If you insist on going in high season to the most popular spots and renting a pricey seaside home, then yeah, you’ll pay through the nose and fight traffic all the way. Go at off-peak times and stay in more modest accommodations and you can enjoy uncrowded beaches and good food.
I guess Southerners really are super-polite and hospitable - at least, the professional Southerners are incredibly insistent that the rest of us acknowledge their superiority on that score. :dubious:
See? What makes it for me, is all the gol’darn racism.
I have had to deal with the Southern Superiority Complex my entire life.
Uncrowded because of SHARKS!!! I guess Southerners make good food indeed!
Please send me a copy of your petition; I’ll sign it in a heartbeat.
Rizzo was a petty fascist, his racism was incidental as he was just as happy to crack white heads as soon as black ones. He raided hippy coffee houses and railed and ranted against the ‘libruleigthward’ that opposed his overbearing police and the pursestrings they pulled (8th ward was quite wealthy - and predominantly white).
Rizzo never had people murdered and buried because he didn’t like their politics, but he would abuse police powers if he thought something funny was going on (like a coffee house serving coffee). Bad antics, but hardly the same as the sheriffs setting dogs and firehoses on peaceful protestors just trying to be treated like human beings.
Would you like to retry that comparison?
As another poster said, few wave Rizzo flags. There is a statue of the man downtown because he was loved by the Italian American community. Walking around City Hall you can occasionally see a guy with a ‘Rizzo was the BEST’ sign. The guy is black and sadly is probably mentally ill, but he wouldn’t be the only black man I’ve seen long for Rizzo’s overbearing ‘law and order’ administration.
Frank’s been dead for a while, but it was not long ago (unless you consider the 60’s – 80’s ancient history) that a great number of northerners (i.e. the majority of Philadelphia voters) most certainly did fly Rizzo Flags and campaign buttons and bumper stickers—often and proudly. And, I see online that Rizzo is, to this day, still greatly praised and revered by many people.
And, sorry, Mr. Miskatonic, I’m not willing to give Rizzo a pass for being a poor misunderstood bigot, nor the Philadelphia police force, nor the voting public.
Frank Rizzo was openly and blatantly anti-black, anti-gay and anti-anything else he didn’t approve of (e.g. reporters). He was a tough Philly cop, then police commissioner, then twice elected mayor of what was at that time THE THIRD LARGEST METROPOLITAN AREA in the United States of America (not some Podunk boondock). He was a racist and anti-gay. During one campaign he boasted, "I’m going to make Attila the Hun look like a faggot after this election’s over.” He and his police force used to raid gay bath houses and clubs regularly and blackjack occupants unconscious. Blacks got the same treatment, or worse. They did this to the Black Panthers just for fun.
Rizzo and his police department ran Philadelphia for more than a decade. He had the Philly cops in his pocket even after he left public office. I recall more than one front page Philadelphia Daily News photo of Philly cops stomping on black people’s heads in their black leather jackboots.
Rizzo used to brag that his police department could successfully invade Cuba—and I believe he was right about that. I don’t think there’s a police force in the world tougher than Philly cops. I used to live at 48th and Osage Avenue, West Philadelphia during the Rizzo years. People loved him. In his five-year tenure as police commissioner, Philadelphia had the lowest crime rate of the nation’s 10 largest cities.
Rizzo was good and evil. He was actually quite good in promoting black cops; he just hated black street people, gays, etc. But, remember, this isn’t just a case of one racist thug gone commando. It’s a case of a racist thug gone commando embraced by an entire city police force and the majority of voters in the third largest metropolitan area of the United States…and they voted him into the highest city office, twice. Ironically, he garnered the black vote, too. Go figure.
In 1985, after Rizzo was out of office, and I had moved away (4 years in Cleveland, 3 in Miami, then north to the Deep South), Philadelphia, the 4th or 5th largest city in the United States in ‘85, bombed a rowhouse at 62nd and Osage Avenue, full of black radicals (MOVE). Ironically, the mayor at that time was Wilson Goode, the first black mayor of Philadelphia: he ok’ed the initiative to move against MOVE, but I don’t believe he was aware of the operation specifics…like dropping a bomb from a helicopter onto an inner city rowhouse.
