Racism in the South can be rather odd. Often times white Southerners love a specific person(s) of color, but loathe/fear the group as a whole. I grew up in a very rural one stop light town in Alabama in the '70’s and my S.O. grew up at the same time in urban NNJ. While his family and friends aren’t overtly racist, they don’t know many, if any, people of color b/c their 'burb was 99% white and mainly Italian. I on the other hand grew up playing w/black kids and having black friends etc etc. I asked my S.O. once when we first met (15 yrs ago) if he’d ever been in a black person’s home or car during his youth and he stated No. I found that very odd b/c even though some of my family and friends were considered slightly racist by NJ standards, we always mingled w/black folks and personally knew many black folks we loved and admired. Because of my S.O.'s and in-law’s non-exposure, it seems as if they feared the individual person of color, but not the group.
I’m not sure if Charleston WV is considered the “South.” Technically, it’s below the Mason-Dixon line, but I’m not sure if people around here think they’re Southern or not. MHO is they identify with the South.
Anyway, I have seen and heard more racist comments and seen racist behavior here than when I visited relatives in the lower part of NC and in SC. There have been several news stories lately about white cops and black suspects and how they are treated, and I hear a lot of high school kids using the "N’ word and other nasty comments as if it’s an everyday thing for them [it probably is].
Just IMO and a slight threadjack too.
Other dopers in this thread, particularly Sampiro, beat me to the best points and made them better than I could have, probably. Racism in the South is a complicated, diverse thing. It’s easy to get depressed about it, but I actually think we are making really good progress, considering. There are places in the world where ethnic groups are still feuding and bitter about things that happened long before the U.S. even existed. I honestly don’t think that’s going to happen here.
Oh yes. Worked with many professional black people and the stories they tell…
My former boss was driving thru a small city south of Atlanta during daylight and goons on the street started yelling racist things at here. Her big crime was that she drove a nice Toyota. She got out of there fast. Very scary.
My previous former boss and the head of computing went to a computer store. They weren’t waited on. Others who came in later were. They finally left.
And on and on and on.
Note there is also “polite racism” such as denying that the southern states withdrew from the Union over slavery. (Just read their secession proclamations idjits.) Or that the use of the Confederate battle flag isn’t racist but honoring heritage. (Quick: describe the state flag at the time of the Civil War. You know, they one they actually fought under.)
I was born and raised in Indiana, and first moved to Tidewater Virginia, then just across the line into demographically the blackest and one of the ten poorest counties in North Carolina.
Indiana as I know it is far more racist than Virginia and North Carolina that I’ve experienced. Yeah, I occasionally hear N-word jokes now, but not to the extent I did in Indianapolis or South Bend. I do not know how much of what I see now is actual getting along versus political correctness, FWIW.
In Indiana, blacks and whites stayed to themselves, and it was common for the racial cliques to openly fight in the schools. I don’t hear of that happening here, although black-on-black crime is much more prevalent where I live in NC. I’m an EMT, so it’s my job to clean up those messes.
I tell people, with a little bit of pride, that it took my moving to one of the last holdouts of Jim Crow (VA) to get over the hangups that were ingrained in me growing up in Indiana.
That said, the most blatant racist thing I witnessed was in a Kroger store in McComb, Mississippi in the mid 90s. A young black girl was trying to place a deli order to an old white hag, who was ignoring the girl to the point that I was served ahead of her. I placed my order, and while the hag was working on it, I asked the girl what she wanted. I added them to my order, and once everything was there, I handed the girl her stuff in front of the old hag. I then told the hag that I was white, the girl was black, but her money was as green as mine, and if I was a Kroger stockholder, she’d be out of a job NOW. The look of indignation on the hag’s face was priceless.
I’m black, I grew up in Indiana, and I’d agree with this.
This reminds me of a saying I once heard. I can’t remember the source and I don’t how its veracity so don’t take this as me saying this is fact.
The saying was. “Both the south and the north have racism but it is of different types. In the south you hate the race but love the individual and in the north you love the race but hate the individual.”
So you’re not the only one with that impression Poonther.
Here’s the saying I’ve heard:
“In the south, they don’t care how close blacks are, as long as they don’t rise too high. In the north, they don’t care how high blacks rise, as long as they’re not too close.”
