The Negro Travelers' Green Book (1956) | Hacker News Reader

The Negro Travelers' Green Book (1956)

digital.tcl.sc.edu

76 pointssampo43 comments

I learned of it by watching my parents use it while growing up in the Jim Crow south.

You people were never supposed to know of it. You could not be trusted not to burn the businesses to the ground.

  Are any reader surprised to learn that such is still very much needed and that several things things may well still exist and be in use to this day?

Same as it ever was. Thats why those of us who live through it still teach our children and grandchildren to "Never Trust Whitey". Funny how White folk are offended by that concept.

Some people you can trust. Others you can't. This has no correlation with skin color. To think otherwise is... well... racist.

That's a naive belief to have in practice. If you are part of a group that has been systematically oppressed by a different group because of your skin color, there is a valid correlation between trust and skin color. To think otherwise is... well... naive.

There are quite a few valid correlations that judging individuals on the basis of would be considered racist.

I'm a white lady who grew up in the south and yeah, I got absolutely no problems with black people not trusting us white folks. We've treated them like shit for a long-ass time.

> Some people you can trust. Others you can't. This has no correlation with skin color.

That's the ideal, which I fully support, but tragically it is not at all the reality of people with black skin in the U.S.

> racist

In a small way, it's an interesting philosophical debate about semantics, but it has nothing to do with the very real, critical issue, which has caused centuries of suffering and oppression for millions of people. While we argue about words, they are in real pain.

You're totally ignoring or forgetting context. Which is that the green book exists because of the Jim Crow laws at the time, along with the general racism.

It's not remotely racist to stay away from white businesses when there is a certain possibility of service refusal, and a possibility that you might be assulted and killed. Hence the necessity of this book.

To say that his family was racist for not trusting white people with the books info, is to be totally ignorant (Tulsa is one example).

You have an extremely weird idea of racism that is not grounded in reality.

It's not racist to assume that you can more safely trust other people that look like you, because most people are racist and are therefore less likely to betray the trust of someone who looks like them. There are sociology / anthropology / psychology experiments and studies and stuff if you look.

Yeah, going through life using sociology / anthropology / psychology experiments as a moral compass sounds like something a well adjusted person would do.

I think this is less a correlation with skin color than culture, tradition, inertia and education (or lack thereof). It's demonstrably real, and why it takes decades or centuries to undo. The lasting inertia of institutional racism in the United States is pretty hard to ignore, though I've encountered my share of people who think it's all in the past.

"Trust" assumes a fair, even starting point.

the lack of empathy and casual disregard i often see from educated liberal white folk when it comes this stuff makes my stomach turn.

When my Malaysian immigrant parents bought their first ever house in America (actually still to this day their only house),

It was in a neighborhood in what was a small town about 20-30 minutes away from the Capitol city in Boise, ID

It was around 2000 and we were the first non-white family to move into that neighborhood.

Our experience there was a mixed bag.

There was some of the nicest neighbrods who helped us move in with their pick up trucks saving us a ton of money which we didn’t have at the time.

And even a year ago when my parents moved to California, many of the neighbors got their pickup trucks again and helped them with the move.

But that was the good parts. Sadly there were also other kinds of folk.

We were Buddhist/Hindus but because we were brown and many people didn’t know about Hinduism, basically all brown Asian people of middle-eastern or south Asian ancestry/ethnicity/looks got lumped in with the same stereotypes

And my parents had met some Malaysians who were studying abroad here in Idaho which got them so excited they invited them over.

They were Malaysian Muslims wearinf the headscarf and stuff and so when they were leaving our house

My mom gave the wife of the couple a big hug and one of the not so friendly neighbors saw that so I’m guessing they assumed we were Muslim.

And I got lots of terrorist comments and mean bomb jokes thrown at me.

I guess I never understood Xenophobia towards Muslims

Because my mom (who is Hindu) had best friends from her childhood in India who were Muslims

And also I had visited Malaysia which is 60% Muslim.

And they were very open minded and modern people just like here in the West.

In fact Malaysia was far more progressive than India (which is where my mom grew up during her childhood because Malaysia was having race riots at the time so she stayed in India for her safety).

Malaysia is a multi-ethic multi-religious countries made of multi-generation Malays (Indonesian immigrants), multi-generations Chinese, and multi-generation Indians.

