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EpicAura99 t1_itk0ajj wrote

Reply to comment by firelock_ny in TIL the Port Chicago disaster accounted for 15% of all African American casualties in World War II by Butthole_Alamo

Honestly, of all the reasons to segregate by race, this is probably the least bad.

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Smart_Ass_Dave t1_itlsovj wrote

This reminds me of early Quaker congregations that would segregate their discussions by gender and then come back together and present what each group had decided they should do. This was so that women did not have to agree with their husbands in public, even though they actually disagreed.

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EpicAura99 t1_itlxs5v wrote

That’s mighty progressive of them, although I feel like I remember the Quakers doing a good bit of progressive stuff. Could be thinking of a different group.

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Smart_Ass_Dave t1_itlyi21 wrote

As with any group that has existed for 400 years or so, the group's history is imperfect obviously, but equality is one of the four central "testaments" of the religion (along with truth, simplicity and peace). So they were earlier to abolition than most religious groups as an example. They also did smaller things like using set price tags rather than unlisted prices or bartering because different prices for different people is inherently unfair.

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firelock_ny t1_itpjcsu wrote

Fun bit: two US Presidents (Hoover and Nixon) were raised as Quakers.

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Ok_Profile6608 t1_iuf6qsz wrote

Except in this instance we were fighting Nazis and the Japanese Army with policies and practices of white supremacy, & white folks had trouble seeing the irony of it all.

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EpicAura99 t1_iufaehp wrote

I don’t think you’re seeing their perspective. Obviously I’m not condoning any of this, but let me show how the conflict you explain here didn’t really exist:

1940s racists (and some today, of course) saw these undesirables more or less like monkeys. Maybe advanced monkeys. But monkeys all the same. Animals, subhumans.

It’s easy to see how someone doesn’t want to kill all the monkeys in the world, while also not wanting to treat them like people.

Again, this logic is awful, but it’s more consistent than how you portray it.

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Ok_Profile6608 t1_iufiq2h wrote

Yeah I think I understand it really clear because I spoke with some of these men and all of their families over the course of 7 years and they just couldn't believe that white people would pretend to fight white supremacist Nazis and Shinto fascist Japanese Army and still make a black man walk through a separate gate into the Navy Yard while he was helping us fight the Nazis , they couldn't believe that we would be more committed to racism than winning and choose to give a black man unreliable equipment just to let him know they didn't see him as a man.

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Ok_Profile6608 t1_iufjai6 wrote

And this accident was very likely caused by a combination of War Frenzy driving us to move at a dangerous pace, and unwillingness to provide skilled Technical Training to classes of people we did not want to see increase their economic Mobility, and the unqualified supervision by untrained supervising officers.

That's all well and good if we're just saying s*** happens in war and we put people in positions that no one was ready for, but if we had been less racist at this Naval Base we could have avoided this. There were plenty of warnings and plenty of formal objections to wait till the way this plant was run. US Coast Guard refused to do on-site inspections, trade unions plumbers and pipefitters refused to come out and work on the base because of the way it was being run. And this explosion really hurt us and our invasion of Saipan and the northward march to Japanese home islands. White supremacy is a technology of power that sometimes acts like a traumatic brain injury and leaves people hurting themselves just to maintain their white privilege. Like literally folks were coming to kill us and he's white officers wanted to reinforce racial superiority rather than defeat The Barbarians at the gate. Seeing yourself as white is a toxic thing to believe in.... because there's no such thing as white people.

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