General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Remember how FDR executed American Nazi sympathizers? [View all]HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)when he told me, because he easily accepted his children's japanese and mexican spouses.
i asked him why he'd done it, and he said, 'if you weren't there, you can't understand.' but basically, it boiled down to: they believed the people they rounded up were a threat. i didn't understand except intellectually.
but after 911, i understood through my personal experience as a member of an antiwar group that very publicly protested the sanctions against iraq and the run-up to the iraq war. though i live across the country from nyc, in a small town, most of the public feedback was very negative, and i had repercussions at my job. in one case while we were standing in the street with our signs a truck veered toward us as though to run us over. i'm quite sure that if there had been any official encouragement for rounding up dissidents at that point, at least some of my coworkers and neighbors would have been happy to turn me in. at that point it was easy to see how things like that happen.
my stepfather was born in 1916. a few years before he died we were talking and he told me he'd used to believe black people were mentally inferior, basically because 'experts' said they were, because media presented them that way, because social relations were such that often blacks presented themselves subserviently, etc. his thinking began to change circa ww2 -- because social conditions changed.
his evolution is one of the reasons i stopped thinking of racism as being exclusively lodged in individuals.