White people in these areas don't trust people from outside these areas. The only reason other people come to them is to paint the people in a bad light in some way or scam them (why else would anyone come? it's certainly not for work or pleasure). It has nothing to do with there being "a lot at stake," they just genuinely don't like outsiders.
Then why weren't black people pulling guns on him for "painting people in a bad light"? It's because in the South, the dominant white population has always hated any narrative that didn't show the chattel slave system or the Jim Crow system in a good, if not benign light. This links up with the history of the South and it constantly feeling that it's moral and social structure were always being under attack for being wrong.
People don't come to the South to write stories that will paint the black people in a bad light. I can't speak for the time that this photographer went to the South, but nobody defends slavery or Jim Crow or, from what I can gather, cares about discussing it.
There is an entire civil religion called Lost Cause Ideology which has defending the chattel slave system as a cornerstone of it's beliefs. It's the reason that there were so many confederate statues created in the 1920s-1970s, well after the end of the Civil War.
Oh, wow, a Wikipedia page about something created in the 1920s-1970s. I actually learned about this through the internet several years ago. Not once in my entire life growing up did I actually hear about it.
You don't hear about it, it's a term used by others to describe a set of ideals held by many white southerners. Just because you haven't heard of something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I’m aware of it but only through seeing folks online in comments (and generally they are folks not from the south) making me aware of it despite living in the the south for half a century.
No one I know down here wastes two brain cells dwelling on or “upset over the loss” from a war fought 160 years ago, but to read it online you’d think every other home has an altar to Robert E. Lee in a special alcove in their living room.
I am a white southerner and have been for more than five decades, in all that time I have never met a single person who holds this view. I think if it was “many” I’d have encountered at least one in that time.
Sure you get the random redneck flying a tattered confederate flag outside their broken down trailer, but ascribing an adherence set of ideal to a complex philosophical hero worshipping belief system is probably a bit of a stretch.
If you were an African-American Southerner at the time, wouldn’t you be more worried about locals, for this sort of thing? Baldwin Lee is a Chinese-American art professor from New York, I suspect people would not be too worried that he might be a secret confederate.
It's not just those areas. I had some months of "door-knocking" experience in Chicagoland, early noughties. The neighbourhoods tended to be racially segregated: Latino, white, or black. As a white person, we were often warned to avoid certain latino or black neighbourhoods by police and civilians, yet they were almost always more friendly and welcoming than white neighbourhoods, and never ended up being dangerous.
In the white neighbourhoods there was a tendency to be greeted with suspicion, aggression, loud guard dogs, threats, and occasionally with guns. I imagine that the difference would be more pronounced if I was black and walking around in those same neighbourhoods.
There is a social narrative that white poverty doesn't exist in the US even though it is the bulk of all poverty. I've been places exactly like those in the article but everyone is white. Someone making that explicitly visible exposes a truth that many don't want to have acknowledged.
I think this discussion is a losing discussion, as history is recast as being strictly only one way. I could speak of the stories I heard on Thursday from a historian down here, but people would instantly discount it. It very much reflects our current times, where all is seen as either white or black, but nothing seen as a shade of gray. Polarization has benefitted no side, in any debate.
Polarization benefits both sides. It just doesn't benefit the truth.
Sometimes one side or the other is on the side of truth, but even then, the other side benefits from the uncertainty. The further they are from that position the greater the relative benefit. If there's even the slightest hint of gray they benefit even more.
Representing the middle is a pure loss. Both sides benefit from the clarity of their positions and the ability to commit. Usually both sides will assume your are on one or the other, and both benefit from that. One side gets a slight advantage from your numbers. The other benefits more from painting you as the enemy who will stop and nothing to destroy you and must be stopped at all costs.
It can be quite lonely and frustrating having any centrist views, for many of the reasons you mention. Many assumptions made merely on the basis of hearing but one view. The hive mentality is two sides of the same coin, but I don't think anyone is incentivized to change it.
Independents are the largest political bloc in the country at over 40% of voters. Partisans are not convincing, they are just loud and have representation.
Everyone knows the ways in which both sides are different, we are frustrated by the ways in which they are the same, and that is valid too. Keep sharing, we’re watching. You’re not alone, we are actually more numerous than them.
Independents are technically unaffiliated, but they often vote for the same party in election after election. They may claim to be put off by partisan rhetoric, but it's usually effective at scaring them away from one party or the other. They may choose not to vote, but it's rare that they are truly centrist.
The "swing voter" has been called a "myth" for well over a decade, e.g.
I don't think it's only a matter of partisans being louder, it's that partisanship is easier. Seeing only one side of an issue is always easier, in the same way that empathizing with only one of two (or more) sides of a dispute is much easier.
