Slightly off topic but this reminded me of something from high school;

When I was in High School, in Berkeley California (land of the left wing
liberal), my World/US history teacher, Mr. Brooks, was an African
American. This was the mid-late 80s.

He lived in the Berkeley / Oakland hills somewhere (I think on the
Berkeley side, but hey... been a while...)

One day he brought in a bunch of KKK recruitment literature and passed
it around. Diagrams of apes and blacks side by side with lines between
them for comparison... that sort of stuff.

He told us it came in his mail slot while he was moving in - but before
he'd made a personal appearance in the neighborhood (I suppose, while
the mover were unpacking the trucks). IE: before his liberal left wing
tolerance-or-die neighbors knew he was black...

It was my first encounter with the notion of comparing blacks to apes -
though when I saw it a whole list of media I'd grown up exposed to
suddenly "made sense"...

It was also a lesson to us kids that no matter where you live, racism of
the most ugly forms might be right there next to you.


ps: my 'race' is a mix of Chinese + Amazon Indian / Cherokee, Crow,
Irish + Portuguese, unknown. The '/' divides my parents and the '+'
divides my grandparents. The unknown is an issue of adoption - my
maternal grandmother was given up for adoption and when she found her
birth mother, that woman had no idea who the father was. Now what's
really funny is that my Maternal Grandmother grew up with Anglos and
married two husbands she thought were likewise - one turned out to be a
pale Indian (my grandfather), the second a Jew. And grandmother was
raised to be extremely racist, especially against 'latins' - only to
discover she was mostly Portuguese.

That was back in the days when Americans didn't consider southern
Europeans to be whites. Something which, shockingly, I recently
encountered again - with a white person who claimed that 'white' only
referred to Aryans...
- Sad that a piece of propaganda by Hitler is still regarded as real
anthropology.



Kynn Bartlett wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Last year I reviewed a 3rd party D&D 4e product called "Races of the Shroud:
> The Apelord." I was kind of bothered by the racial coding and said so in my
> review, but I found I got dismissed a lot. With the recent controversy over
> the NY Post's chimp cartoon -- and heightened awareness of the way in which
> Africans and African Americans have been portrayed as monkeys -- I'm
> wondering if I was on to something after all.
>
> Here's the original post; what do you think?
>
> http://kynn.livejournal.com/871279.html
>
> --Kynn
>
>


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