Except in New Orleans, where there’s a pawn shop and a daquiri bar on, basically, every street corner.
An Arky, in Milwaukee, there really isn’t a “poor white folks” neighborhood or a “poor black folks” neighborhood, it’s more “poor white AND black folks” neighborhood(s). I’m not pretending that there isn’t any racism up here, it just seems from my experiences that it’s socially acceptable to use racial slurs in public to strangers in the south, while up here if you used the n-bomb in front of a black OR white OR mexican OR purple-skinned stranger, you’re likely to get a beating. I’ll relate just one of my experiences. I was getting gas in Chatanooga (sp?), and there was a black person paying at the counter in front of me and 2 or 3 white people behind me in line. After the black person had paid and walked out the door, the clerk behind the counter said something to the effect of “fucking nigger probably just stole something so he could buy some crack.” I was absolutely floored when the people behind me in line actually LAUGHED and remarked back to the clerk that they should form up a posse and get a lynching on. All the black person did was fill up their gas tank and pay for some gas! I couldn’t imagine ANYONE in the north saying something like that to 3 or 4 complete strangers.
That’s the point I was trying to make by referring to Hutus, Serbians, etc. People often get more stupid ideas in their heads about their next-door neighbors than they do about people they’ve never lived around.
I was astonished when I moved to Washington State to find the anti-Indian racism out there. It was in the middle of a big court case regarding an old treaty that allowed members of certain tribes to hunt shellfish on all coastal properties, and the letters to the editor in the Olympian (a daily newspaper in the state’s capitol) were filled with the most ignorant, racist, anti-Indian shit you can imagine. Talking about Lazy Indians who need to quit the bottle and get real jobs, that kind of thing. I mean, I’d lived in the South for twenty years before moving out there, and I’d never encountered anti-Indian racism like that.
But you know what? There are a helluva lot more Indians, percentagewise, in coastal Washington than there are in the North Carolina piedmont.
Similarly, although I rarely encounter explicit anti-black racism here in North Carolina, I never* encountered it in Olympia. You know what? THere are a helluva lot more black people, percentagewise, in North Carolina than there are in Washington State.
IN NO WAY am I suggesting that blacks or American Indians are to blame for the racism that appears in either state. I’m simply saying that hateful people tend to get hateful about a convenient local group, not against a group they don’t ever interact with.
Vermonters who’ve never met a black person in their lives ought not be congratulating themselves on not being anti-black. If they’re hateful people, they surely find outlets for their hatefulness.
Daniel
Lived in the upstate all my life. And yes, it works both ways. From time to time they’ll be a group of 20 white people and 20 black people yelling at each other in front of city hall but they are usually mocked or just ignored.
Whah, Ah sah, Ah sah, Ah sah, Belvedere…
First of all, fellow citizens trapped south of the Mason-Dixon this time around, let’s take stock. We have CentCom in Tampa, that’s a good start. The space program is mostly centered on the other coast, another plus.
We have automotive factories all over the South which we can rapidly turn into tank factories.
ARE YOU WITH ME!!!
Crickets
I’m still unclear as to how anecdotal evidence is going to change anyone’s mind on this, since previous anecdotal evidence obviously hasn’t. But here goes.
The only person I can remember to use the word “nigger” to refer to an entire race is my father, who is now 83. He used to do it on a semi-regular basis, until I started complaining. He does not do it any more (at least, to my knowledge).
I hear the word “nigger” on a regular basis, though – black people use it to refer to each other. I seriously doubt this is restricted to the South.
My high school was almost evenly split between black/white students – somewhere in the neighborhood of 55/45 white/black. Our senior class president was black. Our Student Government Association president (different guy) was black. (In fact, he beat me in the election; I’m white.)
My wife and I live in a fairly affluent neighborhood. Our next-door neighbors are black. To my knowledge, they’re not treated any differently than any other family on our street.
And on preview, I see additional stereotypical stuff has been posted. I swear, there’s not much point of me hanging around this message board. I’m Southern, so obviously I’m ignernt and have nothing of value to contribute.
I am extremely disappointed in some of the posts to this thread.
I’ll jump in here with my experience. I’ll admit I grew up in ‘the old south’ and have heard plenty of racist things 99% directed at blacks. My guess is that was because we didn’t have any minorities other than blacks. Persons that I associate with aren’t racist and because of the way things are here are maybe hyper sensitive to racism issues.
