One of my favourite little stories is how Mr Rogers started off in Canada. He brought a small team to Toronto and did the show there for a year. One member of the team stayed in Canada when the rest returned to the States. His name was Mr. Dressup, which for many Canadians is our cherished childhood equivalent of Mr. Rogers.
Mr. Rogers didn't start his children's programming work in Canada. That started when he worked on Josie Carey's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josie_Carey) show The Children's Corner on WQED in Pittsburg. Several of the puppets he used on Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood were first seen on The Children's Corner.
No, he started programming for children earlier, but the show Misterogers [sic] began in 1962 in Canada.
It later became Mister Rogers' Neighborhood [sic], which is what we know and remember him for today.
Some of the puppets he used were first introduced in Children's Corner in the 1950s, but the first show to carry his name, in any form, and starring him, was Misterogers in Canada.
More specifically and importantly, Misterogers in Canada was the first time Fred himself appeared on TV showing his face as a major character (and possiblly in any way) in a show.
I explain in more detail below, but: Mr. Rogers began children's programming work earlier in the 1950s, but the show we know him for today began in Canada as Misterogers in the 1960s.
Mr. Rogers is one of the purest people to have ever walked this Earth. I used to infrequently run into him outside of WQED’s studios when walking to and from CMU’s campus and without fail, he’d have a huge smile on his face and tell me (as I’m sure he did everyone!) to have a great day and that he was proud.
To this day the memory brings a huge smile to my face. What a human being.
I watched Tom Hanks' portrayal on the plane a few months ago; being non-American and unfamiliar with the original programme, I was a good way in to the film before I started to suspect it was a 'docudrama' rather than the surrealist drama I'd thitherto thought!
It was an enjoyable film about an apparently almost 'too good to be true' gentleman even without the context of having grown up with The Neighbourhood.
Rogers practiced effective communication for children, which I believe is worthwhile studying as an adult. Helps with clarity.
Starts with:
1. State the idea you wish to express as clearly as possible, and in terms preschoolers can understand. Example: "It is dangerous to play in the street."
2. Rephrase in a positive manner, as in "It is good to play where it is safe."
3. Rephrase the idea, bearing in mind that preschoolers cannot yet make subtle distinctions and need to be redirected to authorities they trust. As in, “Ask your parents where it is safe to play.”
Ends with:
... 9. => "Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them, and listening is an important part of growing."
In other words, he spoke to children as if they are inexperienced humans.
When speaking to children, adults often start with the assumption that children are inferior in some way to adults and therefore they can't be spoken to in a rational way. On the contrary, Mr. Rogers spoke to children in a way that didn't condescend, and did so effectively, not shoving too many ideas into a single statement or making his audience feel shame for not initially knowing something.
Also note that in method 9, he provides a rationale for the lesson.
> It is important to try to listen to them, and listening is an important part of growing.
This might seem innocuous, but "because I say so" really isn't a good explanation for either children or adults. Relating the lesson to something that most children want, to grow, is both truthful and respectful.
> When speaking to children, adults often start with the assumption that children are inferior in some way to adults and therefore they can't be spoken to in a rational way.
People often underestimate the complexity of things they are used to. If you keep trying to use complexity/baggage without realising it, you might assume others aren't smart enough to understand, because it seems so obvious. It takes skill to see that something is not obvious and then break it down so that it can be understood.
Grew up watching Fred on local TV, probably saw every episode for a decade, and know people who have met him.
He was the real deal, with the courage to have unswayable adherence to pure humanitarian values. Look up the time he went to shame Congress into funding PBS.
Yes! I didn't grow up watching Mr. Rogers (not sure why as it was the right era, but I think he wasn't on TV nationwide yet), but did grow up watching Mr. Wizard. For my 10th birthday my mom arranged for me to go meet Mr. Wizard in his studio lab which was a couple hours drive from where we lived. Really nice guy. Give me some books and some electric motors and showed me around. He invited me to be a guest on his show, but I was way too shy as a kid to do that. I was happy enough with the private tour.
