"At Least You Know Where You Stand"

This is a post about racism and segregation in the South. It's not really a "turning over a rock" post because it's too rambling.

I'm usually very South-positive on this blog. The New South, racial diversity, Atlanta has everything, etcetera. A series of stories just reminded me I need to temper myself a bit.

I heard a story on NPR the other day about support for the Iraq war from the town of Pontotoc, Mississippi. It sounded very unbalanced to me. Every single person interviewed about the dead soldiers of Pontotoc expressed unwavering support for Bush and hope that the war would continue.

The unbalanced part was that everyone sounded white.

I remember earlier this year sitting in the airport with my husband. It was around the time of the surge and there was a lot of troop movement. We were sitting in the rotunda when a large group of soldiers lined up on the balcony. Everyone in the rotunda began clapping for them. Well, not everyone. I took a quick look around. Everyone who was clapping was white. All the black people just looked sort of downcast and uncomfortable.

The reaction I felt was shame. If I was truly a courageous person I would have yelled "please don't go!" at the soldiers. How can you "clap for the surge" if you're antiwar? It would be like clapping at a group of young people about to go jump off a cliff just because a morally-challenged idiot told them it was the right thing to do. Some of those soldiers who were on the balcony that day are probably horribly wounded or dead now... damn, this stupid war needs to end.

Anyway, if the NPR reporter had interviewed some black residents of Pontotoc I doubt there would have been the same positive response to the war. But they didn't, and the typical liberal NPR viewer will have their stereotypes of Mississippi and the South confirmed. Here are some demographics of Mississippi:

Race	Mississipi	USA
White persons, percent, 2005 (a)	61.2%	80.2%
Black persons, percent, 2005 (a)	36.9%	12.8%
American Indian and Alaska Native persons, percent, 2005 (a)	0.4%	1.0%
Asian persons, percent, 2005 (a)	0.7%	4.3%
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, percent, 2005 (a)	0.0%	0.2%
Persons reporting two or more races, percent, 2005	0.6%	1.5%
Persons of Hispanic or Latino origin, percent, 2005 (b)	1.7%	14.4%
White persons not Hispanic, percent, 2005	59.7%	66.9%

And the growth trend, which for some reason doesn't include Hispanic/Latino:

% Growth 2000-2005
	White	Black	Asian
2000 (total population)	62.37%	36.66%	0.82%
2005 (total population)	61.72%	37.24%	0.91%
Growth 2000-2005 (total population)	1.62%	4.33%	13.67%

The interview, with its overwhelming white focus in a state where white people are actually much less numerous than average, was probably not very representative of Mississippi attitudes.

I was talking about this with my husband and he asked me if I wanted to go live in Mississippi, to which my response was a big "heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell noooooooo."

I need to step back and be fair. Maybe the interview was representative of Pontotoc. There are many small towns like that that are almost completely monoracial due to the history of segregation. Even where towns are multiracial the legacy persists. I lived for almost a year in a small town in the mountains in Virginia and only once visited the small "black side" of town. The thing that really freaked me out was that I noticed the black residents pronounced the name of the town in a totally different way than the white residents. They pronounced it more the way it was spelled whereas the white people had an odd vowel change. Their lives were so separate they weren't even living in the same town, even though they lived in the same town... it was a kind of deep linguistic/metaphysical segregation.

One point I'm touching on is that the South can be a very hostile environment for non-white people, more specifically black people but also including other people of color when they happen to become more visible. I just read a terrifying story called "Do You Understand Where You Are" about some black people getting shot at just for stepping across a line. Impersonal institutionalized racism sucks, but the rarer, up-close-and-personal racism is what really brings the pain, terror and violence.

There are still many people who prefer to live in the South. Even people who don't have deep cultural ties to the region. I've heard this statement a fair number of times when discussing why... "at least you know where you stand".

What does this really mean? On an obvious level, a hostile racist in the South is easier to spot. Not everyone with a confederate flag on their pickup truck is a hostile racist but the chance of them being one goes way, way up.

On a deeper level, I think it means that people who say they are not racist are more likely to not be racist, or be less racist.

It's easy for someone who lives in a small town in Connecticut to say something like "I don't have anything against those people". Their only contact with "those people" is rare, fleeting or confined to television.

A white person in the South has probably grown up among narratives of racism, prejudice and segregation. They've also probably had more contact with real live non-white human beings.

If you're a person of color with a decent degree of social mobility, you're faced with a lot of interesting choices about where you want to live, and how much and what kind of hostility you can handle. A place where there are already many of you, with a long history, but you're informally segregated into a lower rung of society? A place where you're an exotic stranger, highly visible, social status uncertain? A place where you're a hated newcomer? A place where everyone insists these types of social demarcations don't exist, even when you can see them plain as day? A sterile exurban spot where you don't have to worry about any of this stuff because there's no community at all, but which is also terribly isolating?

Personal note: someone like me, with no hometown, a strange accent, always assumed to be the foreigner... wherever I go, I try to understand where it is I'm standing. It's tiring. I find it much easier when people just straight up tell me, or else I know for certain that they don't really care. Maybe this is one reason why I never felt uncomfortable during my stays in Mexico. The stares and the questions felt more honest, even though a lot of people expressed doubt that I was really from the United States. I was sort of a gringa, not a güera, definitely a "china" and unambiguously a foreigner.