Quote:
Originally Posted by johnatl
^jaeidiaz, don't worry - you'll be just fine. I'm a white gay guy that has been here for 21 years, travel very frequently to lots of major cities and I honestly believe that we probably have some of the best race relations in the country here. My office is mixed white/black/latino, and we all get along like a big extended family.
You will meet everything here from one extreme to the other, but there is a comfort level between white/black here that most cities would kill for.
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John, I'm going to take a guess that you live and/or work in the Midtown or closeby areas. You will tend to find a lot of mixed working environments as well as mixed social environments in those inner city areas than you will in most other areas in the metro. I once worked for a company based near Monroe and Piedmont and it was a similar situation there - varied multicultural employees, most of whom lived nearby as well, and who interacted well at work as well as outside of the office after work socially as well. That was the only company I worked for since however, that had that type of working environment.
Since that time I have worked in places along Fulton Industrial, Chamblee, Vinings/Smyrna, and now West Cobb. The white and black employees in most of these places worked well enough together because they had to. It was required. During lunch you would go into the break room and all white employees would be sitting on one side, all black employees on the other - seemingly because *both* groups wanted it that way. Even the company I work for today, the black employees who work in the warehouse only associate with each other, and will not mingle wiht the white or hispanic employees. In past cases, it seemed to be more of a two way desire that neither/nor wanted to associate with the other but at the current job it's more that the black employees will shun the others when any new employee who is not black tries to "make contact".
Jaeidiaz
Moderator cut: use the Report Post function for moderation issues needs to be aware that just because Atlanta's past doesn't have as much racial violence as some other cities did, the race relations issues here are more covered up, but ARE still there. You'll have a white police office shoot a black criminal and the marches immediately begin... or white officers will try to cover up their blundering when shooting an elderly black woman. Remember the Rodney King riots when they happened here, too? How many whites went out and bought handguns immediately after? Answer - thousands - and members of the police and media were frankly freaked out that there were going to mass shootings of inner city black kids by suburbanites working intown for weeks.
Things in Atlanta are certainly BETTER than they were 25, 30, or 40 years ago. If anything simply because especially since the Olympics, we now have people from literally every corner of the globe moving here daily. The white AND black people are "thinning out" to make way for people from Asian countries, Latin America, the Island countries, Africa, and Europe. You see less tension between two sides when there are 15 other sides starting to enter the mix. It's great that you live in an area and work for a company that has such a good mixture of people and good relations amonst each other, but I think it's naive to tell someone generically that they'll "be just fine" - because there ARE still some areas, and some companies, where they may not be fine if they want a Kum-ba-yah type of atmosphere... it doesn't exist everywhere in the area (yet), though yes, there are pockets of stability here and there and people who find nice places to work just like that as well.
Just my opinion from 23 years of living intown, on the edge of town, and in the burbs.
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12-06-2007, 04:58 PM
Not Quite...
Everyone has prejudice which is alright, we are all human I think.
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