Quote:
Originally Posted by lmkcin
You commend me.
You condemn me.
What's funny is, two different responses to the same post.
I have never believed I was superior to anyone. I love the history of New England. The Puritans would would whip you for not going to Church, but a century later, their decedents were fighting the British and proclaming separation of church and state in the name of republicanism. How is this explained?
New England has always had this odd relationship with civil rights. But can't the same thing be said about GA? If you have elected gay politicans, great, but you still fly the confederate flag, see dichotomy.
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Lmkcin, I assume you're familiar with me. You must have seen enough of my posts on the MA forum to be aware that I'm from Boston. Frankly, I too have the reaction to some of your posts that others on here have called you on.
The post quoted here is interesting. You talk about a change in attitudes in New England, yet you seem to deny the possibility of a similar change in other regions. The one piece of evidence you present for assuming that the South, at least, has not been through a similar change is that the Confederate flag is still displayed in the South. And even you yourself, a couple of posts later, acknowledge that there is a reason other than racism for the Confederate flag to be displayed, which weakens the one piece of evidence you present in the post quoted here for assuming that the South has not changed as New England did between the 17th and 18th centuries. Interesting.
By the way, if you are going to bring in old history as evidence of a the prevalent attitudes in a region at present, then you might be interested in knowing that the first state to allow women the vote was Wyoming. Wyoming, which had already had women's suffrage as a territory, became the first state granting women the vote when it was admitted to the Union in 1890, thirty years before national women's suffrage
The Nineteenth Amendment. Wyoming also was the first state to elect a woman as governor, Nellie Tayloe Ross, in 1925
Nellie Tayloe Ross: Biography from Answers.com. Interesting for a state you cite as an example of a state where an infamous "hate crime" occurred.
Or did it? There is now evidence that the Matthew Shepard murder was not about Shepard's sexuality, but about drug money, and that his sexuality simply led people to assume that this was a "hate crime," something played up in the media, and by political types associated with the gay rights movement (as are always around taking advantage of any group's advocacy of civil rights, for their own purposes--think Sharpton and Jackson, for example) who used the incident for political mileage:
New Details Emerge in Matthew Shepard Murder - ABC News.
Now, if we are going to follow your example, and base our assumptions about an entire city, state, or region on some well known anecdotal examples, well, aside from Boston's infamous school integration wars of the '70's, there is, for example, the stabbing murder in 1990 of Mark Belmore, a white student at Northeastern University, who was killed by a group of young black men, some of whom testified at their trial that they had hit the streets that evening with the stated plan to go out and "get the first white person [they] saw" that night. Now, this crime went the opposite direction of the white-on-minority crimes people often associate with the term "hate crime," but it still shows something less than a nice pretty picture of love and racial understanding.
I could tell you the personal story of a few years in the late '80's, when I was going through a time when I was struggling some, taking any job I could get, when I worked as a supervisor for a security company with accounts around Boston. One account was at an upscale condo development on the waterfront where my company's employees worked in a booth in the parking lot. One of our employees assigned to that account was black, while the others were white. When our employees needed to use the bathroom, per explicit instruction of the condo development's management, the white guys were permitted to enter the building's main entrance and use the bathroom just off the lobby, while the black guy was expected to walk around the far end of the building, and enter a side door to use an employee bathroom back out of sight from the building's residents in an area where a lot of the building's machinery was located. Okay, no violence there, but . . .
You see, anyone can come up with individual incidents for any state or region or major city in the country.
On the other hand, Were Rabbit was right on in post #73. The ongoing assumption that Boston is an especially racist city, apparently based largely on a view passed from person to person over the years, tracing back to the bussing turmoil of three and a half decades ago, which in itself was a complicated situation that involved race but other factors as well, gets old. What can people really present to support this "Boston is a racist city" view, other than anecdotal evidence, or just that this is what they have always heard, so it must be true.
I would not necessarily have guessed that the top five states for most crimes of this sort would be the ones listed, but I'm not completely surprised. A number of Northeastern cities have many races and ethnicities living near each other, crossing paths frequently, and, due to the traditional immigrant experience of struggling in at least the first generation, there is also a long history of various racial and ethnic groups in old Northeastern cities forming insular communities where people have looked out for their own. This combination of many varied racial and ethnic groups living near each other, crossing paths frequently, and insular group identity is a formula for clashes between groups. This being the case, it's not so surprising if there has been tension between different groups. On the other hand, it speaks well of people that over time many groups with histories of having once been newly arrived, insular immigrant communities have learned to live with each other.
Hmmm, what else, since I find that I'm now covering some wide territory with this post? Well, one more point: The reason I've put quotation marks around the term "hate crimes" is that, apparently like some others who have posted here, I have a problem with the whole concept. You enter some very iffy territory when you presume to know what is going on in someone's mind. I also can't see how "hate crime" laws ultimately amount to anything other than punishing people as criminals for their thoughts. I, for one, do not believe that the United States of America, the self-proclaimed "land of the free," should be in the business of making it a crime to have certain thoughts, no matter how odious many of us might find those thoughts to be.