The true story of Black Friday
“If America isn’t breaking your heart these days, then you just don’t love her enough.” Senator Cory Booker at the confirmation hearings of now Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown.
“I’ve never considered myself a particularly patriotic person. But what I’m arguing is that our founding ideals were great and powerful. Had we in fact built a country based on those founding ideals, then we would have the most amazing country the earth has ever seen.” Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize winning author.
I’m supplying those two quotes to illustrate what we at The Civil Conversations Project strive to accomplish. As a country, we have a deeply embedded national narrative about who we are as a nation. That narrative is profoundly and exclusively Euro-centric and makes coming up in this country difficult to not be infused with a bias while remaining completely unaware. It just becomes a part of who we are. I once read of a study that had determined that 40% of Black American have prejudice against Black Americans. Language is effective. But we care for America. We want her to be better. To be the country that Cory and Nikole, both Black Americans, envision. The country that America not only would have been, but still could be instead of the country that uses race to sow division.
America’s race thing is so deeply embedded in our everyday language that it’s unnoticeable. And influential. For instance…if you know nothing about the history of the stock market…if you don’t even know what the stock market is, you know intuitively that Black Tuesday was a bad day.
Cake named after the mean old devil is black while cake named after an angelic – always white - angel is white.
If you’re old enough to remember the genre of cowboy shows in the 60’s, the good guys really did wear white hats and the bad guys really did wear black hats. It made then easy to tell apart and who to kill.
You don’t want to be black balled or black listed. That would be bad. But a lie that is labeled white? Not so bad as an actual lie.
But wait…Black Friday…the day when you get all those good deals on gigantic flat screen tv’s after waiting in the cold pre-dawn to get into Walmart! That’s good, right? Maybe progress is being made!
For over forty years the football teams of the Army and the Navy met on the gridiron in Philadelphia. Hordes of suburban shoppers descended onto Philly to shop, party, misbehave, and attend the game. Their presence was overwhelming. Instead of being home with their families, the police were called on to work the streets to control the crowds. They were resentful and started to refer to the day after Thanksgiving as the bad thing they perceived it to be – Black Friday.
So there you go. You now know the rest of the story behind Black Friday. Enjoy that flat screen tv. I hope you ate too much and enjoyed Thanksgiving.
Wayne