JF Ptak Science Books Post 2484
I've written here a number of times on this blog about endemic, inherent, engrained racism, racism that is just so much a part of the culture that it can become an outrageous element completely obtuse context. Another good example is this ad that I bumped into while looking for a nuclear-attack article in a September 1950 issue of LIFE magazine. It is just an ad for televisions, a big two-page spread in America's leading popular magazine, which means it was expensive, and which also means that x-number of hours were spent on its production and design, and the best thing that the minds working on this was use that incredible black-face minstrel figure to grab a viewer's attention to look at the tvs and link them to a particular entertainment-past. Black-face, minstrel, Mississippi sidewheeler, Dumont. Nobody thought that there was anything wrong with this, and so the television maker connected itself with this visual horrorshow.
Depictions of African Americans in this way came to be seen as wrong, but in another decade or two, probably a few years earlier than the Lovings' case regarding their rejected attempt to be married because they were an interracial couple was settled in 1967, striking the illegality of interracial marriage. Probably the offensive intolerances written about gay marriage will be seen in the same league of abhorance as this minstrel figure was seen with a few decades after its publication. It has taken lifetimes of efforts to legally surpass social condemnation, restrictions and persecutory adjudications of the gay life, the marriage part of which was just today settled by the Supreme Court of the United States, recognizing that not allowing the marriage of two people of the same sex was discriminatory. There are still horrendous and terrible things being said about that, now, as though (as I heard on a Conservative talk radio station) that "homosexual marriage" could lead to complete subjugation of normalcy, and that we could now well see the marriage of humans and animals.
Opinions stated for the public record like that will be hard to explain in the near future, just as the decision to use the minstrel is today. I hope that it doesn't take further decades for people to realize that opposition to same-sex marriage will seem just like those opposing slavery, opposing the vote for women, opposing casual relationship between Catholics and Protestants, and opposing interracial marriage, and so on into the unfriendly past; it is all the same argument of opposition and restricting the intellect from one to the next--only the issues change.
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