An integrated Sock hop? We haz that

I ran across an article where the SJW shut down a college party with a 1950's theme (aka a "sock hop") because... something about those parties were areas of bigotry and segregation.

But ironically, sock hops were on the leading edge of integration:

from the Hollywood reporter: Five Ways that Dick Clark revolutionized American music.

2. He Encouraged the Integration of Pop Music From Bandstand's beginning, Clark had committed to integrating the show.

 The image of a racially diverse crowd of teenagers doing “The Twist” right alongside Chubby Checker is among Bandstand’s most indelible, and would later be dramatized in movies like Hairspray and on NBC’s American Dreams (which Clark produced).

In 1958, Clark curated and promoted the first racially integrated pop concert – a fact fondly recalled by the estate of Michael Jackson. "It still wasn't acceptable for them to dance with white kids, so the blacks just danced with each other. We were waiting for the explosion, but it never happened," Clark said in a 1998 interview with Pennsylvania Heritage Magazine. "The wonderful part about our decision to integrate then was that there were no repercussions, no reverberations, no battles at all — it just happened right there on a television screen in front of millions of people."

The thing about this was that no one made a big deal about it. It was not pushing it in you face, nor was it the virtue proclaiming as in today's SJW. It was just done as if it was normal, and you know what? It was.




I was just a kid, but I remember our cousins and some of our neighbors who would rush there after school to get in. You would even see a few of the dancers wearing Catholic school uniforms because they didn't bother to go home and change.

In those days,, private parties back then tended to be limited to outsiders. Catholics and Jews were outsiders: legally "welcomed" but often kept out of country clubs and even schools (My medical school has no blacks, no women, avoided letting in Catholics, and had a Jewish quota in the 1950's).

Annd yes, interrcial marriage was illegal: One of my fellow medical student in the mid 1960's was debating if she should visit her parents with her husband because the laws were still on the books.

We  Catholics didn't feel welcome at the YMCA, so we had our own organizations for swimming etc.

Nor was the clannishness limited to religion: my big Irish American cousin wasn't allowed to rent the Italain American Social club for his wedding, until he mentioned the name of his Italian American fiance.

The good news is that clannishness meant self policing, and feeling safe. The bad news was that outsiders were not welcome.

But my point is that this was not a racial thing. Which is why I cringe when I hear the progressive meme "white people": Because in the 1950's, Jews and Catholic ethnics weren't considered part of the white establishment.