Re: My point is that to capture a national view on race in America is nearly impossible.....if for no other reason...
...that rightwing conservatives and reactionaries have always sought to dismiss any attempt at compiling the flaws of the US social fabric. It's a classical, if captious, trick of rightwing ideologues to blur the issue of racism by splitting it into individual, meaningless, atomized behaviors --as I explained in the last paragraph of the following post:
Message 21676182
Straight from the horse's mouth:
Speak Now Against the Day: The Southernization of the United States
What horse? Who the hell is Vernon Jordan and what does he know? This article was written in the 1990s and its already dated. For an example, blacks started returning to the South in the mid 1990s and now the black migration is south, not north. In facts, blacks also are leaving California for the South.
Southerners and northerners have always had a rather different perspective on race. Many whites in the South think like Harris; that they are all one big, happy family. And that holds true until you talk to southern blacks and then you get a very different version. Northerners are torn between their liberalism and their fear of blacks and their own biases. And that's because in the North, blacks are more urban and more confrontational than their cousins in the South. And even that's not entirely true.
I have told you that race is a complicated issue in this country as it is in the world. It differs from one person to the next. You would be wise to give it up here. For the first time in its history, Europe is going to have to deal with race right up front just like we have for the past 150 years. Then you will know what we are saying to you. Until then, you are only showing your ignorance. Its one of those concepts where you must be 'an insider' to understand.........just as we could never truly fathom the relationship between the Flemish and Walloons, and the concept of two legal and three official languages in one country, or the nature of the relationship between the Romanish and all Europeans, or the French obsession with their culture to the point where they must review their language every 5 years to make sure its keeping its purity. Their are certain charactisterics of every nationality that are only fully understood by the members of that nationality. Race is one of them in this country. |
