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

Joseph Catron jncatron at gmail.com
Thu May 10 20:00:21 PDT 2007


On 5/10/07, Michael Smith <mjs at smithbowen.net> wrote:


> 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.

Growing up, I always heard that Southern whites disliked their black neighbors as a group, but liked them as individuals, while Northern whites did the opposite. Nothing I've seen in either region has given me any cause to doubt it.


> 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.

You've got that right. Looking at this demographic mapping, it seems that an awful lot of white Northerners could go months at a time without ever seeing a black person.

http://www.antibiaslaw.com/regionalseg.pdf


> (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.)

Anyone who says that is more than welcome to go live there. I did, and don't plan to do so again.


> 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.

It's not that surprising. Most blacks in the North are also long-transplanted Southerners, often only a few generations removed from the South, whose families have lived in communities consisting almost entirely of others with similar backgrounds since their arrival. That's why I take a train to East New York or Harlem whenever I want food that reminds me at home.



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