OT: German identification with/appropriation of civil rights movement/Black power movement was Re: antedating banjo (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Wilson Gray]

On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 9:53 AM, Amy West <medievalist at w-sts.com> wrote:
> Wilson, in the fall I heard an *excellent* presentation by a German
> prof. from Uni Hamburg about Germans, and esp. German youth, in the '70s
> identifying with the US civil rights and Black Power movement: holding
> protests, wearing afros, reading and identifying with activists like MLK
> and Audre Lourde. It explained to me why I came across an MLK Strasse in
> Kassel when I was there in 1989. A lot of it was admiration for the
> resistance and also an air of superiority -- "we're not that rotten" --
> according to the presenter. She also went on to argue that Germans have
> this amnesia about their own colonial and African slavery history
> (quick: who remembers which African nation is a former German colony?)
> and think about race purely in terms of the Holocaust, thereby
> overlooking their own prejudices regarding African Germans.
> (Unfortunately I have forgotten her name, but I will get it for you: she
> was brought in by one of my colleagues. She's published on this and you
> may be interested in reading her stuff.)

When I was in Germany, it was still under Allied occupation, though de
Gaulle had gotten pissed off about something, so that France had a
real military presence only in Berlin. For a while, I was stationed in
Baumholder, where there were still signs reading "Camp de Baumholder,"
directing you to what I knew as "Smith Barracks," then the home of the
8th Inf Div, now the home of the 4th Inf Div.

At that time, the civil-rights movement wasn't even a gleam in
anyone's eye. Indeed, it wasn't even imaginable! The U.S. Armed
Forces, especially the Army, was the only aspect of the United States
in which at least de facto segregation was not total, thanks to
Truman. And, even in the military, de facto segregation was total "on
the economy," i.e. off post.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org