When I was in second grade we lived in a trailer park in Newfoundland. The island was kind of the opposite of woke. Historically they had bought slaves in the spring and worked them to death or killed them by winter as it was cheaper to buy new slaves in the spring than feed them through the winter.
It was not a friendly environment for people of color and the island had actually petitioned the U.S. Congress to not assign any persons of color to the USAF base on the island.
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We had a man who was violent with his wife. The neighborhood men met with him and explained that was not acceptable behavior.
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So he waited until everyone was gone except for a person of color and beat his wife again. There was an immediate intervention and the police were called as the wife beater was being beaten bloody out in the common area. When asked if he was going to intervene, the Mounty stated that “the — has the matter well in hand.”
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The message was clear to my young self. Violence against women was not acceptable, so not acceptable that anyone, even a racist could appreciate that a community should respond.
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My father deplored racists, his father left their first church over racism, but the message was that there were things bad enough even a benighted racist understood they were bad.
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As I grew older, I learned that not all cultures and groups had the same perspective. That instead of seeing violence against women as a male problem, that men had a duty to do something about, many groups saw it as a woman’s problem that women needed to deal with.
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Since we have had introspection posts recently on W&T I thought I would add mine.
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And suggest a link for a podcast that is well worth listening to: https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/689483208/gender-power-and-fairness?showDate=2019-02-01
And yes, I know that men get beaten too, that not all men beat women, etc. But that doesn’t mean that violence against women isn’t a man’s problem and a community problem.
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What things about the world have turned out to be different than you saw them as a child?
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What problems are ones that seem more important? Less?
Wheat & Tares 
The first question is something that I am personally struggling with on an almost daily basis. There are so many things I believed to be one way as a child that as an adult I have found are not even close to what I thought or expected. I wanted to work in legislation and that career path was even one of my main driving forces through law school. Now that I am 10 years into a career in legislation at the state level, I am completely disillusioned and wonder, very frequently, why I wanted to go into this field. The honest truth is 1) I had no idea at all what politics were actually like when I was younger, and I had nothing more than an “I’m just a bill on Capitol Hill” understanding of the legislative process and how taxing working in a political environment is, and 2) I felt called, nay, PULLED, into law school and legislation, and my true, deep love of the law is what keeps me in this field even though it exhausts and disgusts me, sometimes every single day. I never expected it to be what it truly is. People can be both well intentioned and horrible human beings at the same time. People you respect will ultimately let you down, and even be deliberately hurtful sometimes, because everyone is human. And, ultimately, politics and legislation are about being human, and all of the competing interests that go into being human in a society that has changed so much since 1980, when I was in first grade and my teacher took a poll to see who we would vote for, Ronald Reagan v. Jimmy Carter. Clearly this was based on who our parents had talked about voting for, but it made such a lasting impression on my mind that it has stuck with me for 40 years.
I also have a very changed view of the criminal justice system, and its responses to everyone affected by it. Many others too.
I particularly hate the use of the term “woke”.
Newfoundland? Sounds like “Gander”. A big military air base.
The farther north you go the more important (evolutionarily speaking) to distinguish “us” from “them”. You have a duty to assist “us” but that is rival with “them” and at the fringe it can mean survival or death for an entire community. It is a human trait and manifests in many ways.
In Minnesota small nuances of religious expression became very important. One of my ancestors is buried in a churchyard but his wife is buried in an adjacent churchyard. Both Lutheran, but there was a split in the 1800’s over some detail that I have not yet discovered and it split families right down the middle.
Women’s Lib pretty well nailed the coffin shut on “male chauvinism” and what a relief it was, too, eliminating a man’s un-chosen duty to defend women. Now these words have no certain meaning when anyone can be anything and you are required at law to at least pretend to believe it.
“the message was that there were things bad enough even a benighted racist understood they were bad.”
But it is okay to judge racists and deprecate them, insult their powers of understanding. That’s what it is to be woke; to have license to insult entire classes of caricatured person.
I am racist, ageist, ableist, no doubt many other ists that I cannot think of right now. I also have an excellent power of understanding. I won’t judge you for your color, but rather for your culture. Even there I rarely deprecate but we might not have much to do together. I won’t pretend to be your friend just to earn woke points; but I *will* make overtures to be friend to almost anyone for its own worth.
What things about the world have turned out to be different than you saw them as a child?
Growing up in UT, though I don’t remember specific lessons, but I definitely thought that non-Mormons were off-limits as potential friends. It was okay to be nice and friendly, but not to have a non-member friend because they lacked high standards. Of course, as I moved outside UT after graduating college and living where Mormons were a minority I learned different. Some of the most Christ-like people I have ever known weren’t LDS or even regular attendees of any faith. Another things I’ve learned is that the challenge is to get to know people–that ultimately people are individuals no matter what culture they came from. Of my married children, the couple that seems most compatible is the one that is married to someone from a different culture. (Not that the other marriages aren’t compatible).
One community I have lived in had a different wife beater patrol. A long-time resident said to me “there used to very rarely be any serious domestic violence around here”.
“What is different now?”, I asked. He answered, “The KKK would go over and give a 10 fisted lecture to any guy who hurt his wife/girlfriend like that.” “They finally were broken up some years ago and domestic violence has now come back.”
You never know where the extrajudicial justice may come from (for some citizens).
Michael—I think murdering slaves every winter to save a few dollars (and approving of it) counts as benighted in most places. But that was second grade me thinking as well.
El soo—that is an interesting observation.
On “woke “— my apologies. I was trying to play off an earlier post.
Lois—thanks for sharing your perspective.
SRM, I did not appreciate that the Newfoundlanders are still killing their slaves each winter!
Your description made it seem like more of an economic decision without regard to race.
The point I tried to make, and I suspect everyone here understood me perfectly, is that it is human nature to find something that distinguishes “us” from “them” so that resources, when scarce, can be allocated to “us” and denied to “them” or even taken from “them” and given to “us” (the socialist method).
They are not still killing them. But in 1962 they still approved of it. And petitioned the US Congress to not have the AFB integrated.
I’m sorry I wasn’t cleared. My apologies for the confusion.
el oso,
I also remember the old folks talking about the kkk meting out warnings and punishments to white men who beat their wives or otherwise failed in their family duties.
Ji—something that amazed me was the statistic that about 40%-%50 of those in white supremacy groups did not agree with the racist ideology. These were mostly women who were a part for “other” (undefined) reasons.
This explains part of that.
The point of the study was how easy it was with community support to get such people to leave such groups. But I was unaware of this part of the puzzle.
What things about the world have turned out to be different than you saw them as a child?
Just About Everything. What changed mostly was developing nuanced views. The “middle” cannot be defined but nuanced views lead to tolerance and patience.
I believed it was impossible for BYU to lose a football game. How is it possible for God’s church to lose a football game?
What problems are ones that seem more important? Less?
I worried a lot about Armageddon in my youth. Now I worry about the economic viability of the United States over the next couple of decades.