Back of the Bus?


****very minor spoilers****



NJ isn't a southern State. Rufus wouldn't have had to sit in the back of the bus. He wouldn't have had to wait outside of restaurants, etc.

I'm amazed how many I'll informed people believe thsee laws existed outside of the deep south. They didn't.

If you're going to write for a show where every episode is in the past, do some research since you clearly didn't learn in school.

Forced racial tension in shows is getting old, but it's even worse when it's not based in any sort of reality.

It seems racism will be this shows comic relief. What an idiotic premise. In any case, the writers need to educate themselves. As do most others.

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The show really is dealing with racial concepts very poorly. The guy going off on the cop and mentioning Jordan, Jackson, Tyson, Obama and OJ was pretty awful.

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He was just trying to elicit a negative response and it worked. Diversion created, they escape jail. Mission accomplished.

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buttercup_ash: "He was just trying to elicit a negative response and it worked. Diversion created, they escape jail. Mission accomplished."
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Never heard of a movie called The Great White Hope, pertaining to events that occurred BEFORE the Hindenberg explosion? It's not like Tyson was a first in his league. Heck, what about Muhammed Ali? Sugar Ray Leonard? Julius Irving? Kareem Abdul Jabbar? The Harlem Globetrotters?

What was especially strange about all those dropped names was they were almost tabloidish in their mention, as tho the writer anticipated the viewer would be of the lowest common denominator and wouldn't comprehend mentioning Jack Johnson.

And really don't see why it was necessary to approach race like that with the white officer calling him boy. Basically, he bit at the bait. It would have been better had he managed something a bit more intellectual instead of going Black Lives Matter.

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No, when he provoked the cops they hadn't figured out to use the bra wire to pick the lock. It's just bad writing to create drama.

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You weren't paying attention. The diversion was so they could get the underwire.

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It depends on the town during the time period really. I live in SE Ohio and maybe thirty of forty years ago there was racism in my area(not saying it doesn't exist today but was more prevalent when i was real young. While there may have been laws or lack of Jim Crow laws in the area it more or less fell in line with how the public reacted to the law. In most small towns there is a "good ole boy" system too that will ignore the laws in favor of "friends" The federal government had some control but they didn't have nearly as much control as they have in todays world.

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I'm sure I seem like a broken record at this point, but in spite of having the easiest access to the most information of any point in history, modern writers can't be bothered with research. Classic writers had to travel to archives, libraries, and other facilities, often in other countries, to gather information, yet this new crop of writers is too lazy to type something into a search box using the same device with which they are writing their script.

http://writerblalley.wix.com/home

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I saw a picture in a local history book with something like "whites only" and this is in Washington State. What makes you think there was no racism in New Jersey in 1937?

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Just another dope.

In 2016, Boston and Detroit are some of the most racist cities.



Thats a clown question , BRO.......



CLOSE the FRIGGEN BORDER ALREADY!!!

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As of the latest census, Detroit was 82.7% African American so...

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It was odd, as well as distracting, to decide to 'tackle' race and segregation in a story about the Hindenberg. It's not like the fire was going to discriminate or comprehend the suffering of a black man who happened to be in the Hindenberg's vicinity.

If these people appeared on the Titanic and this guy Rufus is told he can't enter a lifeboat because he's black (which there was a black man, from Haiti, who was on the Titanic), he's going to take to the soapbox and all the while the ship is still sinking. His moralistic words aren't going to make the water any warmer.

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[deleted]

I'm in Jersey now. Maybe 25 miles from the tragic event. A family friend remembers seeing the Hindenburg flying overhead that day.
There was and still is racism here. However, I wasn't around during that time and don't know if things were so smothering everywhere. I hope they were exaggerating the racism just a bit to make a point. It might have been very effective to show someone show Rufus a bit of respect.

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You beat me to this historical error. Northeastern states like NJ didnt have official segregation like the Deep South. So the scientsist would not need to sit in the back of the bus, altho he may have in order to not draw attention to himself in 1937.
Serious FAIL by the scriptwriters.

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That is not to say that racism didn't exist in the north in 1937 and later. See the Howard Beach incident of 1986 for example.

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Unless Rufus is being set up to get a taste of REAL racism by going back in time and ends up appreciating what the present is like, this will get old VERY fast and end up being a deal breaker for me. I'll see what happens next week when the team goes back to Lincoln's assassination.

BTW, I've called Jersey home for 46 years and am neither white nor black, and can honestly say that I experienced little racism that was of consequence here in Jersey, and have never had to play the Race Card. I worked in the school system in Camden, which is 95% black or Hispanic. I had a co-worker who was black but never actually lived in Camden, and she reminisced about how in the early 1960s she and her husband were the first black couple to move into a new, otherwise all-white residential suburban development, and nobody treated them differently. She also reminisced about how she never identified with Martin Luther King Jr. or felt any political or cultural loyalty toward him.

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Unless Rufus is being set up to get a taste of REAL racism by going back in time and ends up appreciating what the present is like, this will get old VERY fast and end up being a deal breaker for me. I'll see what happens next week when the team goes back to Lincoln's assassination.

BTW, I've called Jersey home for 46 years and am neither white nor black, and can honestly say that I experienced little racism that was of consequence here in Jersey, and have never had to play the Race Card. I worked in the school system in Camden, which is 95% black or Hispanic. I had a co-worker who was black but never actually lived in Camden, and she reminisced about how in the early 1960s she and her husband were the first black couple to move into a new, otherwise all-white residential suburban development, and nobody treated them differently. She also reminisced about how she never identified with Martin Luther King Jr. or felt any political or cultural loyalty toward him.


So, you're, "neither white nor black," but you're trying to present the anecdotal to support the argument that racism has never existed, where you're from.

Everyone's experience is unique. Let's not try to speak on behalf of what others may or may not experience, based on the good face that someone deliberately put on to you - that one time, way back when.

What I do know; is that the commenters that are pretending like there wasn't any racism in the 30's - anywhere - are just patently ridiculous.

Of course a person of color would go to the back of the bus... whether it was explicit or implicit. They would have most certainly, "known their place," in the 1930's... without question.

It says a lot more about the current antagonistic societal environment, that we have to keep trying to pretend like racism has never existed; instead of realizing that racial tensions are CURRENTLY as bad as they have been in a long while... as evidenced by the hatred that is oft spewed in forums by many a closet racist, behind the comfort of their computer screen.

The fact that we have to constantly try to insulate ourselves from entertainment that depicts uncomfortable times in history, says a lot more about those of us that are unwilling to accept the fact that other people experience life differently from us.

The solution is to either educate ourselves better; or just try to be more empathetic to things that we personally have not had any experience with.

Or, we can go on pretending that, everything that is uncomfortable for us to watch, must somehow be attributed to the, "race-card;" when, in point of fact... it is us that have sullied the program with these false accusations, based on nothing more than our own misguided belief that nothing untoward has ever occurred to anyone outside of our own, "race," - if we must make everything about that, to begin with.

It's not the show throwing out the race-card... it's us, trying to forbade the show from depicting historical racial tensions, in the first place, as somehow unrealistic. -- When, just the idea that there would be no sign of racism anywhere in the 1930's is just utterly preposterous.

Let's get past all of this childish race-mongering.

If everyone looked exactly the same, we'd surely find something else divisive to cry foul about.

Apparently, we can all only see as far as ourselves.

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