These weren't doors inside in some display but the entrance doors to the building, the building you needed to enter to get to the post office. It's one thing for the government to offer to teach people about the history of racism in a museum setting, which they may choose to visit, quite another to confront people with it as they go about their ordinary business and need to interact with the government.
Presumably the idea was that it was good to impose this lesson on white people, but there are at least 2 big problems with that idea. First, members of a minority group matter, even if they are a small proportion. And second, how do you know the white people are taking the message the right way? Are they solemnly chastened or improperly amused or smug or even feeling superior? It's too negative a message to assume people are taking it the right way and responding correctly.
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I am skeptical of the notion that Wapo is telling the whole story.
They missed the obvious solution, replace the "Colored" sign with "People of Color" and then not staff anyone on the "White" side.
Maybe we should start sending THEM some of the illegals that Joe Biden is inviting to America that they are trying to relocate to Red States. Let ALL of the Progressive states take in what they voted for.
Like Bill Burr said, it just makes me want to take over and dominate.
These days, given current no whites or Asians allowed events and CRT intents, the door labels’ meanings could be just the opposite.
The post office is in Virginia, not Vermont.
Your government doesn't want to "teach you about racism." That's 1950s thinking. In a 1950 high school, that was the American History class.
No, your government wants to TELL YOU that YOU are a racist. That YOU are the problem. Not THEM. Back THEN. But YOU. Now. Remember back in the day when the Supreme Court said black people were worth 3/5ths of a regular person? Yeah that's not on THEM. That's now on YOU. YOU should be ashamed because of what THEY did.
You should be asking why your government needs to browbeat you. Maybe we should get us a new government. One that's not such a fucking asshole.
Yo government: I'm not the racist. YOU are and you always have been. Fuck you.
Here's the place:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montpelier_Station,_Virginia
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Montpelier+Station,+VA+22957/@38.2243506,-78.2003408,15
This is an unincorporated rural nothing near the James Madison house and museum. Why is there concern over teaching the history of segregation when 99% of the visitors to the area are there to learn of the history of the Civil War and James Madison, President and slave owner before the Civil War? This area is also near the front lines of the Civil War (i.e., it's a bit south of the Virginia - Maryland border).
https://www.montpelier.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Madison
I say keep the stupid signs because that's the reason why anyone comes to visit.
"It's too negative a message to assume people are taking it the right way and responding correctly."
You can convince all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but never all of the people all of the time.
Bruce Springsteen thought he was writing a song that was an indictment of the American political and economic system, and what a lot of people heard was a homage to the decency of the American people, their betrayal by various elites, and their ability to rise and rebuild.
They're literally writing up contracts where white people get laid off first, before black people.
But yeah, this Post Office diaorama ... that's the real problem.
Old train station in Punta Gorda FL has the same signage. History, right?
God forbid they not try to hide from their history. Sure, let’s lock it away in some corner room where most people will never see it. Otherwise sensible feelings might get hurt. This is a close cousin to civility bullshit.
In today's world, which of those doors do you think leads to "The Big Deal"?
1988 in Winter Garden, FL the old movie theater had been converted to a community center. Still had two sets of bathrooms. Although painted over you could still see the ghosted raised lettering for Colored and White above the entrances.
Replace them with "Smart" and "Stupid" signs and challenge disparate impact.
The post office doors are on another side of the building.
https://youtu.be/PBv6y_KRGbA
Montpelier Station, Va., post office
Are they solemnly chastened or improperly amused or smug or even feeling superior?
I think there's pretty good evidence that a whole lot of the white people who visit this museum wouldn't feel chastened at all, likely have an amused smugness toward the old white racists who put up those signs, and think that we know the superior way to do racial discrimination now.
"It's one thing for the government to offer to teach people about the history of racism in a museum setting, which they may choose to visit, quite another to confront people with it as they go about their ordinary business and need to interact with the government."
Isn't this an argument to tear down every monument in DC?
I would disagree with Ann on this one. That the signs remained in their original location and not encased in display glass gives it unique power.
"Your government doesn't want to "teach you about racism." That's 1950s thinking. In a 1950 high school, that was the American History class. No, your government wants to TELL YOU that YOU are a racist."
That is exactly my assumption at the point in the post where I say there are 2 problems with that (and that's assuming it's NOT a problem to tell you you are racist).
It's too negative a message to assume people are taking it the right way and responding correctly.
Yea....suuuure. White people are so stupid and all of them racist anyway, so lets not give them any more ammo. /sarc/
I think it is a fantastic historical lesson. Great teaching moment for your first grader, reading aloud everything they see in print. Lessons like this is something we spent a long discussion with our kids when it came up. We tied it into their faith based education, that centers on respect and service to all, regardless of station.
But sure, lets sanitize the public square.
Public Schools have sole power to indoctrinate kids, with the approved federal government message.
The bleatings will continue until morale improves…
Oh please, find a smug white supremacist to quote before smearing all white people.
