Circular Cruises/Racists and Glass Houses
From Eccentric Flower
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Racists and Glass Houses 19 May 1997 My particular set of influences sometimes makes it difficult for me to see why the South has trouble shaking this reputation for racism. Then I stop and think, and I remember why. I grew up in a one-parent family. My mother would have slapped me silly if I had insinuated black people were inferior. But my father, who grew up in Memphis, although a very intelligent person, sincerely believes that. It's one of the reasons I haven't seen him face-to-face in many years. - - - I worked for several companies in the South where the black people were kept in the stockroom or on the production line while the rest of us worked office jobs. I've also worked for places in the South where everybody really was working on the same level, but those were all low-paying, abusive service jobs (we were all on the same level because we were all treated like dirt - least common denominator theory). - - - I think it's gotten better. I don't think kids in the South today are automatically embedded with the wrong message by their parents and grandparents - but I came from a liberal-thinking household and I could be wrong. It's an easy trap to fall into. You deal with a couple of ignorant people in a row and you think why are they all so stupid? ... and you think maybe there really is a statistical link here ... but you've forgotten that the circumstances do not match yours; that they may not have been given the opportunity to go to college, that they may not have been encouraged in high school ... that they may not have been offered any prospects to aim for. - - - What I want to know is why the South takes all the burden, when I work in a very liberal-fronted Northern technology company - poster child for generous human policy - with many hundreds of employees ... and no black ones. It seems to me sometimes that the only differences between Northern racism and Southern racism are camouflage and reputation. If you keep insisting that "all southerners are racist," I do hope you'll understand when I suggest that "all northerners are hypocrites." And the battle will never end.
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