The scene (actual video footage) of him testifying in front of congress was so amazing I wouldn’t have believed it actually happened if I saw it in a dramatized movie. I tried to find a clip on YouTube but I can’t - it’s worth watching this documentary if only to watch him actually convince a skeptical senator to fund PBS.
Before the #MeToo movement there was a slow ramp of scandals about celebrities and for a while there every time someone posted about Fred I would recite a little litany in my head,
Pleasebegoodpleasebegoodpleasebegood
That went into overdrive after the first rumors about Bill Cosby started up. And then by John Lassiter I was a momentary wreck every time Fred made the news.
Fred Rogers has been gone long enough now that I’m more confident that he was genuinely the Nice Guy his public image paints him to be. Of course Fred Rogers sued the KKK.
Arsenio Hall had Fred on the first run of his talk show. He was agog. Major hero worship. Ended up gifting him a copy of his signature jacket. Which was even bigger on Fred than it was on Arsenio.
A better example would be Jimmy Saville, Larry Nassar, and the leaders of the Catholic Church, people who intentionally worked with children to create an opportunity to rape them.
She passed away last year, but I remember her doing some press the last few years, and was always delightful. She seemed a little mischievous in a way that seemed like it would have offset Fred's near-saintly disposition.
I've said for years that Fred Rogers actually put into practice the values that Christians claim to espouse. Just about all of them. In kind of an innocent way, too, like Jesus was kind to the most hated people in his society, we are told it is a good thing to do, so why shouldn't I do it as well?
I'd argue the five minutes of episode when Fred soaked his feet with a black man in a kiddie pool delivered a more crushing blow to the KKK than his suit did. a lot of kids saw that, and in turn became a lot harder to indoctrinate.
bigots and racists unfortunately remembered that lesson very well. teaching lgbtq and the history of race in this country is all but forbidden in some States because it works.
> I'd argue the five minutes of episode when Fred soaked his feet with a black man in a kiddie pool delivered a more crushing blow to the KKK than his suit did
What a weird way to put it, it makes it sound as if this difference of opinion is hate based, not just a wrong belief.
It isn't forbidden "because it works", it is forbidden "because teaching works", and a step back, "they believe it to be wrong information"
By stating your shortcut, eg "teaching works", I feel you are glossing over, while unintentionally, the fact that there is an actual difference of belief here.
Such people can believe black people are inferior, or lgbtq is wrong, without it deriving from hate. Their hate comes from people trying to "corrupt" their children's beliefs, and anyone with a child would feel precisely the same way, if they thought the thing taught, was very wrong.
By understanding the source of the hate, by keeping the source in mind, we are better able to counter it... to perhaps fix it.
Whatever your definition of "hate" is, if it doesn't capture teaching people to believe Black people are inferior, it's an unproductive definition, one that will just lead you into constant unproductive semantic debates. A lesson that Black people are inferior is a lesson reasonable people will consider hateful. Some beliefs people hold are simply hateful; we are not bound to respect them.
You are seeing hate, as a reflection of your own emotional response to the act. You are also insisting that those responsible, must believe just as you do, and therefore presuming they think their act wrong.
If you cannot see how they view they world, how their thinking is wrong, cannot see how they think, you have zero chance of correcting it.
I'm sure many people who took part in historical lynchings against minorities thought themselves absolutely justified and were having a grand ol' time doing it. If you look up the records, you'll find that some lynchings were even treated as spontaneous parties by the aggressors: they broke out the good booze, started up some campfire cooking, danced and played music... all while their targets hung dead in the background or, sometimes, slowly choked to death.
Your comments about this are just plain boring when we see the injustice around us every single day.
We don’t want to lean back in our comfort and pontificate from our position of privilege and safety and ‘well, akchtually’ people who experience these acts of hate and violence.
Teaching and believing and spreading that some people are inferior because of where they were born or the color of their skin is just plain wrong. If you are telling your kids that, it isn’t an opinion, it’s hate.
