I'm not black but I grew up in a black neighborhood.
Well--wait! That's not exactly correct. I grew up in what was called a "colored"
neighborhood. The only kid I had to play with was "colored" and the color was black.
He and I became friends, but that friendship was very limited by our cultural differences. He thought differently about everything.
My grandmother tried to explain this to me.
She had been born and reared in New Orleans where a kind of cultural integration was a reality. Not absolutely, of course. But, comparatively.
My Grandmother, when she was a little girl growing up, was cared for daily by a black lady who lived in her home and who treated her better than her own mother and father.
She had zero prejudice in her heart.
The black kid I played with was named Prince (no, not the celebrity) and he was kind, gentle, and overly respectful of me. I was about 10, but he called me Mister Terry.
Prince thought differently because his source of information and values were from his grandmother. My grandmother was in her 70s and she had been born in the late 1800's. Prince's grandmother was almost 90. She had been raised by ex-Slaves!
Her values and Prince's values were shaped by incredibly difficult circumstances I won't iterate here because you should know them already.
When you are uneducated, you are ignorant of a lot of facts, data, information and such. What you receive as "truth" is mostly guesswork shaped by emotions and prejudice.
Folk Wisdom contains some true things and a lot of false things.
From generation to generation the older people, hardened by life, transmit their very flawed "wisdom" to their children and--if possible--to their grandchildren.
My Grandmother and Grandfather taught me many things from their own "wisdom" which was also flawed in many, many ways. So both the white kid and the black kid in that same neighborhood were ignorant and prejudiced and misinformed by people who truly loved them and who we both respected.
Our family and the oldest members of our family were respected as sources of TRUTH.
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I wanted to post this interview for 3 reasons.
Dick Gregory is an old black man with tremendous gravitas in the black community. He was an activist alongside Martin Luther King. He was at the forefront of Civil Rights activism. He is a source of "information" directly connected to persons and events which are prodigiously mythical.
He absorbed and developed an enforced SKEPTICAL attitude about information from certain (white) sources (for good reason.)
In turn, he privately began reading, investigating, conversing with others the same way a JW might peek at the Internet for the "real" truth about the Truth.
Today Dick Gregory is considered THE MAN to ask for the REAL truth about almost everything pertaining to white vs. black.
If Gregory says it, you see, it must be truer than any so-called 'facts' from white sources. Perfectly understandable, if you stop and think about it.
Here is where the title of this Discussion Topic comes in.
VETTING your source of information (or, how Conspiracy Theories are transmitted)
There is--I believe--a great deal of similarity between the naive absorption of negative information on the part of Dick Gregory and the naive absorption of JW's indiscriminately doing research about the Watchtower. There are so many non-factual sources. . . HOW is a person to know what is true and what is opinion or prejudice??
Listen to at least fifteen minutes of Dick Gregory as this young person in media asks him for the "Truth" and then ask yourself how in the world this "truth" could be swallowed whole?
I'd like your opinion because there are so many things people believe (regardless of color or education or religious background) which are simply NOT true---so why don't we learn HOW to VET our sources?
The non-sequitur transitions in Dick Gregory's pearls of wisdom are countless.
There is a kind of logic which is illogical but sounds very convincing!
The same is true for JW's.
The same may be true for Ex-JW's who listen to the wrong activists or go to the wrong YouTube videos or read the wrong web blogs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TC_wopQlmo
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vet1
vet/
verb
gerund or present participle: vetting
make a careful and critical examination of (something).
"proposals for vetting large takeover bids"
BRITISH
investigate (someone) thoroughly, especially in order to ensure that they are suitable for a job requiring secrecy, loyalty, or trustworthiness.
