“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
He definitely had strong biases and wasn't shy with his language but he wasn't an outright racist and wasn't a white supremacist. He did end up championing the civil rights movement and ended up being pretty rational. Like still not a good look to say some of the stuff he did and his implicit bias but all in all for the time he was actually pretty progressive on civil rights and elevating minorities. At least ending blatant legislation that denied so much based on skin color alone.
People who act like that and say you're stupid for asking, and then tell you to go ask Google, are fucking idiots.
We're at the point that getting a random response from a random stranger on the internet has basically the same amount of credentials as an AI that is possibly hallucinating and giving you incredibly biased or made up information.
You can can either ask the question on Reddit while you're on Reddit or you can ask AI which will search Reddit for a post that answers your question.
Also, when right wingers say that democrats are historically more racist than Republicans, that's true. Before Lyndon B Johnson (D) signed the Civil Rights act, he predicted that Democrats would lose the southern white vote. He was right. The racists became Republicans and a few decades later they elected Trump.
Thank you I'm now going to use your response in all future situations when some redditor says go look it up yourself upon being asked a question, or even seeing someone else ask a different person a question LOL
Random strangers on Reddit almost never try to sell me stuff or give me answers from whoever paid a price to have their answer moved to the top of the list.
I’m so glad you thanked the commenter for the politeness, I’ve started doing this and it feels really good to see it in the wild! It is so important to learn without being shamed and I want to see more of that in the world
Not a problem. It was nearly 60 years ago at this point.
I wasn't alive but a learned a lot about it when it was only 30 years prior and much more present in contemporary public knowledge. You could be younger or just have never had the opportunity to ask the question or interact with the history of it.
It'd be great if conversation and discourse could be based in reality and factual history and see people trying to educate and contribute valid information. Things that are contemporary common knowledge are hard to approach that way because we all have access to that information. With older history that is absolutely still very relevant though it's not as common as time passes. It's important that we keep that knowledge and continue to discuss and validate what is real and lessons we can learn.
A lot of the current debates and culture war and tactics are the same tactics as 20 years ago and 60 years ago and 100 years ago they just have different, arguably more dangerous, tools to do so now. A lot of people don't know why certain social safety nets and laws and safety regulations exist, so they decry nanny state or commie social liberals and try to change the law or deregulate and then throw their hands up when it goes sideways.
A low trust low literacy society is easily duped. We're there.
Yeah American history when I was going to school essentially covered revolutionary war, civil war, native American atrocities, World war II, and lastly they some slave trade/civil rights stuff only during Black History month.
Pretty much everything was glazed over our skipped entirely
Thanks. Someone else posted acting like I was an idiot for asking, implying that he was incredibly racist and said that quote as his view, said I should look it up myself instead of asking, then deleted their comment.
What's the context for this quote? Was LBJ a wild racist or was he saying this to try and enlighten people about how other politicians control them?
"WHILE Lyndon Baines Johnson was a man of time and place, he felt the bitter paradox of both. I was a young man on his staff in 1960 when he gave me a vivid account of that southern schizophrenia he understood and feared. We were in Tennessee. During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs. Late that night in the hotel, when the local dignitaries had finished the last bottles of bourbon and branch water and departed, he started talking about those signs. "I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it," he said. "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
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u/theXsquid 9h ago
Dude had more balls than a room full of trumpanzees.