General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I'm from the south. [View all]freshwest
(53,661 posts)It's part of the EEOC regulations against discriminating for emigrants, but our country is so diverse, many states are like little countries. We need federal protection to give a bedrock of rights.
I'm from the South, but brought up in a different era than you, much more liberal than some rural and other areas now. I encountered and saw the various forms of bigotry based on other things, and had to live with it as things went the wrong way as Reagan got into office.
The germ of the current plague was only lying dormant for a short time from my mid to late twenties. I moved away and found that I was going to be reviled even as a liberal, progressive and socialist type person in an area that embraced such things, because of my place of origin, the South.
It was overt and hateful, they wanted me and my family to leave. They didn't believe in a national view, in fact I found some aspects to be more backward and provincial than where I'd grown up in the fifties and sixties, yet they felt their liberal bonafides were impeccable.
Then I learned the sordid racial history of some of the famed Left Coast was not as I thought it was, and even experienced my first hate message, by a phone caller who got the wrong number but took offense at my accent on my answering machine and felt entitled, thinking I was black, to denigrate me.
He left a venomous sounding message that shocked me in tone and words: 'You need to go back to Africa or learn to TALK WHITE.' I was so disturbed, living in 'liberal land' or so I thought, beyond the racism that I learned to be ashamed of growing up. A friend came over to listen. She proceeded to tell me that racism was alive and well and directed me where to learn more. Whenever whites want to complain of black anger, imagine that being one's experience and expectation in life. It's sick.
I have found some of my Southern neighbors to be much more liberal than those who were born in blue states. We need to get over this. I'm still going to post a thread as my final word on the Confederacy, just to let it all out, how wrong it was. It'll be cathartic for me.
I keep recalling a story of an American soldier in WW2, talking to a German POW. I don't know if it was true, but the ideas remained with me.
The German. seeing that the American holding him as a prisoner was white, and he was puzzled, wondering why America was fighting the Germans.
He asked the American, 'You are like us. Why are you here fighting us?' To which the American replied, 'To save you from the insane idea that you are better than anyone else.'
I believe in discussing ideas and philosophy of rights and good government, and being practical, not caught up into talk and no action. I'll make it clear it's not region bashing, but that we need to eliminate the true problem in our thinking.
Thanks, a well said OP.