The cops wouldn’t let the fire department put out the conflagration until the whole city block burned to the ground. 11 people perished, including 5 children. MOVE were no choir boys (Nine MOVE members were each sentenced to a maximum of 100 years in prison for third degree murder of a Philly cop under Rizzo’s tenure in 1978. One shot fired; one bullet in the officer; 9 people sentenced to life…nine people shot the same 1 bullet?)…but bombing and leveling a city block and killing 5 black kids? That’s racism on an industrial scale. A lone racially motivated idiot mass murderer is tragic, but deadly institutional racism is horrific. The mass murderer will be put away for life. The Philly police department had its wrist slapped.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Philly (I made Philly cheese-steaks just yesterday), I just hate the institutionalized racism I witnessed there. Lots of other cities and towns, north and south, east and west have racial problems; too, I just don’t have enough firsthand experience with them to comment with authority.
Yes, the confederate flag is a symbol of slavery and should be banned. But, maybe you are “waving” your own symbol of slavery every time you put a box of Aunt Jemima pancake mix or Uncle Ben’s Rice into your grocery cart. The mascots of those brands are clearly representations of antebellum house slaves. Here are some early versions of Aunt Jemima. Flattering, no? Aunt Jemima Mills was bought by the Quaker Oats company in 1926. Quaker Oats is headquartered in Chicago (for you foreigners, Chicago is way up north, pretty close to Canada…those hosers).
I’m not trying to minimalize the degree of racism that still persists in this country, in fact I think there may be more racism in total than what many of you perceive. It’s just that it’s not all concentrated in the South. In my experience, which is pretty extensive (almost 30 years in the North and ~30 years in the South), racism and ethnic and gay bigotry are quite evenly split between the 2 locals. I’ve never lived on the west coast, but incidences like the Watts riots make me think the West has plenty of blood on its hands, too. Also, racism is a two-way street, but the more powerful side typically gets the upper hand.
I don’t deny that racism persists in the south, but like the rest of the country the amount of racism has declined over the years. Slavery was abolished in the 19th century and free whites and blacks have been living together in the south for many generations and mostly in harmony. If a high degree of racial tension still existed, you’d be reading about racial atrocities in all southern towns and cities on a regular basis, but you don’t. You hear about them in scattered areas, once in a while—just like any anywhere else in this country.
The average southerner does not encounter racism on a regular basis. It has been a very rare thing for me to witness since moving south. I have visited a great many small rural Deep South towns, most of which have a pretty even population split between black and white. I’ve extensively visited places within those towns where you would expect to see the most bigotry: senior citizen centers—old rednecks and old rural blacks eating lunch together in one big room. Not one time did I see all the whites on one side of the room and all the blacks on the other side. I almost always saw a near perfect integrated group of people all getting along with each other, eating their fried chicken, greens, fried okra, cat-head biscuits and shootin’ the shit with eachother.
One data point: shortly after moving north to the South I had a patient who could have been the dictionary photo model next to the word, “bubba”: beer belly stretching his tea shirt to the limit, big gun biceps, crew cut, perpetually pregnant wife, a drawl so thick it didn’t sound like English, can of tobacco chew in his shirt pocket. He was very vocal about his feelings toward Yankees, “you’re alright, doc, but them other Yanks are big-headed loudmouths”…and his wife (and probably the fetus) would nod in agreement. He never talked about blacks or any other group of people, but I was convinced someone like him had to be racist. I kept waiting for him to drop the N-word, but it was never launched. Hmm, he’ll probably launch it on his next appointment.
I was backing my boat into a local boat ramp one day and “Bubba” pulls up behind me in his pickup truck and trailered bass boat. I see he’s got a confederate flag decal on his cab’s back window. He gets out of his truck to talk with me, and then his passenger gets out and joins us. Bubba said, “this is my friend Tyrone, we always slay the fish here.” Tyrone was black, and interestingly had a confederate flag decal on his tackle box. My point: don’t judge a book by its cover, and don’t assume everyone knows the entire history of the confederate flag. Even if they have a vague notion of its association with slavery, it’s usually another association they embrace it for. Lots of people just see it simply as a southern fashion statement or an anti-Yankee statement.
Inter-racial and inter-ethnic dating and marriage are not at all uncommon in the South. That’s something that I do see every day. I have experience in this regard, too. I didn’t get married until I was 40, so I did a lot of dating down here. I’ve dated white, black, Spanish, Asian, Christian, Jewish, atheist, fat, skinny, short and tall women and I never hesitated to hold any of their hands in public. I was never hassled, not once. Non-southerners would think, here in the Deep South, surely someone, sometime would roll down their pickup truck window while speeding past and hurl a racial slur or two at a white and black (or brown or yellow) couple holding hands, but nope, it never happen to me. Was I just lucky, or is there less racism in the South than you are led to believe?
