Tripping Stones
Race Discussions in Media
These are tripping stones. They are placed all over Germany where a Jewish person who was killed in the holocaust once lived.
I heard about them on a podcast. The stones are raised and are at a different level than the surrounding stones so that if you don’t notice them by seeing them, you will when you trip over them.
Hence the name.
The Umbrella Academy is a series on Netflix that can be loosely called a “Super Hero” series.
I just finished watching season two and was impressed by the way it handled race in it’s second season.
I won’t go over plot points or a discussion of the show here, but the way show addresses everything that was occurring in that time period was very refreshing.
Too often in our scifi the heroes travel back in time to save someone or right some wrong while the racial issues of the time are usually glossed over or outright not mentioned at all.
When the term “the gold old days” is muttered, I think not of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave it to Beaver, but of the civil rights movement and the Jim Crow era.
My mind flashes back to a time when Blacks and other minorities were treated as less than human, and not afforded the same rights as those who were not a minority or those who could pass as white.
The Umbrella Academy dealt with this issue head on and had an entire story arc dedicated to it when it did not HAVE to.
Only one character on the show (other than “Ben” who is literally a ghost) up until season two was easily identifiable as a POC. So they could have gone the route of most other scifi shows and just written her as another character in the show whose race really did not impact the story line.
The decision to include this was done pre George Floyd and pre the BLM protests so it was not a decision driven by political or media pressure.
This was an issue that the writers clearly felt they had a need/duty to address.
I broke into a seemingly random discussion about the Umbrella Academy because in America, we have no tripping stones.
What we had were several statues commemorating and preserving the memory of those instigated and continued the institution of slavery re: statues of dead slave owning white men.
I don’t actually have an issue with that.
To be clear, I never had an issue with those statues that were torn down. They were part of US history.
My issue lies with the fact that the history that led us to where we are was seldom if ever openly discussed — Pre George Floyd.
Where are huge statues and plaques commemorating black fallen freedom fighters or POC who made huge contributions to the arts, medicine and science?
Where is the open discussion about what happened in the past and what continues to happen to this day?
The country in which I grew up, would teach us around the fourth or fifth grade and without pointing fingers about the slave trade , The Slave Triangle and indentured servitude.
This type of curriculum does not exist in the US at those grade levels. (please correct me if I am wrong).
As the lone black female actress on the cast of The Umbrella Academy stated more succinctly and eloquently than I could —
“We are not taught enough in America about American history,”…
“We skip huge chunks of really important, really violent and harsh parts of our history that make our country what it is today,”
This is why we need the equivalent of tripping stones in the US. They are an unassailable and unavoidable reminder of where we came from.
And a reminder that we need to remember our past and be better
