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Originally Posted by Handro
Interesting to pursue the woke purists by naming LSD after a colonizer like Dusable... oh well, like Steely said it will always be Lake Shore Drive.
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Lol such a salient point. People will not shut the fuck up about racism and slavery, but how often do we actually talk about what is possibly the deepest, darkest, original sin of this nation? The extermination and assimilation of the native people's.
Honestly I don't go around bragging like I'm some kind of Elizabeth Warren impersonator, but my own family tree typifies the horror of the native holocaust. My furthest back branch of the family tree isn't any of various European immigrant ancestors fleeing genocide at the hands of the British (Irish) or Russians (Polish) or Prussians fleeing oppression of the Austrian empire, it's French fur traders who immigrated to Quebec in the late 1600's and then intermarried with the Native American population as they made their way up the St Lawrence seaway.
Eventually they settled in Fond Du Lac, WI (fun fact, this is French for "bottom of the lake" which is where on the shores of Winnebago it is located) and changed their names from Lajeunesse (French for "the younger") to Jung (German for Young) because the French name was a dead giveaway that you were Indian blood.
Whatever Natives were not outright killed in the plauges brought over from Europe or slaughtered by actual armed conflict, were assimilated and melded into the population in this way. No one talks about it, no one talks about the entire sections of this country that are basically open air prisons for those who refused to assimilate. No one talks about how ALL the people's brought in from overseas are essentially an invasive species that destroyed possibly the last bit of the world truly in a "natural state". No one talks about the complexity of having French, Hatians, other Europeans, etc all melting together into the ancestry of this country.
It's all about visual race (skin color) because that's what's easy for politicians to market themselves on. Just look at Lightfoot's own stupidity about not being interviewed by "whites".
It honestly drives me nuts because I don't identify as "white" or European just because I have an Irish last name. I'm actually 1/8 "Jung" a/k/a Lajeunesse, I'm no more than 1/16th Irish. I don't even look all that "White" if you actually look closely. I have olive skin that turns darker than many of my Hispanic friends in the summer, I have (and now my son does, which is super cute) almond eyes. I actually have a fair amount of "native" features, but because my Mom escaped the redneck life that my grandpa lived and became the first person in her entire family to go to college, none of my complex family origins matter.
It just goes to show the people don't actually care ethnic origins, they just associate education, privledge, and how you speak with "whiteness" which I would argue is a big contributor to the issues we face to begin with. If you are an "articulate black man" like Obama, then you get a pass, but show any signs of educational, economic, or racial diversity and you are fighting an uphill battle.
Again, I am not pulling an Elizabeth Warren here, merely pointing out that the story of this country is far more complex than "black people were slaves". Much of the political jibber jabber is designed to divide Americans, not unify them. Far more relevant to my own privledge and position in life than the fact that my grandpa was a hard drinking, rough and tumble redneck with ancestors going back over 300 years (and thousands if you follow the Indian lines that we have no way of ever tracing) is what my parents did with their lives. It only takes a generation or two to truly move up in American society, but we choose to separate ourselves and deny access to that birthright based on skin color or how people talk. I'm so disgusted and sick of it, the rhetoric lately has not been helping, again instead of uniting our society, everyone, both left and right, wants tribalism. It starts with individual racists and goes right up from stupid local politicians like this alderman who don't actually want to fix anything, but rather get cheap political points by renaming roads, and goes all the way up to the office of the president.
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