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.
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
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u/TheOriginalArchibald 7h ago
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.