I swear these fucking threads are to me like the Mafia to Michael Corleone. I keep saying I’m out but…
That is not true. Just the other day I was on a bus here in Montgomery and there was a little old black lady who could barely walk, and the white bus driver got up and let her take his arm as he led her all the way to the back of the bus.
There is no restaurant or bar in Montgomery, the city of Rosa Parks, that black people cannot dine in. Black people who live down here are also Southerners, incidentally, a distinction that many posters seem to forget when they seem to think of Southerners exclusively as White Protestants (two simple words that would exclude, among a few million others, Martin Luther King [and every other black person], Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Judah Benjamin [do people know that Reform Judaism was founded in the South, I wonder[, Stephen Colbert, Tony “Angels in America” Kushner [born in NYC but raised in Louisiana where his ancestors lived], Shelby Foote [half Jewish, half Catholic, and for that matter mostly Yankee in ancestry],Bobby Jindal).
Anecdotal, but true nonetheless: I’ve known many interracial couples, and while they encounter bigotry upon occasion those who’ve lived elsewhere are unanimous that it’s nothing compared to NYC, Chicago, and other “enlightened” areas of the country, and in fact it’s why some came back here.
My boss’s mother is white and in her 80s and drove black housekeepers during the Bus boycott- she was one of MANY whites who assisted in the Civil Rights (how often do you hear the name Virginia Durr outside Montgomery, a woman that Rosa Parks herself said was more the mother of the Civil Rights movement in Alabama than she was? Or her brother-in-law, Hugo Black, he who “as a young man put on white robes to scare black folks and as an old man put on black robes to scare white folks”?)
I’m a gay agnostic liberal. TRUST ME, I’m quite familiar with the ignorance and the racial tensions and the inequities and the sometimes oppressive conservatism and the daily DAILY SHOW fodder worthy politics and dumbass statements. But to say the South has made no progress or isn’t changing is not just insulting but grossly ignorant. There are gay bars in Southern cities where that wouldn’t have been thinkable even in my lifetime; there’s a sushi bar at the Univ. of Alabama student cafeteria, there’s a club there for transgender students, and most people weren’t alive the last time non-whites were forbidden to enroll at any institution. When the principal of a rural town school makes a racist comment in Alabama there’s far more outcry from white and black parents than there is agreement (and, I hate but have to say it since it’s a standard of bigots, but there is truth in it: if a white principal makes an indefensible racist statement about black students and a black principal makes an indefensibly racist statement about white students, guess which one is far more likely to make the national news? Another thing people forget is that, to quote Gary Coleman from AVENUE Q, “Bigotry has never been exclusively whiiiiiite…”).
The South is like a dysfunctional family but the emphasis is on the family more than the dysfunctional to those of us who grew up in it. We might call them a bunch of fucking lunatic hillbillies from time to time but we advise others to look to the planks in their own eyes. I’ve mentioned the term “Dixiephrenia” several times but it’s amazing how my bristles rise when I read threads such as these with posts from people who would never have the guts even if they had the inclination to make such sweeping statements about black men or Jews or even Muslims as they feel total impunity from making about white southerners. I come into these threads as a fan of Albert Fucking Brooks and I read a few threads and convert into Preston Fucking Brooks. (“You’ve libeled [my home] and my [family] suh… and I see you are pallid… let me introduce your pale ‘n’ mah cane…”).
