Here are two memes that seem worth discussing together:
In one case, the message is to make sure we never forget this bad thing that happened. In the other case, the message is to forget what happened and move on. Why the different message?
Is it because 9/11 occurred more recently than slavery? Well, the message is ‘never forget’ not ‘remember until 150 years from now.’ Further, slavery affected more people for a much longer period of time than 9/11 did, so if anything, I’d expect slavery to be something we should remember longer.
I wonder how people would react if we changed the memes a bit:
I suspect people wouldn’t react well to being told to get over 9/11. In addition, I think a lot of people would be annoyed by a successful black man saying to never forget slavery.
How would people feel about the following meme?
If we have a different reaction to “holocaust get over it” than we do to “slavery get over it,” why is that the case?
I think one factor is who the perpetrator was. Slavery is something that a substantial part of the US population supported, whereas with 9/11 we were attacked by scary foreigners. We want to never forget being attacked by low status others, but we want to quickly forget when members of our high status in-group were the perpetrators.
The other major factor is who the victims are. If you are part of a lower status group, you will be expected to ‘get over’ bad things that happened to you. For example, I suspect a low SES woman who was punched by her husband would get less sympathy than would a high SES woman who had the same thing happen to her. People would probably assume that the low SES victim did things to contribute to it: drinking, drug use, unstable aggressive behavior, etc. People would be more likely to think that she should just ‘get over’ her abuse.
It’s similar with slavery. No matter how much black people are targeted and treated poorly, they are supposed to get over it.
Having sympathy for someone signals that they are part of your in-group. Saying someone should ‘get over it’ signals that they are not part of your in-group. As a result, the least powerful people tend to get the least sympathy.
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based on conversation with charlene estornell-lewis
Another factor might be that we perceive holocaust survivors as dealing in a “productive way” and those descended from the conditions of slavery as a “drain on the system” (who can forget the image of the black welfare mother?). However, survivors of the holocaust, just like survivors of 9/11 and family members who lost their loved one, received an outpouring of support. The most support black people, who endured slavery and Jim Crow, received came in the form of Emancipation in 1864 and The Civil Rights Act in 1964 which were both quickly followed by a myriad of laws designed to effectively stip black people of any newfound power. And yet, they are expected to “get over slavery”.
Could be that no one uses 9/11 or the Holocaust to guilt and/or browbeat people, and survivors/families of victims are still alive.
I came to this via the related links at the bottom of another post. The title text of the link showed that you used 9-11 and slavery as examples of who should ‘get over it’, but not which was which. And I fully expected that it would be ‘9-11 get over it’ and ‘never forget slavery’.
Most of the incongruity in your reversed example comes from the use of pictures that support the original versions. The rest is about partisanship. Red tribers like your original examples, because they want us to fight against islamists and thus want to highlight evil things islamists have done. Blue tribers prefer the opposite ones because they want to fight racists, and thus want to highlight the evils of racism.