[HN Gopher] Mr. Rogers sued the KKK
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Mr. Rogers sued the KKK
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 162 points
Date : 2022-07-30 16:58 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (allthatsinteresting.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (allthatsinteresting.com)
| Waterluvian wrote:
| One of my favourite little stories is how Mr Rogers started off
| in Canada. He brought a small team to Toronto and did the show
| there for a year. One member of the team stayed in Canada when
| the rest returned to the States. His name was Mr. Dressup, which
| for many Canadians is our cherished childhood equivalent of Mr.
| Rogers.
| jollybean wrote:
| I wonder if it'd be better to posit that the 'team' sued the KKK
| because almost everything I know about this guy would lead me to
| believe he wasn't even likely to attack his aggressors, even if
| it was reasonable to do so.
|
| FYI check out this 1969 congressional hearing [1], especially as
| compared to hearings today.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C5PMPIdG_Y
| lupire wrote:
| Asserting one's rights is not "attacking". Do you think that
| Fred Rogers, upon learning that a gang of monstrous people is
| saying horrific things while impersonating him, wouldn't force
| them to stop?
| exogeny wrote:
| Mr. Rogers is one of the purest people to have ever walked this
| Earth. I used to infrequently run into him outside of WQED's
| studios when walking to and from CMU's campus and without fail,
| he'd have a huge smile on his face and tell me (as I'm sure he
| did everyone!) to have a great day and that he was proud.
|
| To this day the memory brings a huge smile to my face. What a
| human being.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Retric wrote:
| "Anti-racism is usually structured around conscious efforts and
| deliberate actions which are intended to provide _equal
| opportunities for all people on both an individual and a
| systemic level."_
|
| Actually being color blind rather than having the appearance of
| being color blind is a tricky thing. Taken to an extreme, a
| collage which had a purely random acceptance criteria is non
| discriminatory, but it would feel like discrimination if you
| had a high GPA.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Yes that is the technical definition of discrimination, but
| when people say something is "discriminatory" they usually
| mean discriminatory in a way that it isn't supposed to be. To
| your example of a college, it is supposed to discriminate on
| academic performance, so nobody has a problem with
| discrimination on GPA (of course comparing GPAs is still an
| implementation problem).
|
| And to say it's hard to be colorblind is not true. You just
| don't factor in race. You will probably fall back to the line
| that black students would have had a higher GPA if they
| weren't discriminated against in other areas of society, but
| then it's not the school doing the discriminating. And this
| is the core of the problem. Instead of selecting the best
| students, universities have decided to select who they think
| hypothetically would have been the best student in a perfect
| world, and doing a very poor job of it. And their arrogance
| in appointing themselves the corrector of all societal ills
| and their myopic focus on only gender and race differences in
| doing so has pissed a lot of people off.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > You just don't factor in race.
|
| You may not want to factor in race, but society already
| has. People aren't spherical cows in a vacuum.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > You will probably fall back to the line that black
| students would have had a higher GPA if they weren't
| discriminated against in other areas of society, but then
| it's not the school doing the discriminating. And this is
| the core of the problem. Instead of selecting the best
| students, universities have decided to select who they
| think hypothetically would have been the best student in a
| perfect world, and doing a very poor job of it.
|
| It's more complicated than that.
|
| If someone is in a bad environment, they can have a worse
| GPA and be a worse student at that moment, but once they
| get into the college environment they _will_ be a better
| student, not just "could have been".
|
| > And their arrogance in appointing themselves the
| corrector of all societal ills and their myopic focus on
| only gender and race differences in doing so has pissed a
| lot of people off.
|
| Appointing themselves the corrector? For anyone that _does_
| have that motivation, they 'd probably gladly welcome more
| cooperation. And those two getting most of the focus is
| because they get most of the discrimination.
| fallingknife wrote:
| > but once they get into the college environment they
| will be a better student
|
| How, exactly? Not that this really matters b/c
| universities today are credentialing scams where no one
| fails out.
|
| > And those two getting most of the focus is because they
| get most of the discrimination.
|
| Citation needed. And if they were being at all
| quantitative about this, at least I would have some
| sympathy.
|
| The giveaway is that they are being completely dishonest
| about what they are doing. Harvard fought like hell to
| prevent their admissions process from coming out in
| discovery. If they were honest, they would make it public
| anyway. What do they have to hide? Well, just that they
| weren't running any remotely reasonable process to model
| how good of a student someone is under normalized
| conditions. They were artificially lowering the
| "personality scores" of Asian students to keep them out.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > How, exactly?