It isn’t a position that deserves debate, conversation or any space in our polities.
Tolerance has it’s limits and a lot of people are tired and refusing to tolerate the likes of your juvenile, puerile attempts at ‘conversation’.
My prior comments discussed zero acts of violence, and further, you are pontificating the second you reply to anything on hackernews.
People here have been discussing how to teach people about equality, how to resolve racism in the young. My comment was about ensuring that is targeted correctly, both in youth and older people, so it actually works.
You cannot fix something, if you target the wrong thing to fix. You cannot fix something, if you don't even understand the source of the issue.
But sure... yell at the guy trying to rationally frame this issue, so we can correctly fix it.
See what I mean about unproductive semantic debates? I recommend you just use the word the way everyone else does; that's what words are for, communicating. When you do the "a-ha, gotcha, I meant something totally unexpected by the word 'hate'" thing, most of what you manage to communicate is that you think racial hatred is a game.
See what I mean about unproductive semantic debates? I recommend you just use the word the way everyone else does; that's what words are for, communicating
What presumption!
A few responses, are not indicative of the world, or even a majority opinion. They do not indicate "the way everyone else does", and in fact may be responses from people misusing the word!
This seems more to be the case, for the responses either tried to paint my statments in a poor light, even after I clarified my usage, or went off the deep end.
When you do the "a-ha, gotcha, I meant something totally unexpected by the word 'hate'" thing,
What are you even talking about? I clearly defined this from the start.
most of what you manage to communicate is that you think racial hatred is a game.
A game? It is as if you have not read my posts, or this thread. Or even the post you are responding to.
Just because I think racism can exist without hatred, does not mean racism cannot be hate based. This all or nothing, this "it is this way, and no other way", this "a problem can only be approached from one angle" thinking seldom results in solutions.
And we want to fix things, right? We don't just want to complain, and throw words at it, right?
Or do we want to understand, frame correctly, then fix?
You introduced the word "hate" to the conversation.
Yes, racism can exist without hatred. We can view an ancient dead civilization through a racist lens without hating the people we study. But, so what?
This thread started from a specific example - segregated swimming pools.
I don't know why you've written so much on this thread without actually discussing the issue.
We know whites were angry about desegregating swimming pools, and committed violence in order to preserve their belief in a segregated society protecting the legal and social status of whites over blacks.
That's not simply saying "there was hate", but giving a reason for the belief (white supremacy) an explanation of the anger (increasing desegregation overturned the status people regarded as their birthright), and a way out of it (showing beloved Mr. Rogers share a wading pool with his black friend, Officer Clemmons).
That's a chance to correct it, through Mr. Rogers' deliberate anti-racist efforts.
You earlier wrote "My prior comments discussed zero acts of violence", which rather highlights that your comments are completely decoupled from how Mr. Rogers was responding to widespread acts of violence when blacks tried to swim in what had been white-only swimming areas. That's the context everyone else is addressing.
So don't be surprised when people are irritated by your irrelevant hypotheticals.
This is what I was referring to. I responded to a specific point, of a specific post, about a specific thing.
This happens all the time. It's how conversation works. Yet you continue to ignore context, continue to ignore what I was discussing, which I have reiterated in every single reply. Instead, you find fault that I was not discussing.. what? What you wanted to discuss?
I repeat again, and go back to my original reply, we must truly understand cause, to effect correction.
For some reason this appears to bother you greatly. All of your replies have been to posts of mine stating this. Apparently, you disagree?
Well, why even bother responding? You apparently don't care for cause, and get upset at targeted correction.
> I repeat again, and go back to my original reply, we must truly understand cause, to effect correction.
Which I have specifically addressed in my earlier reply. To wit:
reason for the belief = white supremacy
explanation of the anger = increasing desegregation overturned the status people regarded as their birthright
way out of it = showing beloved Mr. Rogers share a wading pool with his black friend, Officer Clemmons (anti-racism efforts)
> You apparently don't care for cause
Perhaps your frustration caused you to overlook my earlier summary of the cause, and overlook my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32289951 where I link to additional resources about the cause.
