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[Arachno-capitalist]

You know, the further I go the more I dislike any value judgements about any group of people.

What about lawyer jokes? Those are pretty universally accepted.

[littlefallsmets]

It is not fair to say that the South is entirely racist as fuck.

It IS, I think, fair to say that there are large swaths of the South where it is common, accepted and encouraged by the dominant authorities and a large vocal majority of the population to be racist as fuck. Where either it is that the people who are racist as fuck have all the power to speak or that maybe a lot of the people are merely kinda racist and don't particularly fight the popular thrust of racist as fuck-ness.

Boston is certainly as virulently racist against African-American as any Georgia backwater hamlet but at least Boston has the decency to be publicly ashamed of it and try to downplay it and deny it.

Certain areas of exurbia at the edge of the Los Angeles metro area are as racist against Latinos as any burnt-out coal mining town in West Virginia but there's a certain level of accepting that if they don't hold back on it at least a little bit, they'd have no minorities to build all their houses and make all their food for about a third of what you could pay non-oppressed types.

There's making sure not to make a blanket statement against a people in general but there's also, like, not admitting to the truth on the ground. You get outside of the urban and educational centres in a lot of the South and the southern Midwest and... okay, sure, there's a significant minority of people who aren't racist and probably the majority of people are just casually racist, not assholes running around in hoods and shit...

But there's something to be said for the fact that in those areas, the forces in cultural charge are racist as fuck and there aren't nearly enough people standing up against it, whether because they're less-racist-but-still-racist fellow travelers in hate or outnumbered or whatever.

I think that when you say "Much of the rural South is racist as fuck" shouldn't have to be parsed out with four paragraphs about how there's many individual exceptions and, hey, if you're close enough to Chapel Hill or Austin, there's token resistance to it or so on or so forth. Sometimes you just say things in shorthand and it doesn't mean you're being a jerk, unless someone's trying to attack you by intentionally reading malice into your brevity as false ammo against you.

Much of the rural South IS racist as fuck and largely unashamed.

Also, yeah, I have been told by a lot of people in developing countries that... driving really is just a very different thing in places without the money for good roads and lights and signs and highway police and such. It's not that they're bad drivers, genetically or culturally, they just learned how to drive in a very different economic structures.

I'm sure I'd be the shitty driver in Mumbai, fuck*ng it up for everyone else. Hell, I've still never gotten behind the wheel of a car in Manhattan. Even when I lived in Brooklyn for a year, fuck no, man. Take the train or get a ride in the car from my Long Island raised girlfriend.

I'm a very good driver on Rust Belt open roads or Los Angeles slow gridlock but ancient tightly-packed Northeastern metropolis driving is just not something I'm trained for.

[pmcd9]

Austin sure has done a good job of image building.

[pmcd9]

Also, this thread is going down a bad road. Do we need to lock it?

[jay-ell]

I was wondering that myself. AW and Wombat, I'll leave it to you. But I will say this: I've lived in the midwest and I've lived in the south, and I've studied racism, bigotry, and hatred in this country from the turn of the previous century forward, and I'm with AW. Few people realize, for instance, that the largest and most active chapters of the KKK throughout the 1930s and 40s were the Ohio and Indiana chapters. But we've been fed the notion that the South is more culturally accepting of racism for so long that even some Southerners have started to believe it.

[wombat]

I don't know about driving, but there's a guy at the University of Maryland who actually went out and answered the question about why pedestrians in immigrant neighborhoods near the campus all seem to wander out into traffic like they want to commit suicide. He discovered that in the places they came from, the relationship between cars and pedestrians is totally reversed from the way it is here: rather than walkers being expected to watch out for cars and not walk out in front of them, it's expected that drivers look out for pedestrians and stop and not hit them.

Science. Or at least sociology.

[pmcd9]

I don't know about driving, but there's a guy at the University of Maryland who actually went out and answered the question about why pedestrians in immigrant neighborhoods near the campus all seem to wander out into traffic like they want to commit suicide. He discovered that in the places they came from, the relationship between cars and pedestrians is totally reversed from the way it is here: rather than walkers being expected to watch out for cars and not walk out in front of them, it's expected that drivers look out for pedestrians and stop and not hit them.

In other words the rest of the world has it completely backwards.

A friend of mine who grew up in Greece told me that they used to drive without lights at night. When approaching another car the driver would flash the lights on and off several times creating a strobe effect. He said it was only in the 70s that lights became required for night driving. I can't find anything on Google to confirm or deny this so feel free to take it with a grain of salt.

[wombat]

In other words the rest of the world has it completely backwards.

In fact I meant to add that he had discovered that we have it exactly backwards.

[Bobby Isosceles]

Also, this thread is going down a bad road. Do we need to lock it?

Nah, we just need some gates and a bit of gentrification to keep the undesirables out.

[littlefallsmets]

That's true, jay-elle, but... it's also parsing out what's "the South" in very particular way to use Ohio and Indiana in a very particular timeframe as examples of "not the South". Cities like Cleveland and Gary might technically be in the same states as Evansville or the slice of Appalachia to the southeast of Cincinatti but... culturally, economically, demographically, there's parts of those "Northern" states that fit "the South" much better.

And then, you know, to say "the 30s or the 40s"... before World War Two, virulent racism went unchallenged pretty much across the entire country because casual racism was the overall norm. How the North and the South dealt with the integrating forces of world war and the national war economy and then the Civil Rights Movement that grew out of that temporary empowerment were very very different things.

I understand the desire to "defend" the Southern culture as a relatively rare progressive within it but that one seems kinda cherrypicking-ish to me, to be honest.

How regions, industries, cultures and classes have reacted TO the empowerment of African Americans after World War Two on seems to be more important to the conversation than using the fact that, yes, everywhere used to be a lot more racist overall before that to argue against what we see in culture now.

To use a different but thematically related example, In-N-Out Burger is run by people just as religiously fanatical as the people who run Chik-Fil-A but there's no way they could've gotten away with it in the Pacific Southwest the way Chik-Fil-A has become a rallying cry for homophobia in the Southeast.

There's more nuance to it than black and white/good and bad but there's too much general evidence to it than to just discard it totally as well.

[theinevitable]

There are a few reasons people think the south is more racist.

I guess I can leave a few here.

Something about bodies hanging from trees and children having firehoses turned on them hangs around in the national psyche.

I absolutely run into horrible racists in St Louis, and know there are similar racial problems all over the country. But don't pretend it's completely unfair to think the south is racist. Clearly things have changed, and attitudes have shifted. But people aren't just unfairly pulling this out of their ass.

At the same time: Shut up LFM.

The Invention of Jaywalking is really interesting.

If we are going to do anything mod-wise, can we separate out the South is Racist/Isn't Racist stuff and lock that new thread, so that I can still post memes here?

[pmcd9]

Everybody shut up.

[wombat]

Paul is correct. We are done talking about racism. Don't make me split the thread because if I do I'm going to lock it anyway and then I'll also be pissed off at having had to do the work to split it.

Bring on the memes!

[wombat]

That jaywalking article is interesting. I wonder if the book also talks about other countries.

(Remember this thread is now JAYWALKING AND MEMES ONLY.)

[wombat]

ASH DON'T MAKE ME COME DOWN THERE.

That is the opposite of what I thought was true in California. The first time I visited my friend was very careful to warn me that in LA they give tickets for jaywalking, since it was a foreign custom that you would not expect a New Yorker to understand.