[lbo-talk] Wish I Was In Dixie (Re: The North's burden ofenlightening the South (was Re: The "NAFTA Superhighway" Urban Myth)

Robert Wrubel bobwrubel at yahoo.com
Tue Nov 20 08:03:38 PST 2007


--- Marta Russell <ap888 at lafn.org> wrote:


> I'm from the South. When I moved to LA some 30
> years ago I was
> astounded at what a segregated city it is. It still
> is.
>
> I would hear the most racist remarks from white
> people here who were
> afraid to walk on the same side of the street as a
> black person, well
> usually black males. I had never experienced that
> in my 26 years of
> living in the deep South. I think bigotry can be
> expanded to having
> geographical bias. Kind of thou know not of what of
> one speaks. I
> get sick of hearing about the same old southern
> stereotypes.
>
> Once in West Hollywood with a few white boys a
> writer friend of mine
> explained that his co-writer had a fear of black
> people and so we
> could not go into any establishment where there were
> blacks. He said
> the guy would actually start to sweat over it.
> Irrational bigotry.
> And this guy could be considered in a minority group
> by some. I
> nearly fell out laughing except that it was tragic.
>
> Marta

Yes, for all the talk in this thread of what a groovy place LA has become, it's still a magnet for the disconnected and marginal, for the undeniably wierd (in the negative sense), for the spacey. *Day of the Locust* is still an accurate depiction, only magnified a hundred times. *Get Shorty*, the movie, is relevant too. The LA Times has the worst ratio of information to ink of any major newspaper.

BobW
>
> On Nov 19, 2007, at 10:29 AM, Robert Wrubel wrote:
>
> >
> > --- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote
> (emendations
> > added):
> >
> > "(we)should consider whether (our) indiscriminate
> > attack on the south is not just a way of coming to
> > terms (or rather avoiding coming to terms)with the
> > racism of the north"
> >
> > It's called scapegoating -- projecting one's own
> bad
> > acts and thoughts on other people.
> >
> > BobW
> >>
> >>
> >> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >>>
> >>> And Southern black people aren't Southern?
> Unlike
> >>> Carl, who, in a metaphysically weird manner
> >> creates a
> >>> Southern culture that has no black contribution,
> >> the
> >>> blacks who lived down south longer than most
> >> whites
> >>> were just aliens "reacting" to white southern
> >> culture,
> >>
> >> Southern "white" culture would have been
> >> fundamentally 'focused' as it
> >> were by the "black problem." This perception
> seems
> >> to be the informing
> >> drive of the works of Faulkner. Some (white)
> writer,
> >> I forget who, told
> >> of his grandmother in her old age having
> nightmares
> >> that the blacks were
> >> coming to punish her for her racist misdeeds.
> >> (That's not phrased the
> >> way the writer phrased it, but the memory was dim
> >> and I had forgotten it
> >> completely until I typed the first two sentences
> of
> >> this paragraph.
> >>
> >> And in this sense "Southern White" culture is
> >> American White Culture,
> >> for that culture is unintelligible abstracted
> from
> >> the "peculiar
> >> institution," which has remained equally peculiar
> to
> >> the present in its
> >> post-emancipation forms.
> >>
> >> Carl should consider whether his indiscriminate
> >> attack on the south is
> >> not just a way of coming to terms (or rather
> >> avoiding coming to terms)
> >> with the racism of the north, of his family, and
> of
> >> his culture.
> >>
> >> Carrol
> >>
> >> ___________________________________
> >>
> >
>
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> >>
> >
> > ___________________________________
> >
>
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> >
>
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>
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