The “N” badges for Negro workers used at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, have been made standard by the Navy Department, according to a letter to the N.A.A.C.P., from Ralph A. Bard, assistant secretary of the Navy.
Bard said that the badge was developed for emergency use at a West Coast Yard and that by instructions of the Navy department was made standard “some six months ago.” He asserted that the letters W (for white) and N (for Negro) are inconspicuous and cannot be construed to be discriminatory.
Bard claimed: “Letters to designate the race of the individuals concerned … are not merely restricted to the white and colored races, but many others.”
The N.A.A.C.P. replied on Friday, October 31. “The question is not,” it said, “whether the designation is ‘discriminatory’ or not. It is humiliating, insulting, and unnecessary. It offers a gratuitous affront to Negro American citizens by labeling them (as though a man with colored skin needed to be labeled) in much of the same manner as the labels used by the Nazis to designate Jews from so-called Aryans in Germany.”
In reply to the Navy’s statement that “many others” are labeled according to race, the N.A.A.C.P. asked, “What others?”
The Association also pointed out that the Navy has gone far afield in this manner, and reminded Bard that private industries employing both colored and white workers have not found it necessary to use any such designation on badges.
I love finding stuff like this. Not because it's a good thing or that I get joy out of racism. But you can always find examples of people in the past being like "Yep, we're racist. And that's a good thing. Here's why..." Stuff like this is great to shut up those people who say shit like how people of the past didn't know they were racist and it was normal. You can even go back to the colonial days and find people talking about how racist it is to have slaves. They talk about it with one another. Yet there are still people today who are skeptical that anyone knew what racism was before 1980.
You can even go back to the colonial days and find people talking about how racist it is to have slaves.
Or how one strand of early abolitionists were so racist, they were against having slaves.
It's refreshing hearing a honky with a country accent saying based things. I listened to the recent Well There's Your Problem episode where a Trillbilly is there, and it really put me at ease. I had a coworker back when I worked construction who was very bitter and vocal about how he hated homeless people and trans people, and he sounded exactly like the Trillbilly guest. Or maybe not exactly. Maybe white people all sound the same.
the podcast is just an hour-and-a-half-long shitpost by some engineers that casually talk about engineering disasters, poorly produced and might as well run live, and somehow I've listened to more of it than chapotraphouse
it's not that poorly produced— most podcasts don't have slides, and Justin actually does editing and adds commentary in post
Haha I'm familiar with the podcast, just haven't followed it last few months. Thanks for the link :3
no problemo comrade
Paulie is my favorite Sopranos character and I really fucking hope nothing happens to him don't spoil anything or I'll cry
Should be easy enough to accomplish. I've never seen the Sopranos. I keep meaning to but I'm too addicted to trashy Web novels rn and can't muster the engagement :/
Haha not like oglaf. It's (mostly fantasy) novels published chapter by chapter for free online. I follow stuff on royalroad.com though there's other sites out there.
"Ponta de Lança Africano (Umbabarauma)" by Jorge Ben Jor is a great song
by some engineers
Ros is the only engineer. Alice is a professional podcaster. Not sure what Liam does.
oh my
idk why I expected that there would be more expertise considering the production value
Give her cuddles and exactly as many belly rubs as requested, not a single more! I find that helps.
And thanks for the historical sleuthing.
Trust me bro America fought the Nazis because they were against their discrimination against minorities, not because they were a threat to their hegemony or that they wanted to flex their power at the USSR. It was definitely because they cared about human rights
This is historically illiterate.
The US did not have hegemony in the areas threatened by the Nazis.
The US didn't want the UK and France to fall. The US was a latecomer to the colonial race and far behind the other powers, therefore it had an interest in maintaining free trade in the colonized regions at the expense of the colonial masters. Nevertheless, they correctly assesed the UK and France to be better than Germany, both morally and as trade partners.
When the USSR joined the war, America gave it support too.
Roosevelt did not see the USSR as an enemy, either immediately or long term, which angered Churchill, Truman, and others. He saw the USSR as a foreign power with its own interests, same as France or Britain, and if those interests were accomidated there would never be need for war.
The US didn't care much about minorities, but it did care about white people. It did have serious objections to the political system the German people lived under and didn't want it to spread. The "anti-totalitarian" movement, targeting both fascism and socialism, was a sincere response to the threat these systems posed to bourgeois moral and political outlooks.
American hegemony did exist in the Pacific but even Japan's rise was not enough to provoke a war. Instead, they opposed Japanese Imperialism economically and supported Japan's enemies, both other Imperialists and some anti-Imperialist movements. It took a Japanese attack to make America declare war.
As for Germany, the US only went to war with then because Germany declared war on the US.
This predicament was mentioned in Settlers, but was not properly sourced and was previously dismissed as just another hyperbolic statement made on unrelated documentation. Thanks to a luckily accurate newspaper OCR indexed by Google, I managed to find it fairly easily.
edit: and you can probably guess what happened to such a policy a month after this was published.
I posted this 5 months ago here, and figured it should be boosted.
This article was published in The Pittsburgh Courier (pic) and in The New York Age (image in post), both can be found on newspapers.com. Both papers were owned and operated by black Americans.
This is the Navy official that attempted to justify the practice. This is the naval yard where the badges were reported.
An update on the FOIA request I submitted: someone did respond that they were going to look into a voluminous collection of papers related to Bard, but COVID-19 has thrown a wrench in normal operations and such on-site work is unlikely to get completed any time soon. As of yet, no progress has been made.
god my cat is wanting to sit on my laptop ima have to call it a night
happy black history month, of course
making this comment so the algorithm gods will favor this post