|
| Consider two students with equal intelligence and equal
| skill at studying.
|
| One lives in a rich suburban neighborhood where schools
| are well-funded and the parents have the time and money
| to supply constant extracurricular attention to their
| children.
|
| The other lives in a single-parent household in a
| historically redlined urban neighborhood where the school
| budgets are peanuts and he has to work a part-time job on
| the side to help support his family.
|
| Which one is going to have the more impressive transcript
| in college applications?
| fallingknife wrote:
| Yes but how is that going to be equalized by another 4
| years of the same?
| Retric wrote:
| It's not that people will be exactly equal but rather you
| can validate admission criteria by comparing graduation
| rates and GPA's.
|
| If men and women graduate at similar rates and have
| similar GPA's then your admission criteria are presumably
| reasonably unbiased. If men have lower GPA's and graduate
| at lower rates then presumably their admission criteria
| should be raised to account for biases you aren't aware
| of.
|
| If however you underrepresent men relative to the general
| population you may want to focus on attracting more of
| them through advertising.
|
| From an outside perspective this might seem unfair. Why
| is the school spending so much money mailing to young men
| while requiring more extra curricular activists to be
| admitted? It's a question of equal standards vs equal
| opportunity.
| toolz wrote:
| No one argues discrimination is bad, they argue
| discrimination based on something as arbitrary as skin color
| or gender is bad. It reads to me as very disingenuous to
| frame the conversation as if there was an argument to be made
| that college's discriminating on unrelated, unchangeable,
| inherited characteristics is fair or just.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _No one argues discrimination is bad, they argue
| discrimination based on something as arbitrary as skin
| color or gender is bad._
|
| you're wrong. being in favor of "equitable outcomes" today
| frequently means arguing that discrimination on the basis
| of math or other test scores is bad. Google "math is
| whiteness" or see the elimination of gifted and talented
| programs in public schools
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Google "math is whiteness"
|
| That's about how teaching methods are failing some
| children, and then they're being judged for it unfairly.
| It's not against proper education and testing and using
| that to sort.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _teaching methods are failing some children_
|
| if you assume that all children are equally capable of
| learning everything then you are forced to conclude that
| teaching methods are failing some children. But if you
| "believe in science" (it's quite popular today to profess
| belief in science), you don't believe assumptions like
| that.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| All children are equally capable of learning but
| different children are receptive to different teaching
| styles and approaches.
|
| Only teaching children with a small selection of
| approaches that were primarily refined with middle to
| upper class white neuro-typical children can be
| considered discriminatory.
|
| That's the point of those studies.
|
| It would be like forcing a kid who is growing up in
| middle-to-upper class western society to solely learn
| mathematics via ancient greek visual proofs and then
| blame them for not understanding maths because they "just
| aren't trying" or "they aren't smart".
|
| Everybody has equal capacities to learn but only if you
| can find the style of learning which works for each
| person.
| rosmax_1337 wrote:
| Is it true that all children are equally capable of
| learning?
| josephcsible wrote:
| A lot of people argue that if exam scores or GPAs are
| correlated with unchangeable, inherited characteristics,
| then discriminating on exam scores or GPAs is unfair and
| unjust.
| halostatue wrote:
| Stop selectively using Dr King's words to support a stance that
| his writings, especially his writings later than the "I have a
| dream" speech, do not support.
|
| https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
| https://academic.udayton.edu/race/03justice/justice06.htm#Co...
|
| Mister Rogers _absolutely_ embraced anti-racism on his show.
| That you do not understand that says much more about you than
| about anyone else.
| trasz wrote:
| This. Since I've already googled up a link:
| https://www.today.com/popculture/how-mister-rogers-pool-
| mome...
| nimbius wrote:
| I'd argue the five minutes of episode when Fred soaked his feet
| with a black man in a kiddie pool delivered a more crushing blow
| to the KKK than his suit did. a lot of kids saw that, and in turn
| became a lot harder to indoctrinate.
|
| bigots and racists unfortunately remembered that lesson very
| well. teaching lgbtq and the history of race in this country is
| all but forbidden in some States because it works.
