Reply to Downton Abbey -- Feb 9 episode SPOILER ALERT!!!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Is the storyline with Rose and the singer totally unrealistic?  Would an interracial relationship have even been possible at that time? [/quote]

Black entertainers were very popular in England and France in the 1920s and 1930s.   There were no Jim Crow laws and they were better treated than in the states.    Many young people were rebelling against post Victorian mores, and Rose plays the role.   It is realistic that she would be involved with the somewhat exotic black singer[/quote]

Josephine Baker being Exhibitionist A. I mean, Exhibit A.

Plus, let's face it -- Yurp was getting the cream of the crop back in the 20s and 30s what with a mix of well-spoken, well-educated entertainers and (and I'm guessing) others who had the wherewithal to emigrate and set up a life in their new homelands.

When ill-educated Black immigrants started showing up in the 60s and 70s, you had the Rivers of Blood speech, etc.

Rinse-n-repeat for France with the Ay-rabs showing up around that timeframe (with bonus mistreatment of the pieds-noirs who were French but not as French as those in Metropolitan France, apparently), the Germans and the Turks, Switzerland and the Balkanites, Spain and the Arabs, then the Romanians (and now the Ukrainians), etc.

It took until more recently for Scandinavia to get in on the racist act, but with the rise of the Swedish Democrats and their ilk, all of Yurp is proving they're just as racist as we are. I mean, yelling racist shit at Black athletes has been out of bounds in the US for the past 40 years, and sports fans in Italy and Russia (among others) STILL haven't learned that lesson.

There's entire soccer clubs whose fan base are by and large racist pricks -- Millwall (England), Lazio aka Nazio (Italy), etc. The worst we have is Raider Nation, whose membership comes prepared for Halloween (sort of like the student body of VCU, but that's another story.)

BUT -- they didn't have the centuries of living alongside their betes noirs that we have over here (witness how Northern cities reacted once they were told they had to like Blacks too) and their immigrants by and large share neither a religion nor a language family with our own. I'm not a social scientist except on the Internets, but having decades of Spanish taught in school, sharing a religion with us, and hell having a few million of them whose ancestors have been in this country longer than most of us have to aid in the integration of the Hispanic community.

And yes -- there were fortune hunters a-plenty in Yurp in that era (e.g. Lord Grantham pere) and in the US you had plenty of people who wanted a title or two by their name (e.g. Cora). [/quote]

Yeah, um---there is a bit of fail in your history lesson there. You need to look up what "bete noir" really means, cause it does NOT translate to equal Black Diasporeans, and you'd best not use it to describe us.  Also, "well-spoken"?  Have YOU not learned not to refer to Black Diasporeans as such?  Drop that one ASAP.  As for well-educated..."[Josephine] Baker dropped out of school at the age of 12 and lived as a street child in the slums of St. Louis, sleeping in cardboard shelters and scavenging for food in garbage cans."  The folks who made it across the pond weren't necessarily "educated", more like talented.  The "talented tenth" doesn't apply here.[/quote]

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