So… I used to work for a large, progressive, Fortune 500 type company and at the ripe old age of 24, finally got to get on a plane for my first real-live business trip - “up north”… New Jersey. I go with a few co-workers and we get to the meeting and were discussing the fact that you can’t self-serve gas but that it must be filled by an attendant. “Why is that?” we ask “oh, because all the stupid Pakis kept blowing themselves up at the pumps. The towel heads just aren’t smart enough to stop smoking when they fill up”. The people I was with just stood open jawed in shock. The conversation degraded to immigrants in general and a bit later someone complained about her morning order from a fast food place. She proceeded to rant about “damn foreigners” who don’t even speak English working at drive-thrus. Everyone else in the room nodded in agreement (even the two black ladies). All of us southerners were very uncomfortable with this and quickly tried to change the subject.
A bit later I ate dinner with one of these people and said “man, I can’t believe how racist everyone up here is, lets not talk about stuff like that, it is really making us (the bunch from the south) uncomfortable”. He said “what, that stuff this morning, that’s not racist – that’s just the way it is… its all true! I’m not a racist – I like black people just fine.”
I found that attitude to be pretty common, no… prevalent is a better word – the perception that racism is something southern whites do against blacks and that everyone else, especially northerners (we freed the slaves remember) aren’t racist. I guess one of the reasons some southerners get so bent out of shape about this is we do care, we are working to make things better and we don’t like being labeled as racist, especially by a bunch of people who we perceive as worse racist than most admitted racist you see walking around here. The fact is if you say the n-word in the south you know you are being racist, no ifs, ands, or buts but a string of racial slurs from someone from Boston… “that’s not racist, that’s how it is, it’s all true! I’m not racist! I like blacks!”
Hopefully you can see how this burns us so.
I grew up and continue to live just south of the Mason-Dixon line and I have to say, some of these responses are hilarious. I can bear witness: the South is like merijerk described, to a certain extent. Are there real nice, normal people in the South? Sure. Are there a disproportionate number of jackass, rude rednecks who’d just as soon spit on a person rather than accept anyone who is different than them? You can bet your last dollar.
Sure, every region has its ups and downs. Point that out, but it’s laughable to deny that there isn’t a kernal of truth in what Joe says. It sounds very much like “I don’t agree with you so you’re just WRONG.” Which is part of what Joe was talking about.
As for my town, 1/2 of it is exactly like Merijerk described, so I just avoid that 1/2 the town.
Oh, and spare me the “southerners are polite” routine. The responses here prove that they aren’t, and I will testify again: Southerners are generally friendly (in a shallow sort of way) with most people, but we aren’t always polite. We are the kings (and Queens) of idle conversation, however, and that’s what makes us look so friendly.
I really disagree with you on this one. I’m definitely not agreeing with the OP, but after spending nearly a decade in South Carolina, my experience has been completely different than what you describe.
I don’t think that there’s necessarily less racism in other parts of the country, but it’s different. I think it’s more casual and out in the open in the South than in other places I’ve lived (Maryland, Utah, North Carolina…which I also don’t count as “South”).
Examples (just a couple, but I could give you many more):
- A woman my husband worked with belonged to a family that does not allow black people into their house. They have “friends” and people who work for them who are black, and they’ve invited them over for meals, but they are not allowed to venture inside the house and must eat on the porch. They would not describe themselves as racist because I think they do genuinely like the black people they know, but they believe they are inferior and not quite human.
- A woman I worked with told me I shouldn’t go to the pool at our local state park because black people swim in it.
Now, to be perfectly clear, I’m not saying I don’t think this sort of racism does not or could not occur in other parts of the country, but I do believe that it’s dishonest of Southerners to claim that it’s a completely baseless stereotype of the South.
And, as an atheist, I won’t even get started on the kind of religious descrimination I’ve faced here.
I meant to add in an asterisk in my above post on never encountering anti-black racism in Washington. That’s not quite true: I meant to say never, except when the Aryan Nation from neighboring Idaho papered our campus with racist flyers.
Sure, there’s bad racism here in North Carolina (and dammit, it is TOO the south!) But there’s also anti-racism. One of my good friends in high school was a Puerto Rican Jewish skinhead a member of a group called SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice, or SHARPs. You better believe that any NeoNazi skinhead would fear for his life if he came to our town.
My last real job before my current one, I was the only white person in this office for a lot of the time (soon after I started the only other white staffmember moved away). Although there was tension in the office, it’s because the boss was a clinically insane person with a toxic personality – and that’s just what the Board President said about her in public (he was drunk, I think). Racial tension didn’t even enter into it.
Yes, there’s bad racism down here. No, it’s not something you can generalize about.
Daniel
I prefer to judge a place by its weather, instead of the people.
And that’s why I like the South.
