I don’t think so, and I also think that in ways we are more progressive with race reconciliations. I’ve only lived in Mississippi and California for any length of time though (I’ve visited a handful of states, and even CanadiaLand).
We moved from D.C. to Alabama, and the difference was night and day. For starters, the blacks in Alabama were very deferential, which both my wife and I found very uncomfortable. Clearly, something is very fucked about race in Alabama. And I seriously doubt that there are many states where 40% of the population would vote to keep an anti-race mixing law on the books.
As for the mover, I didn’t say anything, partly because I was young and a big pussy. But what I was getting at (but stated poorly) was his assumption that I wouldn’t find anything *objectionable * about what he was saying. What kind of environment would someone have to live in to think that they can spout off to random strangers about niggers and no one will get offended or pissed off?
I’m from the South, kind of (Texas). But there are some things about the South I won’t defend it against, because I know they are true.
You’re either making this up, or you moved to Alabama in 1952. I’ve lived here for most of my 36 years, and I’ve NEVER seen black people act particularly deferential, unless they were very old, and acted that way because they grew up before the Civil Rights movement.
Know how black people act in Alabama? Like everybody else.
See my previous post. What kind of environment indeed?
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree because I don’t think that you’ve effectively argued that Lee deserves some level of respect. I’ve already acknowledged that he may have been (probably was) a decent military leader. Maybe we have different definitions of respect or the connotations there of.
As for MLK having orgies, you talk like that’s a bad thing. Seriously MLK’s sex life is of no business to anybody but him and his wife. I would never dream of saying that MLK was perfect, but he was deserving of respect and honor.
-----Nor would I dream of equating the respect that these two men deserved.
I keep hearing isolated stories of experiences like yours, and I do not doubt your veracity. However, above and beyond anecdotes, the place you apparently moved your dustless feet to has a long documented history of both overt and quiet racism — from colonial times, when slaves were sold to the South by Boston merchants to the frustration felt and expressed there by African-Americans in modern times, in “America’s third-whitest major metropolitan area”. The racism of your sports teams and fans is legendary.
Yours was the last major league baseball team to integrate.
In April 1945 the Red Sox held a private tryout at Fenway Park for Robinson himself. With only management in the stands, someone yelled “Get those niggers off the field,” and the door was shut. In 1949, the Red Sox laughed off the chance to sign Bonds’s godfather, the legendary Willie Mays, who would go on to hit more career home runs than all but one man before him and awe crowds with his speed and defense. As Juan Williams reports, “One of the team’s scouts decided that it wasn’t worth waiting through a stretch of rainy weather to scout the black player.” That decision killed the possibility that Mays and Ted Williams might have played in the same outfield.Cite.
Your basketball team was no better.
[Bill Russel’s] fierce pride (which the media called “a bad attitude”) mixed about as well with Boston fans as a John Ashcroft sing along at the Apollo Theater. The result was that the greatest player in Boston team sports history was the target of a constant campaign of racial harassment. When Russell tried to move from his home in the Boston suburb of Reading to a new home across town, neighbors filed a petition trying to block the move. When that failed, other neighbors banded together to try to purchase the home that Russell wanted to buy, said Tom Heinsohn, a close friend of Russell’s who played with him from 1956 to 1964. Once, vandals broke into Russell’s home and defecated on his bed. Heinsohn said two white sportswriters from Boston told him they wouldn’t vote Russell the league’s most valuable player because he was Black.In 2006, the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University commissioned a study.
According to the study, which was released last year by the Civil Rights Project, 80 percent of the African-Americans and half of Hispanics surveyed in October 2004 in Greater Boston said racial discrimination remained a serious problem that could cost members of minority groups jobs and promotions and made them feel unwelcome at stores, sporting events, and restaurants. The study included Bristol, Essex, Middlesex, Norfolk, Plymouth, Suffolk, and Worcester counties.Cite.
You’ve been famous for your violence against blacks, and your segregated government.
It’s been almost 30 years since buses of black students were pelted with rocks and tomatoes in South Boston. More than a decade has lapsed since Charles Stuart shot his wife in Mission Hill and sparked a veritable witch hunt for a black killer who never existed.
[snip]
Yet the city’s leadership remains predominantly white, with Irish and Italians filling political offices.