And they all date in high school and are super liberal-progressive and big of fighting for women’s rights and taking rose and sexual assault seriously it is very surprising

Since on average most Hindus and Muslims I’ve met or seen in India or the Middle East are very conservative and the record on women’s sexual rights in India and the Middle East is very limited still to this day.

So I guess SouthEast Asia or at least Malaysia is oddly different.

So my experience with Muslims in general is probably quite different from most conservative Westerners who haven’t traveled I guess.

It’s sad how ignorance and lack of exposure is probably one of the biggest contributors to bigotry and ignorance, of course trying to maintain power and control over minorities is probably also a strong reason.

I remember in Middle School all the stuff people kept saying about Hindusm

“Why does your religious step on babies?” Etc etc.

I remember asking my mom that when I got back home from school and she laughed saying “If we stepped on babies I’m pretty sure India wouldn’t be overpopulated”

But prejudice by the majority race/religion isn’t limited to America.

When I visited Malaysia (I’m an American citizen but was a child immigrant who left Malaysia at the age of 5 and grew up here in the US my entire life since the age of 5) in 2007 there was an old fair skinned Malay lady in the train and when an dark skinned Indian man sat next to her

She started yelling racist things to him telling him to go back to India

Even though he’s a 4th generation Tamil (Tamil is South Indian) Malaysian.

And in India recently I’m starting to see some rising Hindu nationalism similar to the Trump Christian nationalism.

Both of which are silly since they go against the founding Constituonal principles of secularism and religious freedom enshrined in both country’s constitutions.

I don’t understand why but this phenomenon of the majority race or religion fearing minorities and wanting to suppress minorties to maintain power

Is quite widespread on a global scale.

Anyway there wasn’t really a point to this ramble other than to share a story and some perspective on race and religion issues.

Divver, I'm sorry you went through what you did, I really am.

Your experience was nothing like what we are still going through today. I'm sorry. Which is something I don't expect to hear in my lifetime.

You are part of the problem.

Oh I wasn’t equating my experience to yours.

I saw people commenting trying to say you were race baiting and stuff for your comment about your experience growing up in America.

And I disagreed with them and didn’t like how they were saying you were being racist with your comments and they were implying like that stuff like that doesn’t happen anymore.

I disagreed with those commenters because at Berkeley we had folks who were part of the BLM movement mentioning what they went through growing up and also all the statistics surrounding incarceration and police brutality.

What they experienced was so bad and nothing like what I experienced in my lifetime.

So I shared my experience to say I agree with you that there definitely are prejudiced folks out there.

I was in no way saying my experience was similar to yours. I’m so sorry if that’s how it came out.

Since this site seems to be down, here are some other resources:

Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Motorist_Green_Book

A very powerful clipping from the book: https://i.imgur.com/fo8vKHO.png

You can read the full book here: https://archive.org/stream/history_green_book/87_135_1736_Gr...

And there's an article here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/read-these-chillin...

I first learned of the existence of the Green Book thanks to Matt Ruff's "Lovecraft Country", which features a similar work called the "Safe Negro Travel Guide": http://www.bymattruff.com/my-novels/lovecraft-country/a-read...

99% Invisible did a good episode about the Green Book. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-green-book/

There is an interactive display of the Green Book at the National Museum of African American History and Culture https://nmaahc.si.edu/ (I think on the second or third floor).

Also the New York Public Library has an interactive map fro their public domain collection http://publicdomain.nypl.org/greenbook-map/

I saw this very eye-opening video of a presentation on the Green Book, which I hadn't heard of before. The stories some of the participants tell transformed how I look at the experiences of black Americans.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?404885-1/travel-guides-african...

Per the link above, the presenter Calvin Ramsey is making a documentary, "The Green Book Chronicles", in progress (and looking for funding):

https://greenbookchronicles.com/

Crickets

Is that a reference to something?

yes... The absence of participants. "The only sound in the room is the sound of crickets"

In fairness, there's not a lot to say. It was a horrible time in the country for blacks. I wish I had a time machine to see what it was like.

> It was a horrible time in the country for blacks.

It still is, it's just better than it was when this book was published. However, we are back to people openly espousing racism and white supremacy.

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