Shall we ban Anne Frank's diary next in case a Nazi enjoys it?
Every day Black grandparents are telling their grandchildren how things used to be. Usually with words of encouragement about what that means in terms of what they can accomplish in their own lives. Should we erase those grandparents too? Those doors have a story to tell. Only liberal whites dont get it.
It's important to honor history so that young people can see exactly what you people want to Make America Great Again.
@Michael: "1988 in Winter Garden, FL the old movie theater had been converted to a community center. Still had two sets of bathrooms. Although painted over you could still see the ghosted raised lettering for Colored and White above the entrances."
The Pentagon -- headquarters of the US Military and "ground zero" for any nuclear attack -- has double sets of bathrooms intended for "White" and "Colored" segregation. It was built in a rush during the WW2 era in northern Virginia. Consider that Virginia once had the capitol of the Confederacy in Richmond, and Arlington was home to Robert E. Lee. Arlington National Cemetery was built on the old Lee estate just across from Washington D.C. The Pentagon's double bathrooms remain because what else are you going to do with a bunch of bathrooms laid out and watered for sinks and toilets? The Robert E. Lee house remains atop the highest hill in the cemetery, as many of the bodies were laid there during/after the Civil War.
When the main story is segregation, slavery, and war...you have find a way to deal with it...
https://www.quora.com/Why-has-the-Pentagon-got-so-many-toilets
https://www.nps.gov/arho/index.htm
Some nice photos from before the 2008 restoration:
https://www.gardenstogables.com/teaching-with-places-the-montpelier-depot-in-virginia/
No entrance signs at that time.
"Bruce Springsteen thought he was writing a song that was an indictment of the American political and economic system, and what a lot of people heard was a homage to the decency of the American people, their betrayal by various elites, and their ability to rise and rebuild."
If you're referring to "Born In The USA," it's because all people really heard or remembered was the refrain "Born in the USA" repeated throughout the song. It shows most people don't really hear or understand or pay attention to the lyrics of songs. (I find it hard to discern the lyrics in popular songs if I don't have a lyric sheet to read them. After that, I am able t understand the words when I hear the song later.)
Yeah, it's time to take those signs down. It's not like they're the Minneapolis Teachers Union. Or various universities hiring new professors. I mean, no one does segregation or racist hiring any longer. Except at the university graduation commencements, safe spaces, and student governments. Disney/ESPN. The US Government. Corporate HR and DEI offices.
I mean, Jeez. We're not barbarians.
There is a *third* thing wrong with it:
Members of the majority also matter, even if they are a large proportion, and should not be subjected to daily struggle sessions while going about their ordinary course of business, nor assumed to require perpetual moral teaching from the minority.
"which probably didn't have signs like that"
I'm not sure which is worse by today's standards: Jim Crows laws making such signs required (and "separate but equal" seems to be all the rage again these days), or a near-total lack of diversity making such signs moot.
if there are no penalties for ignoring- disobeying "signage" what the hell does it matter anyways?
maybe trigger a frisson of adrenaline if one immerses into the scenery/context while role playing
is this unlike Iranians and Palestinians to trample over American and Israeli flags
just the same, a museum to racism is no place for a post office
But segregation is back in vogue! It's all the rage on the "Progressive" side of things. Separate but equal graduations, meeting spaces, performances, dormitories, classes, you name it!
"Oh please, find a smug white supremacist to quote before smearing all white people."
You're making an assumption and missing a point I could have sledgehammered but chose not to. When I wrote "Are they solemnly chastened or improperly amused or smug or even feeling superior?" I wasn't thinking of a "smug white supremacist," I was thinking of a smug present-day white person who feels superior to those benighted white people of the past.
Progressives even cleverly changed Colored People to People of Color and made it acceptable.
We should applaud the USPS for closing this living monument to bad judgment. I agree with commenter Ampersand that we are not getting sufficient information.
Does the USPS have any other single employee operations, and was this one financially justifiable?
Did USPS management ever make a specific decision to keep the location open and leave the Colored/White signs up or was it inattention for fifty years? If it was a specific decision, I'd be interested to hear the rationale at the time, rather than the current justification.
I would like to hear from the USPS administrator who decided to close this location. Somebody decided to address this embarrassment, rather than kick the can down the road by doing nothing. That administrator seems to have good judgement and integrity. Can this person be promoted to run the FBI, CDC, FDA or any of number of other US agencies who are so obviously deficient.
The Colored/White signs are appropriate near the Rosa Parks bus at the Henry Ford Museum or other large exhibit. Otherwise, it looks like an effort to encourage racial animosity. Black folks may view it as a reminder of how it was, and how it could be again if they get too uppity. White folks may view it with shame or nostalgia.
"It's too negative a message to assume people are taking it the right way and responding correctly."
Those darn Deplorables! Even when you scold them, you can't be sure they're taking it the right way!
They should have taken a picture and taken the signs down long ago
Good old Democrats and their cute signs.