| bbarnett wrote:
| tptacek wrote:
| Whatever your definition of "hate" is, if it doesn't capture
| teaching people to believe Black people are inferior, it's an
| unproductive definition, one that will just lead you into
| constant unproductive semantic debates. A lesson that Black
| people are inferior is a lesson reasonable people will
| consider hateful. Some beliefs people hold are simply
| hateful; we are not bound to respect them.
| bbarnett wrote:
| You are seeing hate, as a reflection of your own emotional
| response to the act. You are also insisting that those
| responsible, must believe just as you do, and therefore
| presuming they think their act wrong.
|
| If you cannot see how they view they world, how their
| thinking is wrong, cannot see how they think, you have zero
| chance of correcting it.
| crooked-v wrote:
| I'm sure many people who took part in historical
| lynchings against minorities thought themselves
| absolutely justified and were having a grand ol' time
| doing it. If you look up the records, you'll find that
| some lynchings were even treated as spontaneous parties
| by the aggressors: they broke out the good booze, started
| up some campfire cooking, danced and played music... all
| while their targets hung dead in the background or,
| sometimes, slowly choked to death.
|
| None of that makes it any less of a hateful act.
| elliekelly wrote:
| > Such people can believe black people are inferior, or lgbtq
| is wrong, without it deriving from hate. Their hate comes
| from people trying to "corrupt" their children's beliefs, and
| anyone with a child would feel precisely the same way, if
| they thought the thing taught, was very wrong.
|
| I think I understand what you're trying to say but if you
| explore the next "layer" of their beliefs and ask _why_
| they're so afraid you'll find the ultimate root of these
| beliefs is hatred.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| > it makes it sound as if this difference of opinion is hate
| based
|
| Yes. If you think black people or gay people are inferior,
| and that their rights should be suppressed because of that,
| that is hate.
|
| > "they believe it to be wrong information"
|
| And we believe what they peddle to be lies grounded in hate
| and bigotry.
| eesmith wrote:
| > it makes it sound as if this difference of opinion is hate
| based, not just a wrong belief
|
| The belief was one of racial superiority and hatred over the
| movement towards equal rights and equal access, which knocked
| them off the pedestal they believed they were born to be on.
| They didn't like how their children were being "corrupted" by
| the ideals of racial equality, which upset their views about
| social hierarchy.
|
| Public pools shut down or were privatized after desegregation
| and civil rights laws made it impossible to have "whites
| only" public pools. There's a book on this overall topic:
| Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in
| America.
|
| There's an infamous picture of a motel manager pouring pool
| chemicals into the motel pool to scare desegregationalist
| activists who were swimming in it -
| https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/motel-manager-pouring-
| acid-... .
|
| Here's background on the context of the wading pool:
| https://www.today.com/popculture/how-mister-rogers-pool-
| mome... . "This 'Mister Rogers' moment broke race barriers.
| It's just as powerful today / The scene aired amid racial
| tensions in the U.S. over segregated swimming pools, and many
| see it as Rogers taking a stand against racism. ... The same
| year it aired, the Supreme Court ruled that pools could not
| be segregated by race."
|
| You can also read what Clemmons (who played the officer) has
| to say about it in his memoir, "Officer Clemmons: A Memoir",
| which has this scene on the cover.
| rblatz wrote:
| I'm not sure the distinction between the idea that this other
| group of people are inferior and hatred.
|
| If a group is inferior it's then ok to use the state and
| other social systems to keep them below you. That seems
| pretty hateful to me.
| trention wrote:
| rayiner wrote:
| ratww wrote:
| _> I 'd argue the five minutes of episode when Fred soaked his
| feet with a black man in a kiddie pool delivered a more
| crushing blow to the KKK than his suit did_
|
| I didn't know this story, so I searched for a video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6O_Ep9bY0U
| b3morales wrote:
| It's also described in the article, and there's a clip with
| commentary from the actor, Francois Clemmons (playing
| "Officer Clemmons").