“If there’s one place you don’t see a lot of faces of color in Boston, it’s in politics,” said [Doug] Most [, senior editor of Boston Magazine].Meanwhile, in Alabama, black-owned businesses have flourished. Despite its small size, Alabama ranks 9th nationally in the number of businesses owned by African-Americans. (Cite.) 14% of blacks who work in the state are executives, managers, and administrators. In fact, 25% of the population is black. And compared to white-governed Massachusetts, Alabama has more black elected officials (706) than any state in the country. (Cite.)
So before you get all high and mighty about dusting off your feet and such, maybe you should check your soles where you are now.
In defense of Bamans (and just because I’m one doesn’t mean I always rise to their defense), I voted when that was on the ballot. I wish I could find the actual ballot and probably could with a bit more googling, but suffice it to say that it was one of the most confusingly worded things I’ve ever read. I’m a reasonably intelligent person with reasonably good reading comprehension skills and I had to read it several times to figure out if a Yes vote meant “Yes, I’m in favor of removing miscegenation from the books” or “Yeah, keep it on there”. As we saw in another election that same year, ballots can be quite confusing.
None taken. Glad to hear Boston’s a place where everyone lives in peace and harmony and there’s no bigotry or racial tension anymore.
As for the Confederate holidays, I admit they’re irksome (somewhat more than the perennial "I believe the children are our future/Representative Hog Islander is a member of Mt. Holy Tiger Tabernacle " quotes from election time and somewhat less than the “Heritage Not Hate” rhetoric every few years about the rebel flag on public buildings.
But, at least it’s fairly distributed: doesn’t matter if you’re black, white, Asian, native Alabamian or a descendant of U.S. Grant, you get the holiday off. The MLK Holiday is almost always referred to as the MLK Holiday- it’s only REL day to old-timers or the cantankerous and it just happened to be the same general timeframe. The others- well, it’s better than calling it Possum Innards Day or whatever, and it’s not like they’re celebrated with slave auctions and everybody only eating hard-tack and bacon grease anymore than most people spend Veterans Day and Memorial Day reflecting on the dead of the the two World Wars and Vietnam or agnostics (and most Christians) spend Good Friday (also a paid holiday) trying for stigmata. They spend it going to “In honor of the men who died on Okinawa iPod Nanos $120 limited quantity at Best Buy!” or “Christ would have died again if he could have seen this price on propane stainless steel grills at Lowe’s!” sales and celebrating the fact they’re not at work. Having never worked for the state I don’t get these holidays but I’d sure as hell take them- paid time off is always good, I don’t care if it’s Rosie O’Donnell’s Birthday. I think most of the descendants of slaves and Yankees and others probably feel the same way- “it’s a paid day off”.
My father was a state employee and we used to joke when he was off during the day and we couldn’t remember why “Is today [Stonewall Jackson’s horse] ‘Little Sorrel’s Birthday’ or the ‘Anniversary of Sacagawea’s First Period’” (or some similarly obscure ersatz holiday). At that time there was Jefferson Davis’s b’day (at least, unlike Lee, he did have a connection to Montgomery), Thomas Jefferson Day, Statehood Day (December 14), and others that were Alabama only- they’ve actually lost a few. (Legislators could always get re-elected if they gave state workers a new holiday.)
Ultimately, it’s a big meh to me. I have a decent understanding of southern history and why these holidays are still there. (Plus, how many black/northern/scalawag/progressive/couldn’t give a damn about the CSA employees do you honestly think would smile and thank you if you got rid of one of their holidays because it’s offensive?) I get a lot more pissed over stuff like Roy Moore and the stickers on biology textbooks reminding us that “evolution’s just a theory like whether the Mafia killed Kennedy or whether pop-rocks and Coke can kill” crap.
Shamelessly self referential side story: in a book I’ve written about my childhood, a very long multipart piece [earlier draft of first installment here] takes part on “the last Robert E. Lee” day. That day my father, a historian and freelance pontifficator on all subjects, kept me out of school (it wasn’t a school holiday) and- I will always remember- had conversations throughout the day about the changing of the holiday to MLK Day and how it reflected a “changing of the gods”; the most surreal [but true] being with a man who was a great-grandson of one of my father’s great-grandfather’s slaves. A reason I remember this bloviating was it actually showed a far deeper and more mystical side to the old man than I’d really noticed before, and it was clear that he seemed to think he wasn’t going to live much longer. He died the next year and on January 15, 1982 (following a funeral in which the former slave balcony of his church was filled largely with his black co-workers who arrived late at the packed assembly) his huge funeral caravan drove over snowy countryside on which almost every car driven by black people had its lights on, not for the funeral but because he was buried on the first celebration of Martin Luther King’s Birthday.
