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My opinion is that US schools do a really bad job of teaching the civil rights protests of the 1960s era. A lot of people unironically believe that Rosa Parks was just some random nice lady who was too tired to change seats on the bus that day, and that MLK Jr assembled a group of purely peaceful protestors who shamed the evil whites into doing the right thing. The reality is... a lot more complicated.
Furthermore they should teach that other countries have wide spread use of public transit and even wealthy people use it. Meanwhile in the US Rosa Parks made public transit a last resort option for those too poor to care about being stabbed.
Do you believe that the thing keeping people from being stabbed on public transit was that blacks had to give up their seats to whites when the bus was full?
It's kinda connected. The particular regulation isn't, but the practice that ultimately developed that having and enforcing a policy of removing disruptive people who are minority members would result in painful legal action whereas just letting shit happen wouldn't, was.
The radical policy of putting criminals in jail without segregating the bus would have permitted Montgomery to have avoided the bus boycott entirely.
Sure, but they were segregationists; it wasn't about crime.
Come to think of it, what was the point of separating blacks and whites? It's easy to think of Southern segregationists as moustache-twirling villains who wanted little beyond stigmatizing blacks and keeping them down, but perhaps there was an actual practical reason for this type of segregation?
To have an exploitable, dehumanized underclass? I get that overlaps a bit with stigmatizing them and keeping them down, but that was the core reason they were brought over in the first place: coerced labor. It’s also the central reason for literally the only time a significant chunk of this country rose in rebellion: because they believed that system was under threat, and they were willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people to preserve it. And a big portion of that formerly rebellious chunk then passed and vigorously supported laws designed explicitly to keep that underclass in an excluded and subordinate state long after formal slavery ended.
Sometimes people just do awful things to other people because it materially benefits them, and they and their ancestors build all sorts of moral, cultural, and legal justifications for why it’s okay, actually. I don't see why that's so hard to believe. People have literally been doing some version of this for as long as there have been people.
What exactly is the material benefit to segregating buses?
Anyway, the general thinking here is that I mistrust liberals and progressives. They have a tendency to spin things to make their outgroup look maximally bad and evil. For example, suppose there is a time period in history during which women are not allowed to enter into contracts. If progressives talk about such a time period, they will frame it as an example of the evil patriarchy, led by woman-hating misogynists who just want to keep women down. But of course there is another interpretation, which is that -- perhaps -- society wanted to protect women from being held responsible for their decisions. After all, children cannot enter into (most) contracts but nobody claims this is because society hates children.
I learned about segregation and the civil rights era from progressives and liberals. I was one of those people who was taught that Rosa Parks was just some random nice lady who spontaneously decided to refuse to give up her seat because she'd had enough. Which was a complete lie. Probably I was lied to in other ways as well.
This experience makes me suspect that there was a practical reason to have segregation in busing. A reason which doesn't necessarily justify the practice, but which might ever so slightly undermine the black and white picture (so to speak) presented by progressives and liberals.
So perhaps there was a big problem with black bus riders being disruptive and unruly and harassing white riders. Not that this justifies full on segregation, but I would like to hear both sides of the story.
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