I’m not black but brown. In Tulsa… These all happened in the late 90s to 2000.
My then-boyfriend (white) and I had gone to a mall and had split up and agreed to meet back at a particular location at whatever time. He arrived before me and started chatting with this very sweet old lady. He thought she was super friendly and nice. Then I showed up and he said, “Here she is”. The old lady, without a word, got up and left with this incredible expression of disgust on her face. I know this sounds innocuous but it was so clear and shocking.
Same boyfriend…he was working a summer job in a very small town about 50 minutes away from Tulsa. This was a white collar job and he went to lunch with a co-worker who seemed pretty normal. As they were driving along a (black) child cross the street in front of them. The co-worked gunned his truck and said (extremely casually), “I wish I could run over those niggers.”
The James Byrd death had just occurred and a radio station in Tulsa had folks calling in about it. As expected, everyone who called in was expressing shock and anger about the death. A couple of folks were saying that it was a horrible death but not necessarily a hate crime. All standard stuff. Then a woman called in from Muskogee and she basically said, "Those people need to know their place. " She went on for quite a bit that those people are treated very well but they just don’t know their place and she doesn’t understand why they don’t get blamed for the actions that result from them not knowing their place and she gave some horrible anecdote about a black guy who had visited Muskogee and didn’t know their place and got beaten. And how people were horrible for judging the folks who beat the guy since they hadn’t done anything wrong. Her call was shocking. The only good thing is that every other call after hers condemned her and the DJ was really upset as well.
We went to a walmart (we were married at this point) and the cashier looked at my wedding ring and asked if we were married. I said yes and, very casually, the cashier mentioned that we were going to hell since the bible said inter-racial marriage was wrong and she quoted some verse or the other. I was too shocked to say anything. This particular wal mart was right next to Oral Roberts University and hired a lot of ORU students and they could be…different.
I’ve lived in upstate NY, Tulsa and various parts of the Bay Area. I’ve never experienced that level of institutional racism anywhere besides Tulsa. There were lots and lots of friendly folks in Tulsa but the institutional racism was shocking and I would never raise children exposed to that.
The thing that would probably surprise northerners so much is how deeply and casually ingrained the racism is - it’s not Klan rallies and lynchings, it’s the basic day-to-day casualness of it. For example, I went in a small drug store in southern Virginia looking for pomade for my hair, and when I asked if they had any, the lady at the counter - without a hint of malice or anger or spite or any other emotion - said, “what, you mean like nigger grease?” It’s like that, on a societal level.
I’ve lived in Ole Virginny since 1977, and these are my observations. YMMV.
I’d say that racism in the south is a two-way street full of ignorance.
We’ve got people that don’t like people different from themselves, be they black, white or whatever descriptive handle you wish to apply.
I’ve seen whites hate on blacks, and blacks hate on whites. Catholics who hate Jews and Jews who hate Muslims. Whatever works to make oneself feel better, I guess.
But can we stop with the assumption that all racism and bigotry is a Southern whites-only problem? From what I’ve read on SDMB, there’s too many Dopers that live in Northern cities that think this way and look down their noses at us ignorant Southern white trash yokels and yet fail to see the failings of their own communities. Sure, it was really bad back in the day, but racism/bigotry is an issue throughout the world, not just down heah.
Thanks for the quotes davidw and Caveat lector. I honestly don’t believe I’ve heard either one, but I have seen them in action.
You can’t think of the South as a monolithic region. Charlotte and Atlanta are very different from Catahoula Parish, Louisiana. I’ve spent my whole life in urban North Carolina, so I have very different experiences from someone from rural Mississippi. Hell, yes, there are crazy-ass white supremacists here, but in places like Durham and Raleigh, they are outnumbered by a middle class of black professionals. As others have said, racism tends to be less overt than you might think. I hear very few racist comments, but I also see very little social interaction among whites and blacks. I also want to point out there are Southerners of all races who are actively engaged in anti-racist activity.
