The North, especially New York (State and City), shouldn't be patting itself on the back and patronizing the South over race relations and segregation (bear in mind that the comments shouldn't apply to NYC, but to NYS). I think it's a pretty common thing. We're pretty bad. Sure, we were on the right side in the Civil War and didn't have the Jim Crow laws (if we did, I've not heard it) or the nationally remembered civil rights struggles (which is not to say that we didn't have any--one of my LSAT passages dealt with protests over jobs at SUNY Downstate). Those things weren't necessary.
We've had a system more pernicious in its lack of overtness. Housing patterns seem just to have developed that way.... We tout our inclusiveness, our liberal openmindedness, yet.... We went to St. Ann's, not a neighborhood or even a magnet public school, for a reason. (To be fair, several reasons.) My point is not that we're all horrible racists who fled our neighborhood schools. My points are that, (1), All too often, we fail to recognize the subtle racisms and hypocrisies we practice and that, (2), The unwritten, unnoticed, unfocused nature of the discrimination makes it impossible to blame any one or two people or things, much less other people, making it that much more difficult to fight against.
I do think that we've got the right rhetoric and ideals, and that's a good start. The concrete manifestation of that, though, is lacking.
Thus ends my unscheduled moralistic assessment of the state of the nation's race relations. It just happened to fall when it did (because of when other people's assessments did).
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Oh, there's no doubt that we've got problems in the North, and that more people should recognize them. At the same time, however, as a Lee-Jackson day parade complete with Confederate flags and gray-clad reenactors goes by in Lexington, VA, on a day that as if by magic occurs near, if not on, Martin Luther King Day, it's hard not to feel a small twinge of satisfaction.
Yeah, definitely--so long as it's just a small twinge. I'd also add that this is almost exactly the problem: In the South, there's some ridiculousness, but in the North, we have the same segregation (if not worse), without the bold manifestations of discrimination/race/complicated history, and it tends to get ignored.
I think that while you have a valid point about the pernicious nature of unconscious racism in the North, you're understating the severe negative effects of the South's history of slavery and terrorism. I attend law school with several African-American minorities: all uniformly distrust their surroundings and distrust southern culture. I spoke to one student seconds after a local law enforcement officer told her, in response to a call about a parking ticket, that it was "people like [her]" who were "ruining" the town. When she demanded that the officer identify himself, he hung up, and the police operator later refused to identify the officer my friend spoke with. I know that at least one minority law student refuses to drive himself back from parties at night. I have spoken to two friends who were confronted by two violent individuals who singled them out by race. I have never heard of this level of race-related incidents in any other place that I have lived. Granted, I have generally lived in some pretty nice neighborhoods, but downtown Lexington isn't exactly Crown Heights. I do not mean to cast a general aspersion on all the people of Virginia, but their racists are less afraid, and I find their boldness alarming in a way that is qualitatively different from my feelings for the racists of the northeast.
I would also note that, isolating African-American and Caucasian race relations, in terms of sheer numbers, the South affords more opportunities for casual racism. So while I take your point about hubristic self-congratulation, I cannot equate the racism I find in the North with the racism I find in the South.
You're right. I don't have a good understanding of the actual results of out-and-out racism. I appreciate your explanation of what life in Virginia can be and I realize that I'm quite foolish to essentially overlook the South's terrible history of race relations.
I have one question. In the parking ticket incident, how did the officer know your friend's race?
However, I should point out that several things you write support my general, if ill-expressed, point: That racism/segregation (possibly separate things) is alive and well in the North (see Howard Beach ["Howard Beach incident"], Bensonhurst [Yusef Hawkins], Boston [busing], Broad Channel [parade float, entered by two firefighters and a cop], and other places not containing the letter B, like New Jersey [racial profiling by state troopers] or Indiana [reign of the KKK in the '20s]--and you could point out that I'm often using incidents from the non-recent past and of lessening intensity, almost always below the South's exhibit level of racism, too, but a slow burn is a burn, nonetheless, and I'm certainly glad of those facts); that it/they is/are expressed differently in the North and South (usually--see list above); and that the general lack of clear expression of bias in the North makes it more difficult to ameliorate the situation. "I have never heard of this level of race-related incidents in any other place that I have lived," you write. Me neither--because there's minimal interaction between races, especially black and white, in residential New York City. That's segregation, I have no idea who or what's to blame, and I don't know what to do about it, other than mostly ignoring it. (I'm taking it as faith that this is a blame-worthy situation. Perhaps I'm wrong?) I wonder what impressions a black New Yorker would have of race relations in New York as compared to in Virginia. You also write, "the South affords more opportunities for casual racism," in terms of numbers. I'd add that it also affords those opportunities in terms of proximity, highlighting again the lack of interaction (surfeit of segregation?) in the North. I'm also curious whether you've had more interaction with blacks at W&L than at St. Ann's, Brown, or other academic/social setting and, if so, what you attribute it to.
