Can you believe this was only 63yrs ago!

[Night409]

On this day 63 years ago Ruby Bridges was the first black child to attend an all white school.

The hate and deaths threats made by grown adults to a little 6 year old child is absolutely vile.

It’s hard enough to imagine these threats and hate made towards an adult but how could anyone do this to such a young child!

Many of these people are still alive today.

I’m not sure why I’m posting, I just thought I’d share.

There are times I think that the US and South Africa are not a million miles apart in their perceptions of race.

In the UK segregation was never official even when racism and discrimination were blatant. I knew black, mixed race and Asian children in my Catholic primary school in the 1970s, and this was a very white middle class area in Surrey. Covert institutional racism exists still and is bad enough, but openly sanctioned racism via apartheid or official segregation is a whole other level.

Agree. Great post.

I've been thinking about the point @stilllill has made and the fact that experiences with race and diversity are very local and subjective. I'm Irish and the first time I saw a black person in Ireland was in around 1999/2000, believe it or not. Bear in mind we were a nation with mass emigration, no inward migration and we didn't have the Caribbean connections. I travelled around a lot as a student and worked abroad with people of all races so for me it wasn't strange but I know people who literally never saw someone with this skin colour until that time.

I now live in a big housing development in a suburb and my children go to the local school, so like most children their world is very small. Most of the black people around here are migrants from the northern African countries and muslim. They tend to be highly educated medical professionals from the local hospital. There is a much larger number of Eastern European migrants, from various nationalities and these are the people who the do traditionally lower paid jobs. From my kids perspective, the black people drive the fancy cars and live in bigger houses, the white people are the ones mopping the floors in the supermarket. I wonder what their perspective on race, money, education etc will be when they grow up. I also wonder if educating them about racism and its origins will somehow corrupt their worldview.