I can’t really find an example right now, but I’ve seen conservative tellings of the civil rights era that were along the lines of the following:
“Restaurant owners and other business owners in the southern states wanted to be able to accept black patrons (because they were businessmen after all, and the only color they cared about was green), but because of Democrat Big Government, they weren’t allowed to”
The way I recall it is that this premise was then used in support of an equivalency between Jim Crow laws and Civil Rights laws, i.e. “First they were prohibited from taking customers that they wanted, and now they’re being forced to take all customers, even ones that they don’t want”.
I’m sure this is bullshit, but honestly I don’t know enough about that part of American history to refute it, and it kind of does make intuitive sense that a restaurant owner would want as many patrons as possible. So can one of you more knowledgeable folks here debunk it?
Absolutely fucking not. This is unironically one of the easiest things to refute. In Greensboro, Woolworths and SH Kress reps showed up to meetings at A&T and UNC because they were legally required to, stated repeatedly that they absolutely refused to integrate, laws or no, and then literally paid the Klan to show up to sit ins.
Jim Crows didn't force businesses to not serve or hire black patrons, it allowed them the option of seperate service which they voluntarily did
Here's a black American describing what ordering from a white restaurant was like
Brief overview of life as a black American working for white businesses and families
Jim Crow was based on the "separate, but equal" clause which said, on paper, black Americans still had to be given service as long as the quality was on the same level as white Americans. It's basically the opposite of an outright ban on non serving non whites, it technically is supposed to enforce serving black Americans
Can you imagine some dumbfuck chud in 2075 being like
Cake decorators wanted to serve gay customers but they weren't allowed to. They didn't care about rainbow, all they cared about was green
"Most people going to say the heart of the matter was the rights of black people," he says. "The real heart of the matter was, now wait a minute, the federal government can't come in and tell us what to do. We're a local business."
These people got treated with kid gloves and still complained when the government would have been entirely justified in :pit:ing them
Washington should have sent tanks down south and purged the rot, as should have been done since 1866.
But that would only happen in a weird alternate universe where the US federal government passed the CRA out of principle, not just because Jim Crow was increasingly becoming a liability.
that's also a reason conservatives think laws shouldnt exist to enforce equality: "why would a business owner turn away money just because someone is black?"
uhh because they are committed racists you dumbfuck. plus the loss of business is likely negligible.
:morshupls: Conservatives explaining why business owners should be allowed to discrimated against gay customers then explaining why they would never actually use that power they want them to have
Setting aside the legal debate over the gay marriage cake thing, you really gotta question the business acumen of those cake shop owners, because I would imagine that gay couples must buy absolutely ridiculous wedding cakes, like 4-5x as expensive as what straight couples buy. And these cake shop owners are really turning down that kind of business?
I would also bet that they did a business calculation of “well white customers have more money, and most white customers are racist and don’t want to eat/shop in proximity with black people, so therefore if I open up to black customers I would lose an amount of white patronage so large that it would either cancel it out or even become a net loss, so it’s not worth it.”
They could have, and that calculation makes sense, but, i doubt most did. I think for them rascism was its own reward
Yeah. It's a mistake to think :porky-happy: doesn't consume some of his own ideology.
The more important calculation- would this potentially rock the boat? If so, that’s not worth it.
I’ve seen conservative tellings of the civil rights era
Always lies, just laugh in their face. Conservatives took a massive L and have been coping ever since.
lol those same conservatives and their children and grandchildren are still like that. Best part of getting out of the south is not having to hear people unironically talk about the civil war and the south rising again ALL THE FUCKING TIME. These people have no hobbies other than hunting for the thrill of the kill like a psychopath, pretending their upper middle class asses were doing it to "survive", and shit talking people of color.
I still don't quite understand why they're coy about being racists. They're clearly proud of it but i guess it's just enough of a bad look?
After Obama was elected the amount of openly spoken racism in the public down here shot up a damn good amount. Then after trump was elected teachers can tell you stories about how often students would randomly chant build the wall or lock her up and the schools just ignored it to be "apolitical" while even classical racial slurs kept increasing.
But hey, when 3/4s of your "teachers"...actually mostly sport coaches with zero interest in actually teaching kids and they literally had to send letters home to inform parents that they're not qualified to teach and all the parents signed it anyway like that's not a huge fucking deal.
Add in that almost all were conservative religious nuts (at a public school) and I guess it's expected.
Fuck the dozens of hours I've spent watching that snuff film passion of the Christ because of those weirdo Christan fucks.
The so-called Lost Cause of the South went through two iterations.
First is to deny the fact that the Confederacy's legacy was fundamentally about preserving slavery in order to justify the preservation of racial stratification. Slavery had been a political poison pill even before the civil war so naturally you wouldn't want it to be associated with your wholesome racial hierarchy (which you'd want since it keeps the huwhite poors in line by having them fixate on black people). Post-Civil Rights is when its purpose eventually changed as a means to try to preserve as many facets as possible of the segregated South once (overt) racism became the political poison pill.
The funny thing about the ideological superstructure is that the people pushing it for entirely cynical reasons are susceptible to eventually buy it (or at least their children or grandchildren are). Sure, you still have people even in the newer generations who understand it entirely for what it is and embrace it (Dylann Roof, those aforementioned chuds who lost it once Obama got elected) or at least keep it behind closed doors (like many interviewees in those posted articles). But there are many such instances where the Lost Cause is touted by people who are only subconsciously racist, and even might have black family members and such (something their forebears would disown if not lynch them over).
Thats bullshit. Its not even worth refuting, its just riduculous
Anything is worth refuting if it has a lot of people who believe it, and unfortunately this fits into that category
God know. White business tyrants were the ones handing out axe handles to white mobs so they could brutalize civil rights marchers. They were the ones riding around in white hoods shooting up neighborhoods and bombing churches. Pure revisionism.
Our small business tyrants opposed to the racist laws created by the government that they themselves control?
:bugs-no:
Our small business tyrants opposed to the racist laws that protect their positions of power by creating a social environment where anger at unessecary material suffering is redirected away from class conflict and instead into racial resentment?
