Contrasting ways of dealing with racism in America

A few minutes ago, I was picking up the day’s mail near the swimming pool at the condo complex and happened to overhear a young mother talking to her children about racism and why it is a bad thing.

Last night, my YouTube homepage brought up a video from actor John Schneider— forever known as faux-Southerner Bo Duke in THE DUKES OF HAZZARD TV series which ran from the late 1970s into the 80s.

Clicked on the video and watched Schneider ruminate about one of the series’s location shoots near Lake Sherwood in Westlake Village CA.

Then, he brought up the renewed discussion of the Confederate flag-decorated General Lee car—which, after Dylann Roof’s church massacre, caused DUKES reruns to be pulled off Viacom’s TV LAND.  Cue the tantrum John Schneider threw at the time:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/dukes-hazzard-star-rips-tv-806339

But times pass and momentary lessons dissipate.  So Warner Bros. TV allowed Amazon’s IMDB channel to carry DUKES beginning two years ago.

And, at the end of the YouTube video, Schneider references the new controversy and sends out a dog whistle to people hard-wired to watch the show in a reality-free vacuum: “Don’t let anybody tell you what to think!” and inviting commenters to agree with him.

And the comments tend to be of the “Southern pride”/“if it offends you, don’t watch variety including a head-scratcher which contends that around 1980 the Conferderate Flag was recontextualized as a symbol of Southernness and country music.  Plus the usual get over it liberals insults.

The big takeaway from this: most of the older generation won’t drop their views on race, racism and continued refusal to re-evaluate dubious life lessons learned from parents, relatives, friends co-workers, clergy, etc.  They’ll watch Fox News and OANN and bathe in trash talk about black victims of police violence and cry buckets over police officers balking at more responsible, less warlike behavior.

So it’s up to the younger generations—the demonstrators and the children listening to their mother at the swimming pool— to move America forward and keep it from again becoming, as Gore Vidal once said, “the United States of Amnesia.”