> Such people can believe black people are inferior, or lgbtq is wrong, without it deriving from hate. Their hate comes from people trying to "corrupt" their children's beliefs, and anyone with a child would feel precisely the same way, if they thought the thing taught, was very wrong.
I think I understand what you’re trying to say but if you explore the next “layer” of their beliefs and ask why they’re so afraid you’ll find the ultimate root of these beliefs is hatred.
> it makes it sound as if this difference of opinion is hate based, not just a wrong belief
The belief was one of racial superiority and hatred over the movement towards equal rights and equal access, which knocked them off the pedestal they believed they were born to be on. They didn't like how their children were being "corrupted" by the ideals of racial equality, which upset their views about social hierarchy.
Public pools shut down or were privatized after desegregation and civil rights laws made it impossible to have "whites only" public pools. There's a book on this overall topic: Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America.
Here's background on the context of the wading pool: https://www.today.com/popculture/how-mister-rogers-pool-mome... . "This 'Mister Rogers' moment broke race barriers. It's just as powerful today /
The scene aired amid racial tensions in the U.S. over segregated swimming pools, and many see it as Rogers taking a stand against racism. ... The same year it aired, the Supreme Court ruled that pools could not be segregated by race."
You can also read what Clemmons (who played the officer) has to say about it in his memoir, "Officer Clemmons: A Memoir", which has this scene on the cover.
Stop selectively using Dr King’s words to support a stance that his writings, especially his writings later than the "I have a dream" speech, do not support.
When Fred Rogers shared a wading pool with François Clemmons, public pools had been legally desegregated for only five years. The underlying stigma that had justified the segregation (the notion that black people were dirty or dangerous) hadn't gone away with the passing of the law. Fred made the conscious decision to demonstrate to his viewers, on his show, that the messages some of them would be receiving from parents and authority figures were simply untrue. He did this not by telling them "Don't trust your parents, they will lie to you," but by simply modeling an alternative to a message they would receive.
It's honestly a masterful but of anti-racist messaging: instead of directly contradicting authority, provide an alternative view and challenge entrenched authority to explain it.
Okay, so your indirect answer to my question is, Fred Rogers was practicing the anti-racism of 1970. Super! The article (published last year) does not make that distinction, and it seems like a disingenuous attempt to legitimize modern anti-racism by conflating it with the past version.
The right-wing abomination known as "critical race theory", as described in that Newsweek article, is that it has absolutely no connection to what real anti-racism is. The anti-CRT people—let’s call them what they really are, pro-racists—have created something from whole cloth that allows them to raise lots of money and outrage.
The two privileged white authors of the opinion piece are disingenuous, at best, as what they present as "anti-CRT" does not match the videos and witch hunts that I have observed over the last couple of years led by the same sorts of screaming white crowds as throw rocks at Ruby Bridges.
Similarly, what they are presenting as "CRT" is 100% identical to the pro-racist straw construction. It does not even remotely resemble any program that any of the many anti-racist activists I know would support.
The same people who threw rocks at Ruby Bridges in 1960 are now terrified that their grandchildren are going to learn that they were people who threw rocks at Ruby Bridges.
It's an interesting article because you rarely see the counter-position spelled out so clearly.
"""The CRT-approved story, in a nutshell, is that white racism is pervasive and accounts for all racial deficits and disparities. What is not being taught—what students are not exposed to, and not even allowed to hear—is the contrary position that persistent racial inequalities are oftentimes rooted in cultural differences and behavioral tendencies that are not all traceable to slavery or Jim Crow, and cannot all be solved by purging the vague category of "structural racism." """
... In other words, "The problem with CRT is it banishes the alternative explanation that races are different." In other words, anti-racism's problem is it's... Anti-racist, and doesn't give racism a seat at the table. Well, yes. We already had this argument two generations ago.
