Quote:
Originally Posted by CookieSkoon
History is forgotten when convenient, and also held as hard unchanging fact when equally convenient. It's all about narrative and bias.
Fact is, no one region is any better or worse. The trouble spots are just in different areas. No less than three times living in Louisiana was I approached by modern KKK recruiters. That was in the span of two years as well, 2008 and 2009.
On the flip side, in general all races were amicably mixed and mingled in the larger towns and cities down south, whereas in the north you will see a lot more division in many of the cities. IE: This is the part of town where the Chinese live, this is the black part of town, this is the Italian part of town, etc.
Also, screeching self-righteous ideologues are much more prevalent in the north and west coast. They may claim to be liberal, lefty, tolerant people; but they aren't. They are every bit the bigots that they claim to be in opposition to.
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A comment in partial support of and
possible partial dissent from this:
There's an old saying among black folk: "In the North, they don't care how big you get, as long as you don't get too close. In the South, they don't care how close you get, as long as you don't get too big."
There's much truth in this.
Yet I just returned from a weekend trip to Louisville, where a dear friend of mine recently moved after a journalistic career that took him from Indianapolis to suburban Central Jersey to Washington to North Jersey, then a short, disastrous marriage and residency in Memphis.
Louisville is a sort of homecoming for him, as he grew up in Somerset in the eastern part of the state.
But he pointed out to me the sharp racial divide in Louisville, where the west side is all black and the east side all white, and in Shelbyville, where his parents now live and the black folks live on the other side of the railroad tracks from the downtown. (Relevant to this discussion: he's half-Caucasian, half-Vietnamese; I'm African-American.)
Louisville's settlement pattern reminds me of my native Kansas City's, which also has a sharp racial divide and a main thoroughfare that serves as the demarcation line. He's familiar with KC too, and we discussed this for a bit.
Here's why this is a
possible dissent: This resembles the settlement patterns in Chicago and (once upon a time) Detroit as well, and one could make the argument that Louisville is not totally Southern. Kentucky and Missouri were both "border states" during the Civil War - there was strong support for both the Union and the Confederacy within their borders, but neither actually seceded. And Kansas City's Confederate roots were drowned under a flood of immigrants - in addition to blacks from the South, there were Mexicans and eastern and southern Europeans too - in the years following the completion of a railroad bridge across the Missouri River (the first) in 1869.
Louisville doesn't feel Northern, but neither does it feel Southern. It is really
sui generis.
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