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[personal profile] jhetley
(News filters north slowly...)

As I noted in an obituary posted earlier this week, I'm old enough to remember segregation.  Hard-core deep-south segregation, with separate and decidedly-unequal facilities right down to drinking fountains, and flaming crosses high on the profile of Stone Mountain back when it was a privately-owned memorial to the Lost Cause.

We came to that from a contrast, Yankees transplanted from the mid-west due to a corporate transfer, where I had attended three years of integrated schools with a couple of middle-class black classmates that nobody really noticed as anything unusual, but that was the only time and place I ever saw them.  In Atlanta, our neighbors had black maids and nannies in an upscale white neighborhood, nobody thought anything odd in trusting your baby every day to somebody so poor that she took jars of salvaged cooking fat home to use in making lye soap. 

"Southerners don't care how close colored people get, as long as they don't get too high.  Northerners don't care how high colored people get, as long as they don't get too close."

And I remember another aspect of racism.  Soon after we moved to Atlanta, some KKK assholes bombed the largest synagogue in the city.  No deaths, but it's the thought that counts.  Jews got tossed into the same Other bin with blacks.

Atlanta has changed in the decades, now largely black, now ruled by blacks. 

But the more things change, the more they remain the same.  I had to shuttle back and forth on a regular basis, from 99% white Maine to riding MARTA where I was the only white face on the jammed transit car, while my mother was dying.  And one time while I was down there, some assholes firebombed a Vietnamese Catholic church.  I never saw how the case worked out, but early reports said the attackers were black...

Look into your own heart.

Date: 2007-08-08 01:25 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] pernishus.livejournal.com
I'd never heard your quote about high and close before, but it does seem to encapsulate my own experiences, South and North.

Date: 2007-08-08 02:21 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jhetley.livejournal.com
It's a bit strange, but some of that attitude lives on. Mom's last care-givers were a family of Louisiana black women, moved to the Big City. None of her white neighbors or members of her church thought anything odd in that, black women bathing her and hand-feeding her and changing her diapers, about as intimate as you can get without sex.

Yet one of the church members commented to me on how he had to hire some Guatemalan yard "boys" because _those people_ didn't like hard work. He still called them "niggers."

Date: 2007-08-08 01:43 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] trinker.livejournal.com
Fascinating. Thank you for sharing that.

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