[lbo-talk] Minority Report (was Southern vs. Northern violence)

Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
Thu May 10 17:53:19 PDT 2007


On Thursday 10 May 2007 11:33, ravi wrote:


> Someone mentioned that the racism in the North is polite while it is
> open in the South.

I don't think that's quite the right distinction. Southern racism is the antagonism of intimate enemies. Northern racism is the antagonism of the mutually alien.

Southern blacks and whites eat the same food, laugh at the same kind of humor, do the same things in church, and talk in much the same way to their grandmothers. This is not the case with Harlem and Ozone Park.

(No doubt someone will step forward to tell me, with an air of sublime self-congratulation, that Ozone Park is nevertheless somehow less backward, or moronic, or whatever. Well, maybe. But I wouldn't want to live there.)


> Southerners (the non-
> redneck single white male with gun-rack pickup truck variety) pride
> themselves on their politeness, etc, but have said the most racist
> things in the sweetest of terms to me.

This reminds me of Henry Higgins' comment about the French: you can say anything you like in France, as long as you pronounce it right. Similarly, "politeness" has quite different meanings in the North and South.

There's a whole book that might be written about this subject, but one of the big differences is that politeness in the South is very much about how you say something; in the North it's more about what you do and don't say, even if you're thinking it -- maybe especially if you're thinking it.

As a long-transplanted Southerner, I still find myself bristling at Northerners' tone of voice, and even their body language, even if what they're saying would seem unexceptionable in a transcript. My white Northern friends find this response quite baffling, but interestingly, black folks are much more likely to get it.

The sweet-talking racist pickup-truck guys Ravi mentions are, I think, making an assumption that their brethren in Ozone Park would not make, and it goes something like this: We are in some way antagonists but nevertheless we understand each other. We speak the same language. That's why we can talk frankly -- but politely, of course, always politely.

The Ozone Park mentality is quite different. I don't understand it from the inside, being an alien and all, but I think it may be just the reverse. Politeness consists in pretending that nobody farted. You keep talking as if there were no elephant in the room. Would you like another spiced rum? Is that a pit bull?

More to the point, though, I think the Ozone Parkers don't make the same-language assumption. That's why politeness implies a kind of stuffy, artificial, contrived Esperanto, a language that simply has no words for the hard stuff -- because there's no way your actual hair-down human languages could ever be congruent.

Which is more backward, which more forward? I wouldn't know how to decide. A case could no doubt be made either way. I do rather suspect though that the outlook which posits a shared human basis for discourse might offer more to build upon.



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