# What Exit, could you clarify something, please?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244
**Category:** The BBQ Pit
**Created:** [March 31, 2007, 10:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244 "2007-03-31T22:16:37Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@Contrapuntal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Contrapuntal)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/21 "2007-04-01T03:42:26Z")
“We’re rednecks, we’re rednecks, we don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground/ We’re rednecks, we’re rednecks, …”
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### Author:  [@Zoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoe)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 3:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/22 "2007-04-01T03:46:25Z")
**What Exit?** , I’m glad that you mentioned NYC and Boston.
New York City was considered the capital of slavery for a couple of centuries. That’s three times longer than Tennessee (my home state) even had slaves. This exibit was in NYC 2005-2006:
[Slavery in New York](http://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/about_exhibit.htm)
The website posed and answers the question why don’t more New Yorkers know about their own involvement in slavery?
> [@](#):
>
> …In the years leading up to the Civil War, the distinction between slave states and free states became fixed in the popular mind and in school texts. Reading backwards, many northerners came to believe that their communities had always been bastions of liberty. But slavery was an important feature of every one of the thirteen colonies.
The exhibt is sponsored by the New York HIstorical Society.
And I remember that Boston had a _horrible_ time integrating its schools. It set one of the worst examples in the country – but occured several years after Nashville schools had been integrated. When I began teaching in 1969, I taught in a school that was fifty percent white and fifty percent black. It wasn’t the first year of integration and there were no racial incidents that I am aware of. The court order for Boston was in 1974 and was a disaster.
Twenty-five years later, [url=[A Prayer for the Dead - The New York Times](http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CEFDD153FF930A35753C1A96F958260) an article about the experience appeared in the _New York Times_ and included this comment:
> [@](#):
>
> Whites have fled desegregation plans all over the country. But the riots that broke out in South Boston 25 years ago gave Bostonians who had a choice more than the customary incentive to leave. When buses full of black schoolchildren rolled up to South Boston High School, whites greeted them with cries of ‘‘niggers, go home’’ and rained down bricks and bottles on the buses.
Some of you just don’t know your history. If you think there is no racial discrimination in both North and South, you are foolish too.
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### Author:  [@Zoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoe)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 3:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/23 "2007-04-01T03:52:43Z")
> **[A Prayer for the Dead (Published 1999)](https://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/03/books/a-prayer-for-the-dead.html)**
>
> Brent Staples reviews book All Souls: A Family Story From Southie by Michael Patrick MacDonald; photo (M)
This link may be better. 🙂
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### Author:  [@Caridwen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Caridwen)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 4:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/24 "2007-04-01T04:01:47Z")
No one said there wasn’t racial discrimination in the North and South. Some people are disputing this claim-
> [@](#):
>
> In the interest of the board’s mission, I believe that it is an urban legend that racial discrimination is (or has ever been) worse in the South than in the North
Are you saying you think it was an urban legend too?
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### Author:  [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 5:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/25 "2007-04-01T05:33:19Z")
[QUOTE=lokij]
Of course there was more racism in the south. There were more opportunities for racism in the south, in 1910 90% of african-americans lived in the south. That changed a bit in the next few decades…
[/quote]
Yes, it changed due to a mass migration of blacks northward. It was a chance to for them to escape the lack of civil rights and horrendous racism endemic to the South. Being at the lowest rungs in the North beat being at the bottom of the barrel in the South.
Race relations have obviously improved markedly in the South (as elsewhere).
Historical revisionism is still a bit of a problem. :dubious:
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### Author:  [@lokij](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lokij)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 7:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/26 "2007-04-01T07:40:33Z")
[QUOTE=Jackmannii]
Yes, it changed due to a mass migration of blacks northward. It was a chance to for them to escape the lack of civil rights and horrendous racism endemic to the South. Being at the lowest rungs in the North beat being at the bottom of the barrel in the South.
Race relations have obviously improved markedly in the South (as elsewhere).
Historical revisionism is still a bit of a problem. :dubious:
[/QUOTE]
Wow, its awesome that you read that first part of my post. Tell me, did you apply that same outstanding reading comprehension to the second part… you know, the one where I correlated the rise of the second KKK in the NE and Midwest to that same great migration? It seems that Northerners had no problems with racism, that is untill they actually had to live side by side actual factual black PEOPLE, then… whoah… all bets were off. Oddly, now we are seeing a kind of reverse migration where black folk are leaving the NE and Midwest in droves and returning to the south. According to your logic, that must mean they’re tired of the hideous racism and are fleeing to the welcoming bosom of dixie, right?
