Madeline
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- #21
Yanno, AkronGuy I am beginning to wonder if this may not be tied more to age than anything else. Back in the 1960's, I went to a big New York high school with immigrants and the children of immigrants from All Over Planet Earth. Some were the kids and grandkids of Holocaust Survivors from Germany and Eastern Europe. So here's a true story:
Me, my best gf Eva and her Old Auntie were inna local resaturant having lunch and Auntie watched as two more chicks I went to school with walked in -- two black chicks.
Auntie says to Eva:
"I think we need to finsih up. The schwarze are here."
("Schwarze" is Yiddish for "black devil", as there is no Yiddish word that is 100% the same as "******" -- and note, I am not entirely certain I am spelling it right. )
Anyway, the two black chicks alerted and went on point immediately and now everyone was upset. Auntie did not think they'd be insulted because she never expected two New York black teenaged chicks to understand Yiddish. The black chicks were upset because to them, and rightly so, "schwarze" was exactly the same as calling them "*******". Eva and I were upset because we did not know whether to" shit or go blind"...Auntie was a camp survivor, with numbers tattoted on her forearm, and not for Anything On Earth would we have allowed anyone to face off with her.
But if you were born in say, 1980 or thereafter, these sorts of stories your folks may tell are not your own personal life experiences. Black kids today would not react as the chicks did in that diner back in 1969. They could feel insulted, depending on the context in which the words were spoken, but they cannot know the suffering of their parents and grandparents...no kidlet can do that sort of Vulcan mind-meld with his folks.
So to be 100% fair, I think mebbe some of what I read on USMB inflames me far more than the writer ever intended it to do.
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I feel better now...
