Yep. Every single holiday of my childhood, we traveled. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized it was because none of my relatives would come to the neighborhood we lived in. It was too dangerous and scary and Black. (I have extended family throughout the South, all living in suburbs or small towns). I’d never argue that racism isn’t part of the South, just that those fighting against it are part of the South too.
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White churches vs. Black churches come to mind.
The fences are never more clear than on a Sunday morning in the South.
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This extends to funeral homes, too:
But the Black Church was not keeping out whites, it was acting as a place of refugee for the Black community. It’s white churches (and not all of them) that were segregated. This has started to change, though. Some mega churches that are getting popular are more diverse than the older mainline churches are.
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Mason-Dixie, you mean?
To be fair, back when I was still a believer, I wouldn’t have wanted to go to most White churches, even if I’d have been welcome - most services were dull as dishwater by comparison to Black churches.
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This is what I was trying to get at initially, before I found myself struggling valiantly to defend myself against scurrilous charges of knee-jerk anti-Southern bigotry.
I don’t mean to play the “But some of my best friends know Southerners!” card, but the longest relationship of my life was with a very smart Southern girl who didn’t find out until college that Black people can, indeed, swim. A fact that I very clearly remember explaining to her in the car that day, on the way up to see my grandparents on a rainy afternoon. (Don’t worry, she outgrew her upbringing quickly, and went on to become an historical archaeologist studying wealth distribution in early Southern culture.)
So yeah, I know that not everyone who has trouble enunciating the difference between ‘pen’ and ‘pin’ is of diminished capacity or is inherently malicious. I truly didn’t mean to tar anyone that didn’t need tarrin’.
Yeah, I’ve been to plenty of white protestant churches… hard pass (mostly). Black protestant services have them beat by a mile, with regards to inclusivity, feeling like it’s an actual worship of something greater than yourself, etc… 
But I guess for me, the most churchy-church is probably a catholic or episcopalian service?
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But again, all that is found in the rest of the country, too. The president was born and raised in NYC, so…
Plenty of people in other parts of the country live under such delusions about Black people.
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Sigh. Yes, I’ve been to South Boston. I lived in Boston for years. I did say many, not all. This constant implication that I haven’t acknowledged that racism is foundational to the United States and can be found everywhere is becoming tiresome. As is the refusal to acknowledge that the problem can take on different forms depending on what part of the country it manifests within. My experience is that the form that it widely takes in the parts of the South in which I lived half my life is open and brazen to a degree that I haven’t found in other parts of the country that I’ve lived, which does not exclude similarly virulent pockets existing elsewhere. Your mileage my vary.
I’ve never been under any illusion that all American racism has a Southern “source”. While I grew up in the multiculti grouphug that is Hawai‘i, I did so with a USMC stepfather who was such a literal Illinois Nazi that that line in the movie didn’t fully make sense when I was younger. Because for me, a white teenager in Kahalu‘u, that’s just where American Nazis came from, duh.
The irony is that once I’d broken with the church in general, I now find that Black services last WAY too damn long for my tastes.
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I’m just not sure how you can reconcile the two. On one hand, you’ve seen first hand Southfield racism, yet you can still lump all of the south together as racist?
I mean, use all the weasel words you want, those two things still don’t add up.
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Which was not my intention, and I apologize.
What would be a useful shorthand, then, to describe communities where the predominant culture appears to involve the waving of the Confederate flag? You seem to be saying that any assignment of a name by someone not of that subculture is intrinsically making an ‘other’ of that subculture and hence making it lesser. Nevertheless, it’s hard to discuss a phenomenon without having a word for it.
The people of that subculture are surely proud of it, and have arrogated the word, ‘Southern’ to themselves - to the exclusion of other Southerners such as yourself. That surely complicates the use of the term. And when I described downstate Illinois or the portions of Appalachia that lie north of the Mason-Dixon line, as Southern, I mostly meant that the visibly predominant subculture in those places comprises inhabitants who would happily embrace the term, and proudly fly the Stars and Bars. (Often alongside the Stars and Stripes - making me wonder which system they think they’re supporting!) I’ve lived in downstate Illinois and spent considerable time in Appalachian New York, just across the Pennsylvania line, and observed it for myself.
+1 on the tiresome part.
We live in a mobile enough society that the subcultures are by no means geographically homogeneous. There’s plenty of Confederate culture in the formerly Union states (there always was, but the mixing is more abundant than I remember), and plenty of pockets of anti-racist sentiment, but also of oh-so-polite crypto-racism, in the former Confederacy.
Can we at least agree that the different manifestations of institutional racism, whatever words we assign to them, might require different tactics to engage them?
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America? Western world? Wypypo?
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Not even on the South Shore of Long Island.
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I’m from the South Shore originally - from a community that was about 40% Black, and this surprises me not in the least - right down to the faux outrage.
I can recall that I knew people in high school whose parents forbade them to visit me, because I wasn’t on their side of the tracks and my neighbourhood was too scary and dangerous.
Not presuming to speak for them of course, but earlier they seemed to be struggling to make the same point I was. Which isn’t that every Southerner is a racist shitbag. Not by any means. And nor, of course, is every racist shitbag Southern. (Though they do tend to share a powerful affinity for certain iconography of the South.)
As I’ve watched people generally more intelligent and reasonable than myself talk across each other in this thread, there is one thing that has popped into my head a couple times. But it’s something I would never dare say, even here. But what the hell, what are Tuesdays for, right? As a cis white guy, I’ve had to learn to just sit back down whenever I find myself needing to say “But not all…”
So yes, racism and class inequality are rampant across the globe. Yet we can admit that America has some pretty big and structural problems on those fronts as well, right? And yes, rural anywhere tends to be more racist, homophobic, misogynistic, etc. and so forth. But how many of the racist shitbags outside of the South are rockin’ the Oregon state flag on their gun safe?
In fact, just before posting the above, I found this text on my clipboard, from an aforementioned instance where Restraint won out over Snark: “But take it from this cis white male: sucks to be the actual outlier, don’t it?”
I think this is definitely the case. In highly populated areas, people are constantly exposed to all sorts of other people, so any stereotypes (or lies) tend to get dispelled by experience. They’ve met and talked to those other people. In rural areas, people have little actual exposure to other cultures or races (other than what they see on TV), and only hear about them 2nd hand, usually by people making things up or telling “what they heard”. So myths abound.
The ones that are into beavers?
But seriously, the confederate flag isn’t a state flag, and with the retiring of Mississippi’s flag in June, no state has the confederate battle flag as part of it’s state flag anymore.
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But it is the flag of the entire region. And yes, I realize that that’s not a thing. And yet, am I wrong?
Hasn’t been for 155 years.
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