Note: I ended up marrying a white woman, and she ended up being a sociopath who cleaned me out, so I won’t make that mistake again. I may have sworn against sociopathic white women, but not all women. Sorry gay Dopers I haven’t switched to your team, yet—this body remains off limits to you, at least for now. 
You can believe racism is rampant in the South all you want, but it’s a myth. It’s present, but it’s not rampant. Again, before citing examples to the contrary, I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, I do see local news accounts of racial and ethnic flare-ups. I’m just saying it is uncommon enough so that the average person does not encounter it very much, if at all in their daily lives. I’m also saying, in my experience, the amount of racism and bigotry continues to decline in America and is pretty evenly spread between regions. But, I agree, ban the confederate flag—I never watched the Dukes of Hazard, so it won’t affect me.
TL,DR
Well said Tibby (your user name forced me to pick a side and I went with pro).
ADHD?
SSDD :d
ETA: That was supposed to be a smiley - wonder what went wrong…
I never gave him a pass, I will say that compared to the Southern sheriffs of the same era he never reached that level of souther bigots employed ‘keeping races in their place’. He never turned firehoses on protestors (although doubtless he wished he could), he never set dogs on peaceful protestors (MOVE was not peaceful, sorry), he never arranged murders of people he considered ‘uppity’ or executed people coming to Philly because they might stir up minorities. What happened to the Black Panthers was horrible, but wasn’t done in a vacuum. A Philadelphia cop had been killed and the Panthers had declared war on cops. Compare that bit of shitty but ultimately non-lethal action to this listand realize that the list is by no means complete.
Don’t lecture me about Rizzo. I fucking grew up in Philly under Rizzo and was terrified of cops because of their antics. But at the same time I had seen enough new reports and heard enough from my fellow students to know that as bad as Rizzo was the South was infinitely worse.
Rizzo was a side effect of the decay of cities during rise of the suburbs. Crime rose, and people voted for the simple answer of getting tough on crime. It didn’t work, the wrong people were often targeted and it took decades for the Philadelphia police to regain their reputation.
The sad fact is that Rizzo wasn’t initially elected. He was made de facto Mayor when Tate retired. One thing that happens with Philly Mayor is that it is hard to get them out no once they are in - witness John Street. Lackluster campaigns by other democrats and the fact that memories of the old Republican machine that ran the city just a couple of decades previous were still to fresh for the GOP to make any kind of challenge.
When it was patently obvious that Rizzo as mayor wasn’t going to be the solution the city voted down his attempt to change the charter to allow him more terms in a landslide. But by then it was too late.
As for giving a Mayor a pass, why do you give Mayor Goode so much of a pass in the 1985 MOVE confrontation? He wasn’t a Mayor in a bubble, he had to know the options in play, and yet still he faced no consequences for bombing his own city.
Dafuq? This is your version of the history of race relations in the South? Really? Okay, you can be disregarded.
i don’t doubt for a minute that the south is not chock full of hateful racists at every turn. I didn’t realise that’s what our focus had shifted to.
I thought we were discussing why outsiders foolishly mistake the region to be a bit backward and a tad overly racist. And the comments were mostly along the lines of its hard to look modern and not racist with the flags flying, statues to glorious dead slavers and streets and schools celebrating those who fought for the right to enslave.
As long as these potents symbols remain, I suspect you’ll appear both a bit backward and a tad racist to others. It’s a PR conundrum, to be sure.
“Disregarded” is putting it pretty fucking lightly.
Here’s the condensed version: Bigotry exists around the globe in pretty much equal proportions. Unless you believe there is a significant genetic difference between different types of people (which would make you a stupid person), then you are talking out of your ass.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with people talking out of their ass. But, I do request that I be allowed to video it in order to post on YouTube.
You got a cite for this?
You’re deeply ignorant about this subject. You need to read a book or two about the period from 1863-1963. This is normally not a big sin, but when you lecture others about their ignorance while being even more ignorant it makes you an enormous ass.
Meanwhile one of my black friends from rural Louisiana who trained me at my first job just posted on Facebook that he got his one birthday wish from his wife - the full Dukes of Hazzard series on DVD. He was worried that he wouldn’t get it because the prices have skyrocketed to over $600 because of protests from white liberals but she bought it early as a surprise. Social dynamics are not nearly as simple as many of our wannabee caretakers assume.
You are a fool; someone I refuse to suffer.