BTW, cites for the reverse migration.. starting with the earliest
[NY Times 1974](http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/race/061874race-ra.html)
[USA Today 2005](http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnist/wickham/2005-06-06-wickham_x.htm)
[NPR 2006](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5261746)
Anyways, yes.. it’s obvious that millions of african-americans fled north and that endemic southern racism was a major cause. However, I’m willing to bet that the biggest single factor was economic and not purely racism.. things were pretty bad in the south for the first half of the 20th century and both blacks and whites went to more prosperous areas en mass. My point is that the migration is not in and of itself evidence that general racist attitudes in the north were any less pervasive or problematic. I think they were every bit as bad but due to the tiny minority of the population previous to 1920 that was african american in the north and midwest, those attitudes were alowed to lie dormant more or less untill the great migration, when as I pointed out there was a huge bloom of white supremacy in the rest of the nation. Again, my argument in brief is this…
South= Most black people = Most widespread documentable racism
North= Few black people= little widespread documentable racism
Then, after migration…
South- Still alot of black people= Just as much widespread documentable racism
North- Alot more black people than there were= Widespread documentable racism
This would mean that people living in the north and south were and are more alike than they want to admit, which I think is pretty likely.
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### Author:  [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 8:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/27 "2007-04-01T08:49:06Z")
[QUOTE=Richard Parker]
That isn’t what you were “just saying” in your OP. You said that there wasn’t reason to believe it was more prevalent in the South. There are, in fact, lots of objective reasons to believe this.
[/QUOTE]
I disagree with you, of course, but I’m willing to meet you halfway. Can we at least say that the statement made in the ATMB thread is false — that racism is confined now to small pockets of the South?
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### Author:  [@Richard\_Parker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Richard_Parker)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 2:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/28 "2007-04-01T14:22:42Z")
[QUOTE=Liberal]
I disagree with you, of course, but I’m willing to meet you halfway. Can we at least say that the statement made in the ATMB thread is false — that racism is confined now to small pockets of the South?
[/QUOTE]
There’s no meeting halfway in here! Madness? This is PIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT! [/King Leonidas]
_cough_ err…yes, of course I’d agree with that.
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### Author:  [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 2:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/29 "2007-04-01T14:39:50Z")
[QUOTE=Liberal]
I disagree with you, of course, but I’m willing to meet you halfway. Can we at least say that the statement made in the ATMB thread is false — that racism is confined now to small pockets of the South?
[/QUOTE]
I’ll agree to the last and I hope I can get you to agree that through the 1960s, racism was indeed worse in the South. That was the point of my long ramble above.
**Zoe** , things got a lot better in the south starting in the 1960s, but it was really much worse before that.
Your last line shows that you did not read what anyone in this thread is debating.
[QUOTE=Zoe]
Some of you just don’t know your history. If you think there is no racial discrimination in both North and South, you are foolish too.
[/QUOTE]
We are all well aware of how much racism there was and still is everywhere in this country. We are far better than we were and yet we still have a long way to go. The point of debate was that the South use to be more racist than the North. Not that the North was not racist.
\*\*Liberal \*\* is correct that racism is not restricted to the South. Never has been. I and I believe \*\*Richard Parker \*\* are objecting to another statement that Liberal made, that placed the amount of racism in the past as equal between the North and the South.
Jim
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### Author:  [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/30 "2007-04-01T14:42:18Z")
I appreciate the participation in this thread from everyone involved. Aside from those engaging the ATMB matter specifically, I especially appreciate the well reasoned and cited contributions of Lokij.
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### Author:  [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/31 "2007-04-01T14:51:18Z")
[QUOTE=What Exit?]
I’ll agree to the last and I hope I can get you to agree that through the 1960s, racism was indeed worse in the South. That was the point of my long ramble above.
[/QUOTE]
I’ll agree to it in the context of the logic provided by Lokij, and in the context of the experiences of Paton: namely, that discrimination was greater in the South mainly because there were more objects (blacks) against which to discriminate, and that discrimination in the North was more subtle— out of sight, out of mind — but definitely there and of equal consequence. (Read his experiences with land deeds.) What irks me about the stereotypes is that they paint Northerners as good hearted open minded people and Southerners as hateful and myopic as though there were something intrinsic in the genes or something blessed in the air that knows where the Maxon-Dixon line is.
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### Author:  [@wring](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wring)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 2:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/32 "2007-04-01T14:53:59Z")
[QUOTE=What Exit?]
