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Post by km on Jul 27, 2010 14:01:10 GMT -5
My father's family all lives in rural south central Ohio and their area is extremely racist as are most of them. I think living in an area where they are surrounded in their daily lives by people of the same race, ethnicities, similar religious backgrounds, etc...is the root of the problem. Here, on the other hand, it's okay for people to be anything but Hispanic. That's the racism I fought on a daily basis in my classroom for the last ten years. And fighting it was part of my undoing in that job. Was this the job at the Christian school?
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Post by debrabaker on Jul 29, 2010 7:48:23 GMT -5
I am a lifelong resident of Chester County, PA which is part of the five county Philadelphia metro area but on the border of Lancaster County (famous for fauxoutlets and Amish) In fact, toward the western part of the county, one can find Amish farms.
With respect to PA, Pittsburgh and suburbs and Philadelphia and suburbs are definitely East Coast culture while the rest of the commonwealth is "Pennsyltucky."
Funny, ours is a Christian family but I never, ahem, conformed to the expectations of those in authority and we have, as a result, been "projects" similarly to the non-christian family in the Atheist story.
When I was home schooling, we were mocked because my educational approach strayed from the cliquish norm of the Alpha (bwith an itches) that dominated the home school culture.
Funny, my kids excelled academically while very few of the critics' children ever darkened the doors of a university, go figure.
Being Love bombed...felt worse than being stink bombed.
Being someone's project was horrid because the rug eventually gets pulled from underneath you and you suddenly are shunned and alone.
It is by God's grace alone I did not reject Christianity outright and my older children have no use for organized religion but love the Lord while my younger children that have no memories of the legalistic church have no trouble with our present grace-based church.
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Post by km on Jul 29, 2010 8:32:43 GMT -5
My father's family all lives in rural south central Ohio and their area is extremely racist as are most of them. I think living in an area where they are surrounded in their daily lives by people of the same race, ethnicities, similar religious backgrounds, etc...is the root of the problem. This is partly why I think the South sometimes has an unfair reputation (at least in many regions). The South is far more integrated than any other place in the US, and has been now for several generations (largely because of the Civil Rights struggles that happened here). Not that there isn't racism here, but I think it's somewhat different in form. In the Northeast, I often met people who became extremely uncomfortable around discussions of racism, and who felt that being called out for racism was tantamount to being accused of, like, Klan membership. Here, pretty much everyone is used to talking about racism, regardless of anyone's individual politics. Discussions about it are woven into the fabric of the culture, to the point that my 80 year old Republican grandparents (conservative Baptists with only a high school education) can talk intelligently and reflect about it. It's not about formal education as much as it's about people's life experiences around here. Which are pretty well-integrated, yes. Which is why Southerners (and especially urban ones) have not bought into the "I have Black friends" excuse for racism. We all have Black friends in the South, even the most racist people we know. This doesn't mean we don't have racism anymore than we're color blind. We tend to think the whole "color blind America" thing is kind of a crock of shit, too, becuase no one in this country is color blind given our history of racial struggle. And this isn't a political position 'round here, as in a liberal or a conservative one. It's just something we all know. So, these were things I expected to be true of Americans in general. I guess I didn't realize that more homogeneous areas wouldn't get these things, or that Southern attitudes about racism are as much a product of recent historical changes as they are. It was quite surprising when my students in PA told me there was no longer any racism in the US, now that we have a Black president.
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jeb
Junior Member
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Post by jeb on Jul 29, 2010 10:00:44 GMT -5
km said: "This is partly why I think the South sometimes has an unfair reputation (at least in many regions)."
I lived in MS for 15 yrs. the last time I was there and for a portion of that time had my own window business. I installed 24 stormwindows, on a house south of Hattiesburg where I lived, on a retired airforce colonel's home. He was in charge of an Air Force base in MN many years ago and said it recycled airmen coming back from a tour of duty in Europe.