You have anecdotal evidence that your view of the South is true. I have anecdotal evidence to the contrary. The only person I’ve ever known in my 41 years on this earth who used the term “nigger” in anything approaching a casual way is my father, who is in his mid-80s, and he’s all but stopped doing that.
The largest city in the state, Birmingham, has had a black mayor for … gosh, at least the past 25 years, and probably longer than that – I’m just going off memory. According to the 2000 census, we have more than double the average black population of the U.S (26.3 percent to 12.8 percent). Almost 10 percent (9.3) of businesses in the state are black-owned; the national average is 5.2 percent. The Civil Rights Institute in downtown Birmingham is nationally renowned.
We’ve got a long way to go to be the state we want to be, but it irritates the fire out of me when people dismiss us as being eat up with the racism.
I mostly agree with you, but, if I’m not mistaken Alabama has the longest, most convoluted state constitution within the union. Alabama’s constitution is written such that if a county wants to raise its own taxes, basically the whole state has to vote on it. Usually newscasters when discussing the various amendments being proposed, will announce to their listeners, “if you live don’t live in XXXX county you don’t need to vote on this amendment”.
Often times there will be amendments on the ballot to provide the right of home rule for a particular city or county. Depending on how the right to home rule is written, the amendment might allow for a county commission to increase tax at whim without seeking approval from its constituency.
Because these amendments are often less than clear, often times people vote “no” to any amendment proposed. I’m not saying that such logic was applied to the anti-race mixing laws, but it could have been.
And don’t forget the Southern Poverty Law Center, in Montgomery.
Heritage is important. That’s why every April 9, I celebrate Confederate Surrender Day - it’s an important part of my heritage as an American citizen so don’t ya’ll get offended when I dress up in blue uniform and throw a Confederate flag in the garbage to symbolize the fact how we’re all one country now.
Not so fast there, sugah.
(I know wiki is no reference, and the difference is probably a toss-up)
Why would I be offended? Celebrate anything you want. Have a ball.
We wo’nt.
Great! Now just pay those employees with Confederate currency, and I’ll be all for it.
I agree completely about Boston. I just cherrypicked this quote because the governor of Massachusetts is an African-American.
Just a wee bit of irony, doesn’t detract from your larger point. I do wonder if Patrick has opened any doors in Boston for minority politicians.
With all due respect, Sauron. You live in a city that is 73.5% black, according to city-data.com. You also live in the largest city in Alabama. Don’t you think that could factor into your experience a bit? There are definitely pockets of enlightenment in Alabama. As there are definite pockets of extreme racism. If you are ever driving to Montgomery, take US 31 through Marbury and wind your way through rural Elmore county. That should enlighten you. Have you been up to Desoto State Park and the Little River Canyon National Preserve? If not you should. It’s beautiful. But, you don’t see many blacks enjoying those parks ----and I can understand why. Rural NE Alabama is Old South.
Your perfect 20/20 historical hindsight vision powers are amazing! I don’t think I’ve encountered such a level of hypocrisy, ignorance, and lack a of historical perspective in one individual before. It’s a perfect trifecta.
Hey, I think I just thought of a slogan for their license plates!
we parted each feeling
superior to the other
and is not that
feeling after all one
of the great
desiderata of social intercourse
–the merry flea, Don Marquis
I completely agree with the points made in this thread about racism in cities like Boston, and i’m not especially interested in weighing in on the racism (or otherwise) of Alabama.
But your paragraph is not exactly a very convincing argument.
First you point out that Birmingham has a black mayor. Well, as someone else has already noted, it’s a city whose population is almost three quarters black. The fact that the mayor is black doesn’t say very much about race relations, one way or another.
You then note that 26.3 percent of Alabama is black, which is over twice the national average. Again, what does that tell us? Baltimore is two-thirds black, but it doesn’t mean that racism is absent here. There’s no necessary connection between the percentage of blacks in any particular place, and the amount of racism.
Your final stat is even more problematic. Having already told us that Alabama has over twice the national average of blacks, as a percentage of population, you then note that the percentage of black-owned businesses in Alabama is 9.3%, compared to a national average of 5.2%
But if you take the percentage of black-owned businesses, and then account for the higher black population percentage, it turns out that a black person in Alabama is LESS likely to own a business than a black person elsewhere in the country. In other words, your statistic tells us precisely the opposite of what you suggest.
I’m not suggesting that any of these stats support the notion that Alabama is racist. I’m simply saying that they don’t, by themselves, really tell us anything at all about the level of racism in Alabama.