that pesky paragraph

Well readers, all of you, the teeming horde who wait breathlessly for the late night posting by Beagles, or the early bird post of Uncle Ken, I regretfully inform you that there was no posting by Beagles last night.  He informs me that they had company last night which I take to mean some wild party because up there, up there at the end of America, so far from the civilizing influence of the stately capital of the midwest, who who knows what sort of thing those savages get up to.

But there had been a paragraph a couple posts back that i had wanted to get to, so I will take this opportunity to do that.  Let me reintroduce that paragraph:

One point brought out in the book was that segregation is justified by its proponents because Blacks are so different than Whites. The other side of the coin is that segregation is a big reason why Blacks are so different. Being shut out of the White culture for so long has caused them to develop a culture of their own. So how do we fix this? The civil rights people believed that, if you could get Blacks and Whites to live side by side, it would draw them closer together. What they discovered was that, the more you try to force them together, the more they hate each other. Like you said, it's all about hearts and minds. It seems, though, that with all the propaganda tools at the Establishment's disposal, they could easily condition Blacks and Whites to accept each other. They certainly did it with the Gays! Any culture that can make homosexuality seem normal should be able to make anything seem norm

Oh I do think that if you can get people rubbing elbows together, they will eventually get along better.  When you get to know people it is harder to hate them.  I think that is a lot of what happened with gays.  As the animus faded they began to come out, and people began to realize that some people they really liked were gay so it seemed kind of stupid to hate that category.  A little tougher with blacks because they can't pass for white the way gays can pass for straight.

I think our Gage Park experiences with race were different, but the way I remember it growing up was that almost everybody hated blacks, and there were no blacks living closer than a mile or two from us, and they certainly never came into our neighborhood, nor we into theirs.

But anymore things are more mixed, and black and white get along a lot better than they did in the time of the book.  I don't think the book ever indicates that the more you forced white and black together the more they hated each other and I don't think that is true.  What happened in the time of the book was that the blacks pushed for equal schooling and the whites pushed back and they fought over that issue, but they didn't hate each other anymore than they did before the whole ruckus took place.

I don't know where you get that the establishment got straights to accept gays.  Apparently, after all my arguments to the contrary you still believe that there is some shadowy establishment pulling strings.  What could be more establishment than the guys who program tv?  Some people claim that Will and Grace was a big moment in gay rights, and maybe it was, people saw likeable funny people who were very gay, but you notice that they didn't bring out this series in the fifties, they didn't bring it out until their polling showed it would be successful.