He tried, he said, to ship the black airmen back south as quick as he could because whereas they knew where they stood down south they often made the mistake of going into a barbershop for a haircut and found themselves passed over until they left. Or they would take their families into a restaurant for dinner only to be continually ignored. So he got them out of the North where they thought they would be accepted but, instead, found out that racism was well represented there.
'Course that got the colonel, who is a white guy, in trouble with the white airmen from the south that came through his base since they didn't want to be up north in the cold either, so he was accused of reverse racism. Interesting, eh?
I was doing windows in the mid to late 80's and his experience was some 20 years before that so things weren't good in the south for a person of colour but at least they knew what to expect. Not so up north . . . very confusing.
John
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Post by km on Jul 29, 2010 12:19:30 GMT -5
John-I've honestly never even been to what we think of as the Deep South, so I can't speak about MS at all.
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jeb
Junior Member
Posts: 97
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Post by jeb on Jul 29, 2010 15:31:45 GMT -5
km said: John-I've honestly never even been to what we think of as the Deep South, so I can't speak about MS at all.
I started work, km, at my first machine shop job in Hattiesburg, MS in 1960 after a years training at the Jones Cnty. Jr. College trade school and there was a tall black man working there. His name was Ike McMillan. He was a grand guy and he called me MR. JOHN because I was white. So I called him MR. IKE in return. The white guys that worked there who were, for the most part okay, took me aside one day and explained to me that "you never call a nigger Mister". I explained to them that Ike was old enough to be my grandfather and if he was polite enough to call me Mr. John I could certainly return the courtesy by being polite to him. They just shrugged and walked away. Crazy Canadian kid, eh?
A day later Ike came to me and said, "Mr. John, I appreciate what you're doing calling me Mr. Ike, and these boys around here wouldn't bother me, but somebody could come up at the door and hear you call me Mr. Ike and say, 'Uh huh, uppity nigger', and they'd get me, and I've had too much trouble in my life to want any more. Please, just call me Ike." And I wept. Broke my heart . . but I complied. I sure didn't want him to get into trouble on my account.
I had the pleasure, in 1973 when I returned to MS to live for 15 years there, of sitting on MR. IKE's front porch with him and drinking a glass of tea. Times had changed and we could do that without worrying that some heathen SOB was going to kill him and maybe me for communing together. Brings joy to my heart still! YES!! ;D
But until the day he died my former fa-in-law would tell you that it didn't matter whether a black man was a doctor, a lawyer, or an astronaut . . . he was still 'just a nigger'. And, while I don't know for sure, I'm almost certain that his son, my former bro-in-law, still thinks the same today.
And that's my experience of the south. There's a lot of good folks down there and I have no regrets for the years I lived there but there are some folks that couldn't/wouldn't change if you set 'em on a keg of gun powder and lit the fuse.
Anyway, for what's it worth, eh? And I'm not sure what that has to do with 'The Atheist' except that all of those experiences and a lot of others combined to help me get away from Christianity as it's represented by folks who have hate in their hearts instead of the love that Jesus taught.