\*\*Liberal \*\* is correct that racism is not restricted to the South. Never has been. I and I believe \*\*Richard Parker \*\* are objecting to another statement that Liberal made, that placed the amount of racism in the past as equal between the North and the South.
Jim
[/QUOTE]
and I doubt that one can successfully **quantify** racism in order to compare the levels. Northern style racism (In my view, anyhow), tends to be less overt, but just as pervasive. what are you going to do? one lynching =25 housing discriminations?or something like that. One racially charged graffitti \< one burning cross?
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### Author:  [@Richard\_Parker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Richard_Parker)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 2:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/33 "2007-04-01T14:59:10Z")
[QUOTE=lokij]
This would mean that people living in the north and south were and are more alike than they want to admit, which I think is pretty likely.
[/QUOTE]
Yet, in 1964, black men in Alabama were still being lynched. While black men in New York were not. In 1964, civil rights workers weren’t in danger of being murdered for trying to help black people in the North. There is a reason that Freedom Summer was aimed at Mississippi and not Michigan.
Now, if your argument is that racist political and cultural attitudes developed in the South more strongly than in the North because of the higher African-American population, I don’t think many would disagree. I think it is a little more complicated than that, but that’s certainly a key element. However, the argument that the racism in the North was just as bad as it was in the South once the North had enough targets for their hate is historically inaccurate.
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### Author:  [@Richard\_Parker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Richard_Parker)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/34 "2007-04-01T15:05:02Z")
[QUOTE=wring]
and I doubt that one can successfully **quantify** racism in order to compare the levels. Northern style racism (In my view, anyhow), tends to be less overt, but just as pervasive. what are you going to do? one lynching =25 housing discriminations?or something like that. One racially charged graffitti \< one burning cross?
[/QUOTE]
I think your questions are very revealing. This is indeed the comparison that ought to be made. Lynching vs. housing discrimination. Graffiti vs. cross-burning. Church bombing vs. white flight. We don’t need to quantify all of that to get a sense of what was worse, do we?
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### Author:  [@wring](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wring)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 3:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/35 "2007-04-01T15:12:30Z")
violence is worse, of course, **but** when one is trying to say the North or the South was ‘more racist’ , that’s not the same thing as saying this type of act is worse than that type of act.
Both places had pervasive racism. The North, I believe has struggled more w/theirs 'cause they could always point at lynchings in the South and do the same sort of thing you appear to be doing - the “we’re not as bad as that, so what we’re doing is ok”.
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### Author:  [@Richard\_Parker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Richard_Parker)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 3:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/36 "2007-04-01T15:18:48Z")
[QUOTE=wring]
violence is worse, of course, **but** when one is trying to say the North or the South was ‘more racist’ , that’s not the same thing as saying this type of act is worse than that type of act.
Both places had pervasive racism. The North, I believe has struggled more w/theirs 'cause they could always point at lynchings in the South and do the same sort of thing you appear to be doing - the “we’re not as bad as that, so what we’re doing is ok”.
[/QUOTE]
By “more racist,” I think we mean, more racists (as evidenced by, for example, hate groups and voting results). And harsher expressions of hate from those racists (as evidenced by violence instead of economic discrimination). Does that help?
Also, I’d appreciate if you’d refrain from disingenuous insults like the end of your post. That’s hardly what I’m saying, and if you’ve been reading my posts at all, you already know that.
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### Author:  [@wring](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wring)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 3:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/37 "2007-04-01T15:25:14Z")
??? you took that as a personal insult? Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. relooking at the phrasing, I see why you thought that way.
but, no, your clarification doesn’t help, it in fact make me think more strongly in my position. If you’re quantifying it as number of people w/racists positions, I believe that both are pretty much equal. North had fewer overt acts of violence, but I saw no reason to believe that we had fewer racists. We may have dressed differently, but that’s about it (don’t forget that Howell MI was a hotbed of Klan, and not that long ago, either). and hell, I still see overt acts locally -
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### Author:  [@lokij](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lokij)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 3:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/38 "2007-04-01T15:42:49Z")
[QUOTE=Richard Parker]
Yet, in 1964, black men in Alabama were still being lynched. While black men in New York were not. In 1964, civil rights workers weren’t in danger of being murdered for trying to help black people in the North. There is a reason that Freedom Summer was aimed at Mississippi and not Michigan.
Now, if your argument is that racist political and cultural attitudes developed in the South more strongly than in the North because of the higher African-American population, I don’t think many would disagree. I think it is a little more complicated than that, but that’s certainly a key element. However, the argument that the racism in the North was just as bad as it was in the South once the North had enough targets for their hate is historically inaccurate.