The shades of gray are blacks and whites living in unison in many rural parts of the south in the time period in which these pictures were set. They lived together in poverty in many of these rural areas.
The historian I spoke of mentioned this. He could back it up with pictures of them co-mingling extensively.
Is it to say no racism existed in that time period? Hardly. But far too often I've seen it painted that the south is deeply racist to this day. Generally I only tend to hear it from people who have never been. I say this as someone originally from the north.
The south is indeed still deeply racist. I lived in Charleston SC for several years and was exposed to plenty of it. People like Dylan Roof and the McMichael family don't come out of nowhere. Doesn't mean there aren't Black and white people who do get along.
I lived in Georgia for seven years as a brown guy, mostly in Atlanta but also visited a fair amount around the coast and in Douglas, where my buddy used to live. I just got back from a trip to Tybee Island with my white wife and mixed kids. Never encountered any racism from a white person in Georgia.
YMMV. But in my experience, it was much nicer and less alienating to be down there than it is in a major liberal metro area amongst the "good white people."
I had an Indian friend who grew up in Alabama when his parents immigrated. We were both in San Francisco talking to a white guy and he said "Wow, that's must have been horrible growing up there!"
And my friend said "No, actually, I had a wonderful childhood. Never had any issues with racism, everyone was really nice."
There’s a cultural overlap between the American south and at least Bangladesh (and I assume some parts of India) that I appreciate. Small talk, face saving, indirect communication, social roles, expectations about timeliness, meals, hospitality, that I appreciate. (I grew up listening to country music because I guess that’s the closest thing on American radio to the village music my dad likes.)
So you acknowledge the anecdotal evidence but then make the same accusation towards "liberal" cities? As if cities are solely composed of one type of political spectrun?
So the countless accounts of blacks in the south concerning racism mean nothing? I say that as a black person who is in the South and whose family originates from there.
They're saying it's "more complicated than that" as a way to get away from the truth which is the South has always had race and white supremacy as a cornerstone of it's society.
To me its sounding like they are saying "it's more complicated than that" as a way of saying - hey, yeah, racism exists in the south and is probably far more prevalent there than other places in the US, but there is a perception that every community in the south is racist on the whole, and that most or all individuals in the south are raised to be prejudiced.
Well that idea is obviously wrong, and is prejudiced view to have of the south, ironically.
Living together doesn't mean racism doesn't exist. Being originally from the north doesn't mean anything for your argument. The south has exchanged their deep racism with, at first a prejudice against gays, and when that group was too large such that it hurt elections they moved to trans people.
My wife and I were married in Clarksdale, MS, at the Shack Up Inn. We had several people of color in our wedding. While were told in no uncertain terms to avoid the local haunts, our party didn't.
The shades of gray are that slavery hasn’t been a thing for 150 years and nobody in the south today, or even when those pictures were taken, had anything to do with it. Racism, meanwhile, is universal everywhere that different people live alongside each other. So pinning that uniquely on the south is a shade of gray too.
> The shades of gray are that slavery hasn’t been a thing for 150 years and nobody in the south today, or even when those pictures were taken, had anything to do with it. Racism, meanwhile, is universal everywhere that different people live alongside each other.
The American south is unquestionably better today than, say, the 1950s or 60s. But as a child I lived for a few years in the Deep South (specifically, east Texas) in the early 60s, and then again for a few more years (northwest Florida) in the late 60s, due to my dad's duty-station transfers. It was very racist — and changes in culture can often be slow.
A new New York Review of Books piece reviews a book that studies some of the ~1,000 racist murders — largely unpunished — that took place in the South between 1930 and 1970, in the teeth of federal Reconstruction-era legislation intended to protect Blacks. The piece brought to mind a tweet by an anonymous Army officer from awhile back: "[General] Sherman should have mowed the South like a lawn. With multiple passes." (Quoted from memory and so might be a bit off.)
People forget that things like federal monitoring of elections weren’t limited to the South. Places like NYC and Boston were and in some ways still are very inhospitable to black people.
Slavery was a tool of control. Explicit control of the enslaved people and implicit control of the poor whites and others on the fringe of society. The intersection of race, class and poverty paints a picture that is complex.
The photographer in this case, Baldwin Lee, was Chinese-American and grew up in Chinatown in New York. So his experience was probably not due to this phenomenon.
The idea that the victor is ever anything but perfect is rarely in history books. The history of Southern exploitation is heavily covered in Socialist literature, though.
It used to be, if you were a Yankee driving through Georgia on the way to Florida, a common corridor with NEasterners, they would often be advised to not detour off from the interstate, else risk get entangled in local "policework".
In my experience, Black and Latino people are very warm and welcoming on an individual level. It’s the about 5-10% of individuals in the community that wreak havoc, and the communities already know exactly who those people are.
source: from these areas.
edit: removed the "white" from people