[Magdalen] Fwd: Re: [HoB/D] Charleston

[Jay Weigel]

Some of us (who aren't that much younger than you, David!) started out on
the West Coast, or maybe in university communities--for me it happened to
be both--where there were Asians and later east Indians, so we were perhaps
more accustomed to the idea of a multi-ethnic and possibly a multicolored
America. By the time I was in high school, UW-Madison had the largest
number of Indian students in the US, so even though Madison was still
pretty white, we were sort of used to brown faces on the streets. Asians?
Not a big deal at all. There wasn't much of an African-American population
in town then, and no Hispanics to speak of. That has changed a lot.

My parents were ahead of their time, I guess, and considering that they
grew up in a very segregated state (Missouri) in a time where Jim Crow was
a fact of life, I really have to hand it to them for teaching us not to be
prejudiced. My mother was the driving force in that. She simply believed we
were all God's children and should be treated equally and that was that.
Using the n-word would get your mouth washed out just as quickly as the
f-bomb, and she used Fels-Naptha for that, so you just did not say those
words! When the grandchildren took spouses of different ethnicities, they
loved those spouses, and when the multiracial great-grandkids came along,
they loved them just like the other great-grandkids.

On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 10:20 AM, Cantor03--- via Magdalen <
magdalen at herberthouse.org> wrote:

>
>
> In a message dated 6/23/2015 9:56:20 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
>
> There is  also, sadly, Christian privilege, in the  US. >>>>
>
>
> The picture of the USA being such a polyglot nation with a myriad
> of racial and ethnic groups is, at least in my experience, a  relatively
> new concept after 1968 and the passage of the Immigration and
> Nationality Act of 1965.
>
> It is a concept that I have come to embrace, but that polyglot picture  was
> not what I thought of the USA prior to the Johnson administration in  the
> 1960's.  If you'd have asked me what the USA was in 1960, I would  have
> said something like "an extension of European civilization in the New
> World".
>
> Sure, there have always been a variety of ethnic and racial groups in
> the USA, but with the exception of Blacks, they were marginal and
> not mainstream.
>
> Who would have thought that a US President from Texas would sign
> legislation that amounted to a complete rethinking of what the USA is
> all about, and open the floodgates to non-European immigration?
>
> These changes were not given a lot of notoriety, and relatively  quietly
> commenced without any real public debate, which is odd considering
> they initiated a profound turn of direction for the USA.
>
> The concept that the USA was primarily a Christian nation, which was
> associated with the Eurocentric idea prevalent before 1965, was,
> of necessity, jettisoned.  That, in particular, is very hard for some  to
> fathom.
>
> I, for one, am happy with the browning of America, but it's important
> to remember how far some of us have come in the past half-century.
>
>
> David Strang.
>
>
>