I was wrong to discount the effects of overt racism on an individual, but racism in the North and South has similar if not identical (call for data!) economic and social impacts. I also admit that race and class are deeply tangled, especially in the North, where, as we agree, racism is of a different quality than in the South. For a long time, structural racism, where the forces that bring about segregation and inequality are diffused and institutionalized, not readily identifiable in individuals, has seemed to me to be more difficult to pin down and fight against than what you describe in the South. But, clearly, I've underestimated the difficulty of defeating the South's style.
I should try taking another crack at my argument--and trying to keep it from becoming meaninglessly clever and glib--when it's not so late.
Rephrasing in my last comment:
I wrote: "and you could point out that I'm often using incidents from the non-recent past and of lessening intensity, almost always below the South's exhibit level of racism, too, but a slow burn is a burn, nonetheless, and I'm certainly glad of those facts"
That's not what I mean. Here's what I should've edited it to in order to get the right sense across: "and you could point out that I'm often using incidents from the non-recent past and of lessening intensity, almost always below the South's exhibit level of racism, too, and I'm certainly glad of those facts, but a slow burn is a burn, nonetheless"
Seth, if you want to learn more about segregation, an easy place to start is either "American Apartheid" by Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton or "Urban Inequality: Evidence From Four Cities," edited by 3 major segregation scholars (O'Connor, Tilly, and Bobo).
American life seems to just keep puttering on as if sociologists haven't looked into the whole segregation thing and found some pretty convincing explanations. I don't know if it's a failure of academia or the media or the government or our citizenry, because it's not hard to find out why residential segregation by race exists, it's just hard to show a pulse about it. It's like we've been subconsciously conditioned to keep pretending that it's all just a matter of residential preference (those blacks want to live in that dirty ghetto together, etc).
Thanks, Tracy. I took a history seminar on the racialization of urban places, 1880-the present, back in the fall of 2001. It didn't get much into current conditions (what with its being a history class and all), but it gave me a lot of information on race and the North. (Chicago and Detroit were subjects of excellent studies of race and white flight.)
I'm going to do three things now. One's a link dump, one's a response to you, Tracy, and one's a question.
An article from yesterday about segregated schools in New York City (it's gotten worse and doesn't stem entirely from residential segregation, which is also a huge problem; see also the sidebar quotation from Martin Luther King Jr.).
A brief article from the Daily News.
An article about residential segregation. (Tracy, I can't help but read it and connect it to your blog post. Together, it's a compelling statement about zoning and its abuses, including the unspoken, built-in kind we've got up here--pernicious!)
An article about segregation. The lede says it all: "For all its reputation for diversity and tolerance, New York City remains among the most segregated areas of the United States." Well, when you add the first sentence of the second paragraph, it does: "The separation of the races is of course not legally enforced in the city and, unlike the South, it never was."
Now to the answer. I think it's a failure of our citizenry (a category that includes and expands all the others you list). If we wanted to do something about it, we would. If we wanted our government to do something about it, it would. If we wanted the media to do something about it, it would. If we wanted to pay attention to academia, we would. But we don't. It's a lot easier to muddle through and to blame a Bull Connor than it is to blame ourselves for things we tell ourselves we don't believe in. (And I'm at least as guilty as anyone.)
Now my question, which I hinted at previously: Is segregation the same thing as racism? They're linked--and one could easily argue that segregation is a form of racism (distinct from the open type you, Josh, describe, but the institutional, subtle type more prevelant in the North). I'm going to go with that--segregation as a type of racism. Then, to generalize, the South has the open type in spades; the North doesn't. But the North has segregation in spades and isn't doing a damn thing about it. In the South, (here's where I get unsteady) kids of different races interact more in schools and maybe there's less residential segregation now than in the North.
I don't know if I think segregation is a type of racism. It's a symptom, an expression - everywhere that there is racism there will be segregation of some kind. Even if it's just making the slaves live in the shed out back.
I have one question. In the parking ticket incident, how did the officer know your friend's race?
Her first name is Kadisha, and they'd towed her car before. They knew who she was.
I wonder what impressions a black New Yorker would have of race relations in New York as compared to in Virginia.
She's from New York, and she wants to get back there as soon as possible.
I've had more interaction with blacks--I attribute it to the law school's progressive admission policies, and the fact that I'm in a clinic with one. I don't know how much interaction I'd have with black people otherwise. If you lived in Lexington, you might go a very long time without seeing a black person.
Also, federal law draws a distinction between racism acting "under color of state law" and private racism: I think that distinction is justified, for reasons too long to lay out here. The perniciousness of racism among police forces is hard to explain. A W&L student with a middle-eastern sounding name got stopped near Lexington recently under extreme circumstances (he didn't stop for some distance because there was no shoulder, but slowed down and applied his blinkers) and was harrassed by four to six squad cars of Virginia police who threatened him, overtly, with imprisonment and the scarring of his police record with the intent of harming his acceptance to the bar. All because he knew his 4th Amendment rights against illegal search and seizure.
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