Here, signs above the water fountains said, "For Colored Only." Certain parks, restaurants, and swimming pools prohibited all but its white guests. Distant past? No. As recently as 1960, ethnic integration on public transportation was still questionable.
Home to the Manchester Slave Trail and Lumpkin's Slave Jail, Richmond, Virginia - the capital of the Confederacy - still suffers from its terrifying and unfortunate history. Conversations of white supremacy and suppression among blacks occur in one neighborhood - the black neighborhood - while the stained image of black victimization, slothfulness, and criminalization occur in another neighborhood - the white neighborhood.
http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2014/01/is-this-possible.php
Let's compare this to an interesting statistic:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html
If I'm reading that correctly, roughly three quarters of the current American population was born after 1960. Since they didn't encounter "colored only fountains" or segregated restaurants, &c., as far as they are concerned, it might as well be like other historical dates, viz. 1066, 1492, 1776.
To take another comparison, when I was born, Eisenhower was still President. So that happened during my lifetime. Yet that was ten Presidents ago. So it feels very distant to me.
When I was a kid, I remember L.B.J. breaking into regularly scheduled programs to give updates on the Vietnam War. But that seems like a very long time ago.
Indeed, the very fact that Leon feels the need to give his readers this mini-history lesson is because he can't expect his readers to remember that from firsthand observation. They didn't live through it. For many of them, this is second-hand information. It came and went before them were born, or before they were old enough to know about it. It's like reading The Last of the Mohicans. Or going to the movies.
Fact is, what was real for someone living in, say, the 19C, might as well be fiction for someone living in the 21C. I may cultivate an imaginary sense of camaraderie or solidarity with people from the past, but they never knew me, and I never knew them. Our lives never intersected. Their world is lost world. An often forgotten world.
No, 1960 isn't distant history, but unless you belong to that generation, it's distant for you. My father's grandfather used to regale him stories about what it was like to Union soldier in the Civil War. Oral history. Gripping to hear. Yet it might as well have been Beowulf or the Song of Roland for my young father. It wasn't his past.
Also, according to this article (based on CDC data):
ReplyDelete"Nearly 1 in 20 Americans is an Asian American -- a person of Chinese, Asian Indian, Korean, Philippine, Vietnamese or Japanese descent -- according to the CDC. That amounts to 15.4 million people, a figure that has climbed by more than 40% since 2000. Asian Americans tend to be younger than white Americans, with 43.6% of the population between the ages of 20 and 39 and 19.3% past their 60th birthday, compared with 31.4% and 30% for whites, the data show. The report also notes that 72.1% of Asian Americans attended school beyond high school and that 84.5% were born in another country."
So it doesn't sound like too many Asian-Americans were around to see America c. 1960. At most, maybe roughly a quarter of Asian-Americans would have been around to experience what life was like back then.
Plus, I could be mistaken, but I think it wasn't until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that larger numbers of Asians (as well as other races/ethnicities) were allowed to immigrate to the US. And even with the act, there were still quotas in place, I believe. As such, it's quite possible there weren't even that many Asians in America until a fair bit later.
This wouldn't count for illegal immigrants. But at least my understanding is the majority of Asian immigrants post-1960 were legal (e.g. refugees).
The 60s are not that recent...it's 50 something years ago!
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