[/QUOTE]
Hmmm.. well, first off.. black men weren’t lynched in Alabama in 1964. In fact, like in New York, there were no lynchings at all in Alabama in 1964. There was one famous lynching in Mississippi in 1964 which tragically murdered one black man (and two white men). The history of racially motivated murder by lynching is a black stain on the history of the south, it’s also certainly not confined to the south and was by the late 30s becoming rare across the country. What isn’t so easy to document would be other instances of racially motivated murder… and I would think that NY would share it’s burden of sins in those cases. For instance, in 1943 there wasn’t a single lynching in Alabama but that year in Harlem, NYC there was a race riot that claimed the lives of 5 black men that remain to this day as ‘unidentified’. That same year 25 black men lost their lives in a riot in Detroit.
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### Author:  [@Richard\_Parker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Richard_Parker)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/39 "2007-04-01T17:26:12Z")
[QUOTE=wring]
??? you took that as a personal insult? Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. relooking at the phrasing, I see why you thought that way.
but, no, your clarification doesn’t help, it in fact make me think more strongly in my position. If you’re quantifying it as number of people w/racists positions, I believe that both are pretty much equal. North had fewer overt acts of violence, but I saw no reason to believe that we had fewer racists. We may have dressed differently, but that’s about it (don’t forget that Howell MI was a hotbed of Klan, and not that long ago, either). and hell, I still see overt acts locally -
[/QUOTE]
But it isn’t a matter of what you or I believe, but what the objective evidence suggests. All of the figures I’ve seen, from hate groups, to hate crimes, to voting for segregationist candidates, to supporting Jim Crow or black codes, points to there being more support for racist positions in the South. I am NOT saying that there was not or is not racism, even overt racism in the North. And I accept the premise that racism in the North is equally prevalent in subtle forms including economic discrimination. And while at times it has been violent, it has been less violent. My sole point is that the economic discrimination in the North was not as bad as the violent, state-sponsored discrimination of the South. I suppose you’re right that in the end that’s a judgment call, so I guess we can leave it there.
> [@lokij](#):
>
> Hmmm.. well, first off.. black men weren’t lynched in Alabama in 1964. In fact, like in New York, there were no lynchings at all in Alabama in 1964. There was one famous lynching in Mississippi in 1964 which tragically murdered one black man (and two white men). The history of racially motivated murder by lynching is a black stain on the history of the south, it’s also certainly not confined to the south and was by the late 30s becoming rare across the country. What isn’t so easy to document would be other instances of racially motivated murder… and I would think that NY would share it’s burden of sins in those cases. For instance, in 1943 there wasn’t a single lynching in Alabama but that year in Harlem, NYC there was a race riot that claimed the lives of 5 black men that remain to this day as ‘unidentified’. That same year 25 black men lost their lives in a riot in Detroit.
Mississippi, not Alabama, my mistake. Does that really change the point?
Your other point, that race riots are the North’s version of lynchings, is misguided. Race riots are a consequence of discrimination, not discrimination itself. In most cases they were a result of police doing things in the North that also regularly happened in the South.
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### Author:  [@lokij](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lokij)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2007, 5:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exit-could-you-clarify-something-please/398244/40 "2007-04-01T17:39:02Z")
[QUOTE=Richard Parker]
Mississippi, not Alabama, my mistake. Does that really change the point?
Your other point, that race riots are the North’s version of lynchings, is misguided. Race riots are a consequence of discrimination, not discrimination itself. In most cases they were a result of police doing things in the North that also regularly happened in the South.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t know, honestly… what was your point? You tried to say that blacks in Alabama were more likely to be lynched than NY in 1964 and I showed that was not true. That single lynching case is Mississippi was so famous precisely because it was so brutal, extraordinary and there was widespread revulsion. Why is comparing race riots to lynchings misguided? They resulted in violent death due to racism and were not punished to the full extent of the law due to institutional racism. The only difference that I can see is that that the race riots involved MORE whites in the crimes than the lynchings typically did and a rope was not used. My point is that when significant numbers of black citizens moved into Northern areas they didn’t find a color blind paradise, they found white people of much the same stripe as the white people they left behind in the south. The black population of Detroit, for example, doubled in the years of 1941-1943… result? Systemic racism, whites only facilities, job descrimination, housing shortages (triple the rent for a black family) and a government sanctioned public housing ghetto culminating in a bloody one sided riot that left 25 people dead. But hey.. at least they weren’t in the south. :rolleyes:
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