Relocating to Richmond from CT - HELP!

[richmondpics]

Originally Posted by brocco

but neighborhoods downtown are divided almost exclusively by race. there are a few minorities within the "white" areas but i don't think i've ever seen a white person while driving through a "black" area. the suburbs are a totally different world of course. i grew up in one of them (about 20 minutes from downtown) and never experienced the racial tension that i do downtown. like you mentioned about CT, there were a few minorities here and there but they didn't have any significant lifestyle differences compared to the white families and no one ever said anything about race. the other day on broad street this lady got some serious road rage toward me. i couldnt figure out wtf was going on until she rolled down her window and yelled at me for "not letting the black people cross the street" and being a "white expletive expletive". i honestly did not see anyone trying to cross the street nor was i in an area where pedestrians would have had the right away to do so, but regardless the race thing shouldn't matter. if i was in a hurry and being a jerk, surely i wouldnt have let a white person cross either? what if i was black myself? and on the other side of the equation, the road-raging woman surely must've experienced quite a bit of racism in her life to react like that toward me. ugh i've had a few incidents like that downtown and its just nothing like what i experienced growing up. perhaps its just the concentration of people that makes it seem like that.

There are crazy people everywhere, not just downtown. I grew up in the suburbs, and while there wasn't much blatant racism, there was PLENTY of prejudice going around towards anyone that wasn't white... much more so than I've experienced living in the City.

I live on Northside now and drive through predominately black areas all the time. I don't drive through the housing projects, but who would volunteer to do that?

[KatrinkaButtlin]

I'm happy to hear that it sounds like Richmond is very similar to CT in the prejudice respect. Not happy that it's there, but happy that it seems about average and that I can handle it.