And therein lies the biggest part of the problem, IMO. First, I’ll grant you that the stereotyping of Southerners as ignorant and backwards in this country is pretty awful, so I understand any defensiveness. But part of the problem is that any time anyone has anything critical to say about the South, a lot of Southerners resort to this 'you’re stereotyping me as ignorant because I’m Southern." Sometimes this is a correct assessment of the situation, but too often it’s used just to avoid in depth discussion of some real problems down here. No discussion can take place because there is always a knee-jerk reaction to even the most benign questions.
As near as I can tell, and maybe I need to take a second look, Joe didn’t call anyone ignorant. IIRC, he took pains to point out that some of those people he talked about were well educated, professional people that he generally respected. He didn’t say what they had to contribute was null and void because they’d said some racist or intolerant things, he simply expressed consternation, and voiced the very real opinion that stuff like that reinforces Southern stereotypes.
I live in the south and I see and hear racist things everyday, intolerant things, brutish things. I see them come from people you would never suspect if you weren’t seeing it with your own eyes. A lot of people are unaware that they are even racist. They figure as long they have to work around them and see them at the pool, as long as they live right next door, that’s unracist.
Just my 2 cents.
Sauron, thanks very much for sharing your experience. Birmingham, AL, is that where you went to school, as well?
I see what you mean about some disappointing posts, but I also see some truths being told and an interesting dialogue beginning to develop. Hope you’ll stick around and enrich it.
Thanks, presidebt. Your first point above is what I was trying to get at.
As opposed to, say, claiming that all gay men are effeminate?
When will people realize that it is simply not possible to stereotype ANY group/region/ethnicity by taking some negative attributes and applying them to the amorphous whole?
Maybe I’m hypersensitive, then, because the way I took that part of the OP was “see, even the intellectual people down here do it. It’s not just the morons.”
Hell, look at the title of the thread. The OP doesn’t Pit “some Southerners,” or even “most Southerners.” No, the OP sees fit to Pit the entire South. And there are idiots agreeing with him! On the basis of a single instance, in some cases!
I see a tremendous lack of objectivity on this board when it comes to the South. In many very real instances, the Southern stereotype of “toothless cousin-fucking, cross-burning inbreeds” seems to be the only one that isn’t routinely shot down when it rears its ugly head.
Sorry if my post was “defensive”, as well. I would certainly say that too much casual racism exists in the South. I just was trying to say it’s not limited to the South and that with the higher percentage of blacks in Southern states, the “familiarity breeds contempt” concept that Left Hand of Dorkness more eloquently put forth seems to be part of it.
I grew up in the South, and while I never heard “n-word” usage all that often, there was a lot of racism around. That blacks/minorities were inferior was taken as a given in most circles, and these were upper-middle class folk. Christianity was taken as a given, and other religious beliefs, or things like homosexuality which are opposed in bigoted Christian doctrine, were disparaged or only narrowly tolerated. Deviance from conformity was considered “wrong” and shameful.
You’ll probably find such sentiments in great supply whereever you have people, targeted at whatever elements in society don’t conform to the norms of the xenophobic majority. But there does seem, based on my living elsewhere as well, a higher concentration of this xenophobia – laced with heavy doses of an anti-intellectualism, which probably accounts for much of the devout nonsense about religion that characterizes the South – in the South.
I’ll take the North over the South any day. I’m glad Grant kicked the Confederacy’s ass.
Prior to my present incarnation I lived in the South (including the DEEP South) for more than 3 times as many years as Merijeek.
Maybe I just hung out with and lived around far more decent people than he/she relates, but I never heard the kind of racial crap he/she alleges. Or saw any significant number of daid dogs exceeding the deceased canines one might find in any locale.
I’ve also lived in the Midwest for a good many years, and people have much better things to do than crack jokes about Southerners. Or people from any other region. Of course, I can’t speak specifically about Milwaukee. But I suspect Merijeek is stereotyping there as well.
One will find morons everywhere. In fact, I suspect that they gravitate to kindred spirits.
Oh, I gotta disagree. Seems like that’s exactly what’s happening here.
I am from Texas. Still live there, in fact. I have never participated in a lynching… never even seen one, in fact. They tend to be hard to come by. In fact, aside from those loonies a couple years back that dragged that guy to death, I haven’t even HEARD of any lynchings around here. This, despite the fact there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of black folks.
But Texas also contains a town named Vidor, a place famous for the fact that people whose skin is darker than a glow-in-the-dark plastic Jesus do not dare to live there. They’ll kill you. I’m not kidding. Neither are they.
And so – on the Internet – I routinely hear about how black people should stay out of Texas, because we’ll eat 'em for breakfast.
Perhaps I should ask the black guy who lives down the street from me how he feels about that…