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The lawsuit stopped three Klansmen.
|
| Fred's show inoculated a generation against their lies.
|
| I totally agree.
| OJFord wrote:
| I watched Tom Hanks' portrayal on the plane a few months ago;
| being non-American and unfamiliar with the original programme, I
| was a good way in to the film before I started to suspect it was
| a 'docudrama' rather than the surrealist drama I'd thitherto
| thought!
|
| It was an enjoyable film about an apparently almost 'too good to
| be true' gentleman even without the context of having grown up
| with _The Neighbourhood_.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Rogers is the only childhood hero I had who turned out to be
| exactly who he seemed to be.
|
| And with no small amount of work... He was a trained
| Presbyterian minister and child psychologist. His show was a
| religious vocation.
| dhosek wrote:
| I literally have a picture of Mr Rogers on the wall over my
| desk as a reminder of how I want to be.
| ncr100 wrote:
| Rogers practiced effective communication for children, which I
| believe is worthwhile studying as an adult. Helps with clarity.
|
| Starts with:
|
| 1. State the idea you wish to express as clearly as possible,
| and in terms preschoolers can understand. Example: "It is
| dangerous to play in the street."
|
| 2. Rephrase in a positive manner, as in "It is good to play
| where it is safe."
|
| 3. Rephrase the idea, bearing in mind that preschoolers cannot
| yet make subtle distinctions and need to be redirected to
| authorities they trust. As in, "Ask your parents where it is
| safe to play."
|
| Ends with:
|
| ... 9. => "Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is
| safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them, and
| listening is an important part of growing."
|
| Remainder of rules available at
| https://www.openculture.com/2019/05/mr-rogers-nine-rules-for...
| imglorp wrote:
| Grew up watching Fred on local TV, probably saw every episode
| for a decade, and know people who have met him.
|
| He was the real deal, with the courage to have unswayable
| adherence to pure humanitarian values. Look up the time he went
| to shame Congress into funding PBS.
| feet wrote:
| We need more people like Mr. Rogers
| aliqot wrote:
| I put Mr Wizard into the same category
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Yes! I didn't grow up watching Mr. Rogers (not sure why as
| it was the right era, but I think he wasn't on TV
| nationwide yet), but did grow up watching Mr. Wizard. For
| my 10th birthday my mom arranged for me to go meet Mr.
| Wizard in his studio lab which was a couple hours drive
| from where we lived. Really nice guy. Give me some books
| and some electric motors and showed me around. He invited
| me to be a guest on his show, but I was way too shy as a
| kid to do that. I was happy enough with the private tour.
| michaelchisari wrote:
| The documentary _" Won't You Be My Neighbor"_ was even better
| than the movie, highly recommend it.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhwktRDG_aQ
| commandlinefan wrote:
| The scene (actual video footage) of him testifying in front
| of congress was so amazing I wouldn't have believed it
| actually happened if I saw it in a dramatized movie. I tried
| to find a clip on YouTube but I can't - it's worth watching
| this documentary if only to watch him _actually convince_ a
| skeptical senator to fund PBS.
| OJFord wrote:
| I don't know if it's what you're looking for, but another
| comment has a YouTube link for something similar at least:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32289389
| jmclnx wrote:
| Interesting read, gained even more respect for him from this
| article.
| hinkley wrote:
| Before the #MeToo movement there was a slow ramp of scandals
| about celebrities and for a while there every time someone
| posted about Fred I would recite a little litany in my head,
|
| Pleasebegoodpleasebegoodpleasebegood
|
| That went into overdrive after the first rumors about Bill
| Cosby started up. And then by John Lassiter I was a momentary
| wreck every time Fred made the news.
|
| Fred Rogers has been gone long enough now that I'm more
| confident that he was genuinely the Nice Guy his public image
| paints him to be. Of course Fred Rogers sued the KKK.
|
| Arsenio Hall had Fred on the first run of his talk show. He was
| agog. Major hero worship. Ended up gifting him a copy of his
| signature jacket. Which was even bigger on Fred than it was on
| Arsenio.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I enjoy casually horrifying people by mentioning that Fred
| Rogers had 2 children.
|
| Which means that he at least occasionally did the nasty.
| normac2 wrote:
| Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/767/
| hinkley wrote:
| Somewhere in a highly secure secret government facility is
| a recording of Fred Rogers saying, "I'm not angry, I'm just
| disappointed."
|
| If I suddenly stop posting here in two days time it's
| because They came for me. Please contact Amnesty
| International.
| lupire wrote:
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > after the first rumors about Bill Cosby started up
|
| 2004?
| hinkley wrote:
| I hate to be the one to have to tell you this but Fred
| Rogers passed away in 2003. It's been almost two decades.
| No wonder we're a mess.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| Ah well I'm Canadian so I've always been more of a Mr
| Dressup kind of guy.
| simplicio wrote:
| I'm trying to imagine myself being impartial on a jury when one
| side is the KKK and the other is Mr Rogers.
| [deleted]
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