Was there s sign reading 'Live, Laugh, Love, but only if you're White'?
'It's important to honor history so that young people can see exactly what you people want to Make America Great Again.'
Once again, DEMOCRATS installed those signs and passed those laws.
I would agree that the signs shouldn't be displayed "ironically," that is, not for the purpose they were originally intended, but as an overt reminder of past (and present?) racism. That sort of stuff would be fine (and effective) as part of a museum display, but it's not appropriate for a facility that still serves as a post office.
That said, I'm not at all sure what is the "right" way for white people to take the "message" of those signs. First, I don't think it's right for white people to be "solemnly chastened" by the signs, because that seems to imply that you and I are morally responsible for sins committed by our remote cousins and ancestors. I also don't think it's necessarily improper to be amused in a way by the ignorance and backwardness of other cultures. The Salem Witch Trials resulted in a bunch of young women being hanged. That fact is not itself amusing, but how many times have we laughed at parodies of the cruel and superstitious Puritan mindset that led to those hangings? And is it wrong for me to feel "smug" about belonging to a modern culture that DOESN'T support Jim Crow? I don't think so.
Some on the left claims (falsely, of course) that objecting to CRT in the classroom is intended to say slavery never happened.
Yet they insist on removal of this visible evidence of Jim Crow.
FWIW in my past (working) life I often dealt with historical preservation groups. There was real debate on whether such signs should be preserved. In those instances the signs were preserved but an explanatory sign was added.
I get the thought, but it does belong in the museum - it's a 'museum' piece.
If I had a dollar for every call or email I got when I was working, from photo editors and documentary makers needing "WHITE/COLORED" examples for their productions, I'd have a lot of dollars. In actuality they were few and far between, and most are well-known.
When I got to the U in 1971, it had been integrated for a dozen years already. Most of the physical reminders of Jim Crow were gone, but some of the frat boys--of course--loved the Old South traditions still. For a long time, there was a marble bust of R.E. Lee on display in the admin building that was moved gradually into more remote places and eventually disappeared entirely. When I was placed in charge of the sorta museum for the campus, some old-timers hinted that they knew where it was, but I never took the bait.
BTW it was not the Supreme Court that defined 'Blacks' as 3/5 of 'a regular person.' It was the United States Constitution that enumerated Persons held in servitude at 3/5 for purposes of taxation and representation. It doesn't help to take today's dumbed-down version of the past as the standard.
It was Wilson who segregated Federal employees.
There isn't enough info about particulars in the P.O. case for me to even try to take a stance on it (if a stance is necessary). The world turns.
Signs don't register unless you are already sensitized. Whoever decided it would be a "museum" piece was just into slavery p_rn, like we see when teachers tie students up so they can "feel" slavery.
In the early '70s at about 12, I read 'Black Like Me'. It was illuminating but a few years ago, I ran across this substack that had collected the series of columns of Ray Sprigle, a real newspaperman who in 1948 passed as "colored" in the Jim Crow South for a month. They are now in an ebook on Amazon
"Sprigle's series was called' I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days' in both the Post-Gazette and in the only black paper that carried it, the Pittsburgh Courier, then the country's largest black weekly. Other major papers like the New York Herald-Tribune and the Seattle Times carried 12 parts of the series and titled it In the Land of Crow."
https://clips.substack.com/p/exposing-old-jim-crow-1948
Reading some of that, it was not the description of the separate doorways at the Atlanta train station, with police to stop any black using the "whites" entrance, but rather it was a short description of the total disrespect an operator gave when they discovered the woman who had spoken to them in what we would term normal manners was black and therefore had not been deferential enough. It is those things that can make someone 70 years removed angry about the abomination of Democrat enforced Jim Crow apartheid. Make you wary of any efforts to create 2nd class citizen...again.
Blogger Howard said...
It's important to honor history so that young people can see exactly what you people want to Make America Great Again.
It's not us who are setting up segregated student centers and dorms. It's your team, Howard. Segregation=Democrat. There was an interval from 1865 to 1912 when segregation was banished but fascist Woodrow Wilson got it going again.
Good intentions, interpreted, reinterpreted. This was Thomas's criticism of social progress.
Bummer. I bet those signs inspired a lot of ironic levity from people, Black and White, in the years since Jim Crow. How foolish to erase history. It seems this is more about cleansing the consciences of the White Woke rather than the possibility of offending Black folks.
"And second, how do you know the white people are taking the message the right way?"
Yeah, how do you make sure that the people who come to your museum don't get any wrong ideas? You could just knock them over the head with a bowling pin, I suppose.
Progressive axiom: "You can never be too woke."
I'll take door number 1, Monte.
Ah yes, Montpelier is the site of James Madison's plantation where he played footsie with one of his slaves, Coreen, which resulted in the birth of a son, Jim, who was sold and sent away when he was a teenager. Coreen was the daughter of Mandy and Madison's father. Thus, she was the future president's own half-sister.
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