“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: […] like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift
Hi, OP. I could see this being considered borderline, but I’d ask per Rule 2 that you mark this as NSFW. At the same time, I’d also like to hear others’ thoughts on that request to get a better idea going forward.
(Edit: Undistinguishing, but still feel free to share here if and how you think the NSFW tag should be applied/enforced.)
Don’t go talkin’ ‘bout that dang ol’ orgy, man, tell you hwat, dang ol’ g-gross, man.
I feel like it’s pretty fucking gross to impose this text over a sign a real person is holding. I don’t know what the original said, but unless it was exactly this, this is pretty trashy to do to someone.
Like I said: it’s relative. It’s clearly awful and racially motivated. But to treat it as such a notably dark past that it’s elevated to something worth studying in high school or even an undergrad gen-ed course alongside the rest of US history is absurd. You would have to know astonishingly little about US history (and/or learning) to think this somehow slots into a general curriculum about it.
I feel vindicated by the fact that places like Lemmy and Reddit are bubbles of people who I often agree with broadly on social and economic issues but who are often majorly disconnected from obvious reality when it comes to smaller pet issues.
I’m sorry that Seneca Village and the other eminent domain seizures for Central Park being bad but a footnote within a footnote in the course of US history is racist to you.
In particular because the point they are making is about the notariety and popularity of central park having such a dark past.
“such a dark past” is a pretty wild exaggeration of a total of about 1600 evictions for its construction. Central Park’s early history is shocking to nobody who has, as in the post, a high school or undergraduate-level understanding of US history. It’s dark-ish, but dark enough to stand out from the US’ past otherwise? Not even close. Central Park isn’t such a huge topic that you’d expect, in a high school or undergraduate-level gen-ed course, to learn what constitutes a paragraph in its fairly extensive Wikipedia article.
TL:DR: The point is that history can remain buried no matter how popular what buried it becomes. You would think more people would notice what’s underneath.
Anyone can. It’s right there. It’s mentioned in the second paragraph of the lead of the Wikipedia article. Anyone even slightly interested in Central Park’s history will find this. Not teaching this in an undergruate-level gen-ed isn’t buried history; it just means it’s not significant enough for the general public to care.
Insulting their knowledge doesn’t do much to make them want to know more.
Anyone who would expect this to be part of the curriculum of the courses the OP is describing is completely delusional. I don’t really care what pointing that out makes them want to do or not.
And that I never heard a peep of this in any high school or college history class?
I mean… Unless you were taking some sort of graduate-level course focusing on events like this, why would you? It’s a really interesting story, but it was a village of 225 people in a city of about one million that lasted 30 years, and its existence had minimal impact on history going forward. Seizures of predominantly black neighborhoods for public works projects are a dime a dozen in US history, and there are a million other topics to choose from like the Tulsa race massacre if you want noteworthy material about black oppression in the US for a high school or undergraduate level course. At best this would be an incidental two-sentence mention as a piece of trivia from a particularly knowledgeable teacher.
“Local person discovers undergraduate gen-ed courses not designed to teach you literally everything about a subject. More at 11.”
“I never asked for this.”