This is a great point. I have several friends who do social service and advocacy work in the Latino community. As they describe it, there’s a lot of tension not just between Latinos and whites, but also between Latinos and African-Americans. And in other communities in North Carolina, you also have a large and growing group of immigrants from southeast Asia. It’s waaay more complicated than black v. white.
I really don’t think that anyone has suggested (at least not in this thread) that racism only occurs in the southern US.
It certainly happens in Canada where I’m from. But frankly, the descriptions in this thread are rather depressing , particularly since many posters have indicated that this is an improvement. I can’t imagine some of the things described in this thread happening here. Black women refused service in a restaurant because they’re black. ? Really? That’s…well I don’t know what that is. I’m totally dumbfounded, frankly.
My friends who found jobs in Atlanta do not have a high opinion of the black population of that city and felt the above link was Exhibit A.
Of course, I’m sure they encounter black people every day who behave in a respectful manner (and by respectful, I don’t mean saying “Yessuh” or “Yessum” and walking with their heads down, I simply mean not acting anti-socially). It’s just that normal, adult behavior doesn’t attract their ire.
Another (white) friend of mine in college was from the DC area and had gone to a high school where black kids (mostly poor) and white kids (mostly middle class) were very much separate social groups and there was significant tension between them.
One of her friends was “Chris”, a white boy who came out in his late teens. He went practically overnight from being a quiet, geeky type to FABulously flaming. He even took to wearing a feather boa to school. He was consequently subjected to insults and sometimes violence from other white guys, but according to my friend the black kids at her school LOVED this guy. I don’t know if he ever saw these kids outside school, but she said they’d call out to him in the halls: “Hey Chris! What’s going on, Chris? There’s my boy Chris!” etc. Black guys would throw their arm across his shoulder, and black girls would give him hugs.
My friend said she never really understood this, but I suspect it’s partially that the black kids thought Chris was funny and partially that they saw him as being put down by the same kinds of people who put them down.
From the other side, I’ve met a lot of black living here in tennessee, in Knoxville, and the odd thing is they seem to go ouot of their way to stay seperate. Not all of them, of course, but I found it very hard to meet-n-greet and get to know them. They just don’t respond very well to White Boy me wanting to be friendly. I’ve only really known two, who were a classmate in high shool and a roommate in college. We weren’t close, but there were “class” differences. Literally. I graduated high school two years ahead of the one and entered college two years after the other, so there was a bit of disconnect in our though processes. 
I’ve known others, though who just didn’t connect very easily. That’s not just blacks, but they proved to be unusually hard to make friends with. Ironically, I’ve sometimes seen the same problems with Chinese, particularly young Chinese women (who often attend as immigrants). I haven’t noticed anything with any other ethno-whatever group.
I grew up in that part of NC and moved to the eastern part of the state about ten years ago. Completely different worlds. “Out west” it’s more inclusive as long as you’re not A Mexican. “Out east” there’s a deep mistrust between white and black. I was talking to a (white) lady at the bus stop yesterday who was telling me about her insurance woes and then casually said “I think it’s because I’m a little white girl.” Then a bus pulled up and a bunch of black people got off and she quickly said, “But I didn’t say nothing.” It’s like that all the time.
There’s a feeling out here that white people don’t use public services, that’s for poor (poor = black) people. I ride the bus to and from work each day and I’m usually the only white person there. Black and white will talk to each other, work with each other, live near each other (my neighborhood is 50/50 black/white) but there’s a sense that you have to know your place. I’m not knowing mine by riding the city bus, but I don’t care. Riding the bus makes financial and logistical sense for me right now. Hell with what the good ol’ boy system says I should do.
I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know much about Canadian race relations. But it’s my impression that you don’t historically have a large population of black folks. I wonder if a closer analogy might be to look at the current and historical treatment of different Native groups in Canada. It seems like that’s the closest situation to black-white relations in the US South.
How bizarre. That video is chock-full of black people acting perfectly normally; it just happens to also contain one mentally disturbed woman, and one man she prods into a reaction a little over the line. Taking this as damning evidence of the nature of black people in general, rather than about one crazy person, is bizarre; have your friends not seen just as many videos of crazy people of other hues? Crazy people are all around.
Granted, your friends feel they have other information to go on in addition. But that video in itself is not very convincing of anything.