Count me out: In reference to Trish’s earlier post, I am going to go out on a limb and get a lot more personal than we ordinarily do on this Web site. The reason I stay out of the fray for the most part is because I think the racism question is incredibly difficult to parse, and the question of whether the North or the South is more racist just skirts the issue.
Disclosure: I have in the past been misidentified as a racist because A) I was born in a Cracker Florida town where, instead of desegregating the city pool, the town fathers filled it in; B) my name is Buck; C) my aunt and uncle were members of the KKK in the town of my birth, and D) my father was one of the worst racists I have ever met. In reality, I have always strived to allow my fellow humans to make complete asses of themselves, regardless of race, creed of skin color.
Anyay, here’s how I see it:
During slavery, the industrial North benefited from the South’s peculiar institution by receiving the raw materials and foodstuffs grown on the sweat of slaves. In Reconstruction and the early part of the 20th century, the massive flight north of millions of blacks fed the North’s need for cheap industrial labor (to augment the poor immigrants arriving from Europe) and created huge black ghettos in most Northern cities.
In the contemporary South, in every town I have lived in, there have been the tracks — literal or implied — across which blacks did not relocate by enforcement of the white-ocracy. In every Southern town I have lived in there have been acts of overt racism of varying degrees, race-on-race violence and conspiracies to deny blacks the rights to vote, congregate or worship. I would suggest that intelligent readers could say the same thing about any mid-size town or big city they have lived in.
In seventh grade (1970), Florida finally complied with a court order, issued in 1963, to desegregate its school system. The bright lights of Lee County responded by closing the historically black high school and junior high, and busing all seventh graders from all over the entire county into those two schools, located across the tracks in the predominantly black section of town. It was a rough year — for everybody, regardless of color.
Every year of my high school we had violent race riots, some rumored to have been incited by the Black Panthers. I learned a lot during those riots — the effect of a bean bag gun wielded by a policeman, the unforgettable aroma of tear gas, the sensation of bare knuckles rapping on my noggin and that the safest place to be during a race riot was in the Agriculture Building among the rednecks.
Today, I live in Miami, one of the poorest large cities in the nation. Currently, in downtown Miami there are 18,000 luxury condominiums either under construction or permitted. A half-mile away from downtown are several of the poorest and blackest neighborhoods in Miami.
The population of Miami-Dade County is about 2.4 million. Whites (both Anglo and Hispanic) represent 76.4 percent of the population; blacks, 20.6 percent. Hispanics comprise 60.1 percent of the population; non-Hispanic whites, 19 percent. As you can see, as a white, non-Hispanic, I represent a minority in my community, a major turnabout from other places I have lived.
I reside in Coconut Grove in what, when I moved in eight years ago, was a predominantly black neighborhood. Since then, like the computer game Sim City, the old houses have been knocked down and replaced by hideous double townhouses filled with white, uninteresting and interchangeable Sims who inevitably drive sport utility vehicles. Many of the old-time black families have sold out or lost their houses due to skyrocketing property values and taxes.
Affordable housing is virtually unavailable here, and blacks are being forced to relocate from the Grove to the inner-city ghettos.
Meanwhile most people who work in the city of Miami don’t live here and don’t pay any taxes to support the city services they consume. Hence, the increadible poorness of the City of Light.
My point, I suppose, is that racism is a lot more complex than just saying that white people hate black people and vice versa, for the vice is versa, make no mistake. But down here, there’s plenty of hate to go around — the Cubans have made a cottage industry of it — but also plenty of exciting diversity. Indeed, because of this nexus of cultures and races we have, the question of whiteness or blackness gets blurred in skin tones that range from cream to latte to mocha to espresso and every shade in between. In Miami, while there clearly are problems directly attributable to racism, there also is an incredible appreciation of diversity and a celebration of different cultures, cuisines, music and literature.
But economic and societal forces — as well as history — remain the determining forces behind most racism, and with the gap between rich and poor growing daily, I doubt that is going to change. Deeper psychological sources of racism — the natural response to physical differences, the need to bond with one’s own kind, the need to unite against a common foe, the basic human need to subjugate others — might have something to do with it as well. Hell, I just don’t know.
So, fellow editors, please continue to leave me out of the debate on who’s more racist, as someone who’s only lived in the South, I feel I should recuse myself from passing judgment on the topic.
A bigot is a bigot is a bigot.
The word bigot is often defined as a “person who refuses to reason” on any subject.
Any form of “bigotry” must be “accepted” in the first person singular, and is therefore the SINGLE AND SOLE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONCERNED.
No amount of “faith-based spin” will alter these elemental “TRUTHS”, which can not be reduced to “truthiness” by S. Colbert or anyone else!