(And that's if I accept the authors' premise that CRT and anti-racism are the same thing, which they are not. CRT is a specific legal interpretation framework; the term is mis-applied to race-conscious general education).
Well, nothing having to do with the fantasies expressed in that fact-free opinion piece in that garbage outlet luring Boomers by publishing under the name of what was, decades ago, a reasonably respected print weekly.
“Anti-racism is usually structured around conscious efforts and deliberate actions which are intended to provide equal opportunities for all people on both an individual and a systemic level.”
Actually being color blind rather than having the appearance of being color blind is a tricky thing. Taken to an extreme, a collage which had a purely random acceptance criteria is non discriminatory, but it would feel like discrimination if you had a high GPA.
No one argues discrimination is bad, they argue discrimination based on something as arbitrary as skin color or gender is bad. It reads to me as very disingenuous to frame the conversation as if there was an argument to be made that college's discriminating on unrelated, unchangeable, inherited characteristics is fair or just.
> No one argues discrimination is bad, they argue discrimination based on something as arbitrary as skin color or gender is bad.
you're wrong. being in favor of "equitable outcomes" today frequently means arguing that discrimination on the basis of math or other test scores is bad. Google "math is whiteness" or see the elimination of gifted and talented programs in public schools
That's about how teaching methods are failing some children, and then they're being judged for it unfairly. It's not against proper education and testing and using that to sort.
if you assume that all children are equally capable of learning everything then you are forced to conclude that teaching methods are failing some children. But if you "believe in science" (it's quite popular today to profess belief in science), you don't believe assumptions like that.
All children are equally capable of learning but different children are receptive to different teaching styles and approaches.
Only teaching children with a small selection of approaches that were primarily refined with middle to upper class white neuro-typical children can be considered discriminatory.
That's the point of those studies.
It would be like forcing a kid who is growing up in middle-to-upper class western society to solely learn mathematics via ancient greek visual proofs and then blame them for not understanding maths because they "just aren't trying" or "they aren't smart".
Everybody has equal capacities to learn but only if you can find the style of learning which works for each person.
Economic status and two-parent vs one-parent households are both stronger indicators of educational achievement than pretty much any other, including race.
However, when broken down by race, economic status is heavily weighted by race in America and Canada (differently in each country, but but still present).
One can’t simply assume spherical cows here, because there is a deeply historic, systemic, and persistent imbalance which gets compounded through chronic underfunding of economically depressed (and mostly minority) education systems. Some of the systemic racism is ongoing and being actively encouraged by bad actors who misuse the words of Dr King to oppose real measures that would begin to address these imbalances.
A lot of people argue that if exam scores or GPAs are correlated with unchangeable, inherited characteristics, then discriminating on exam scores or GPAs is unfair and unjust.
If exam scores / GPAs are correlated systemic (or, if you prefer, environmental) injustices and imbalances, then discriminating on those scores without considering the imbalances is unfair and unjust.
Race and economic status are heavily linked in the United States (https://voxeu.org/article/race-and-economic-opportunity-unit...). Children of lower economic means often have food security issues (they can‘t guarantee having had breakfast and/or even having a lunch every day). It is known that hungry children do worse educationally than those who are not hungry. It’s also known that when there’s a healthy school lunch program, there’s a substantial lift in educational results:
> We find that in years when a school contracts with a healthy lunch company, students at the school score better on end-of-year academic tests. On average, student test scores are 0.03 to 0.04 standard deviations higher (about 4 percentile points). Not only that, the test score increases are about 40 percent larger for students who qualify for reduced-price or free school lunches. These students are also the ones who are most likely to eat the school lunches.
So, the people arguing aren’t arguing about "unchangeable, inherited" characteristics, but are instead arguing about very changeable ongoing systemic injustices.
Yes that is the technical definition of discrimination, but when people say something is "discriminatory" they usually mean discriminatory in a way that it isn't supposed to be. To your example of a college, it is supposed to discriminate on academic performance, so nobody has a problem with discrimination on GPA (of course comparing GPAs is still an implementation problem).