John
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Post by km on Jul 29, 2010 21:50:22 GMT -5
Yeah, you're right, John. Sorry for the derail, Sierra. But, yeah, I don't know... I actually heard the "n-word" more in PA than I've ever heard it... I grew up in North Carolina and heard it about a handful of times throughout my life (mostly from my grandmother--my dad's mother from Virginia--who would do it when she was around me just to piss me off). But North Carolina is not Alabama or Mississippi or even South Carolina (where I understand the rebel flag still flies pretty much everywhere). North Carolina is unusual because it never really had the feudal plantation system that characterized so much of the South's political economy. It had a sharecropping tobacco-based system, which just didn't operate like the huge cotton plantations. It also didn't have as many slaves, and it had a sizable population that defected to the Union. North Carolinians are rather squarely embarrassed when Virginia designates a day to celebrate the Confederacy or when someone in South Carolina does something asinine. Politics were nasty here up through the career of Jesse Helms, who even... You know, I never met anyone who would ever admit to voting for him? And, yes, there were about five kids in my high school (of 2000 students) who would go around in Confederate flag t-shirts that said "heritage, not hate," but these were few in number. And everyone kind of rolled their eyes at them. But I grew up in the most urban parts of the state, with really good access to public education, etc. So, I grew up in the areas that voted against Jesse Helms, which I suspect has made a difference. And I never ever heard anyone casually say the "n-word," which, you know, I can't even type here. I would hear people--just random people talking outside--use it about once a week in Pennsylvania. Not that that aren't problems with racism here. I think I just understand them better here, and it makes a difference... If I were to have a student who faced harassment, I would have a strong Civil Rights infrastructure in place to go to for help. There is nothing like that in Pennsylvania. No one doing Civil Rights advocacy in the rural area where I was. It was like...worse problems than I've seen in the past, with nowhere to go for help. I think one difference can be easily explained through anecdotal examples: In North Carolina, people of color were not afraid to come out in support of Obama on college campuses or anywhere else, really. In Central PA, I had one Black student in my class one semester. She came to my office hours crying one day, saying she didn't know if she could vote for Obama. No one in her family was going to, because they felt like it was just going to get him assassinated. My student was getting notes posted on her apartment door that said, "N****r, leave." So had one of her friends on the campus, who she said one day in tears, "isn't here anymore." She asked if she could be excused from class one day right after Obama was elected because she knew the Klan had been making inroads in our town. She said she was scared to go out of her apartment until she could get a better sense of what might happen. And she wasn't the only Black person who had this kind of fear--I also saw it among graduate school peers and older adults. Thank God nothing happened, but we didn't know. And I know the Klan and other white supremacist groups were very active in State College at that time as well, because I went to the Palin rally (to see if they would be there) and found them in large numbers. Lots of swastika tattoos and skinheads. (An aside: The Klan also rallies in Raleigh every year. It draws about six people--usually from outside the state--willing to admit to Klan membership--and about 600 counter-protesters in any given year.) The atmosphere in NC when Obama was elected was far more celebratory. Or so says everyone I know. There was one incident at NC State--one incident of graffiti in the "free expression tunnel" there echoing some of the white supremacist sentiments overheard at some Sarah Palin rallies. But NC State is known as the most "redneck"-friendly school in the Triangle (also home to UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke), and even they took serious action to erase the graffiti and then took steps to (1) step up campus security, (2) hold a whole bunch of anti-racist trainings and seminars and (3) reach out to the Black community to make sure that people felt safe. And people did--and do--feel safe here. When my students in PA were getting much more aggressive harassment and threats, there was no one willing or able to help them. Racism is more institutionalized here, I think, than it is often evident in individual attitudes. We don't have a neo-Nazi presence, at least not in urban areas. I know what to do to address racism here, but I was totally at a loss there. But remember, John, that I'm in my early 30's. I didn't live through the worst of it, and wasn't really aware of much anything until the '90's. My experience is going to be quite different than yours. And, damnit, Sierra, apologize for derailing again. I should start another thread. 's just... It's something that's been on my mind a lot since I left PA.
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Post by amyrose on Aug 2, 2010 11:17:36 GMT -5
My father's family all lives in rural south central Ohio and their area is extremely racist as are most of them. I think living in an area where they are surrounded in their daily lives by people of the same race, ethnicities, similar religious backgrounds, etc...is the root of the problem. Here, on the other hand, it's okay for people to be anything but Hispanic. That's the racism I fought on a daily basis in my classroom for the last ten years. And fighting it was part of my undoing in that job. Was this the job at the Christian school? No. I worked in the town that has made headlines for passing, through a special election, an ordinance on illegal immigration that included provisions like making all renters prove their citizenship to the police department and pay for an occupancy permit in order to live there.
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