And to say it's hard to be colorblind is not true. You just don't factor in race. You will probably fall back to the line that black students would have had a higher GPA if they weren't discriminated against in other areas of society, but then it's not the school doing the discriminating. And this is the core of the problem. Instead of selecting the best students, universities have decided to select who they think hypothetically would have been the best student in a perfect world, and doing a very poor job of it. And their arrogance in appointing themselves the corrector of all societal ills and their myopic focus on only gender and race differences in doing so has pissed a lot of people off.
> You will probably fall back to the line that black students would have had a higher GPA if they weren't discriminated against in other areas of society, but then it's not the school doing the discriminating. And this is the core of the problem. Instead of selecting the best students, universities have decided to select who they think hypothetically would have been the best student in a perfect world, and doing a very poor job of it.
It's more complicated than that.
If someone is in a bad environment, they can have a worse GPA and be a worse student at that moment, but once they get into the college environment they will be a better student, not just "could have been".
> And their arrogance in appointing themselves the corrector of all societal ills and their myopic focus on only gender and race differences in doing so has pissed a lot of people off.
Appointing themselves the corrector? For anyone that does have that motivation, they'd probably gladly welcome more cooperation. And those two getting most of the focus is because they get most of the discrimination.
> but once they get into the college environment they will be a better student
How, exactly? Not that this really matters b/c universities today are credentialing scams where no one fails out.
> And those two getting most of the focus is because they get most of the discrimination.
Citation needed. And if they were being at all quantitative about this, at least I would have some sympathy.
The giveaway is that they are being completely dishonest about what they are doing. Harvard fought like hell to prevent their admissions process from coming out in discovery. If they were honest, they would make it public anyway. What do they have to hide? Well, just that they weren't running any remotely reasonable process to model how good of a student someone is under normalized conditions. They were artificially lowering the "personality scores" of Asian students to keep them out.
Consider two students with equal intelligence and equal skill at studying.
One lives in a rich suburban neighborhood where schools are well-funded and the parents have the time and money to supply constant extracurricular attention to their children.
The other lives in a single-parent household in a historically redlined urban neighborhood where the school budgets are peanuts and he has to work a part-time job on the side to help support his family.
Which one is going to have the more impressive transcript in college applications?
It’s not that people will be exactly equal but rather you can validate admission criteria by comparing graduation rates and GPA’s.
If men and women graduate at similar rates and have similar GPA’s then your admission criteria are presumably reasonably unbiased. If men have lower GPA’s and graduate at lower rates then presumably their admission criteria should be raised to account for biases you aren’t aware of.
If however you underrepresent men relative to the general population you may want to focus on attracting more of them through advertising.
From an outside perspective this might seem unfair. Why is the school spending so much money mailing to young men while requiring more extra curricular activists to be admitted? It’s a question of equal standards vs equal opportunity.
I wonder if it'd be better to posit that the 'team' sued the KKK because almost everything I know about this guy would lead me to believe he wasn't even likely to attack his aggressors, even if it was reasonable to do so.
FYI check out this 1969 congressional hearing [1], especially as compared to hearings today.
Asserting one's rights is not "attacking". Do you think that Fred Rogers, upon learning that a gang of monstrous people is saying horrific things while impersonating him, wouldn't force them to stop?
First - this is the kind of thing that's typically handled and driven by 'the legal department'. They think differently, act differently, for non obvious reasons.
Second - 'fighting' is a form of aggression no doubt and suggest most people avoid that and confrontation esp. people like Rogers. I can see him rationalizing it's just not worth the effort, I mean, it depends a lot on the proportionality of the situation. Was someone handing out leaflets in 'nowhere USA'? Or was there a National Convention?
I cans see Rogers wanting to do something like wanting to call them and talk to them, and his lawyers saying 'no, that's not how it works, better to send them a firm letter from a reputable law firm, we'll take care of it' etc..
