Growing up in Coos Bay OR, we had ONE black person. He ran a shoeshine stand.
With ONE black person here, we were beset by alcoholism, child abuse, a high vocational death rate, tons of property crime and we had no shortage of rundown housing, unpaved streets and real dives to get drunk in.
Obviously the ONE black guy wasn't responsible for all that...LOL!
Going from lily-white coastal Oregon into the USAF in 1974, I got to meet plenty of blacks, Hispanics and a few others. I never had any problems with them. About the only difference I could spot other than the obvious one of skin color was one of slang. Just like us whites, they liked a good car, a good stereo, a good time and a good lady! They struck me as "regular folks" in their ways.
Today Coos County still has the same kind of problems and there are just a few more black people, who have done nothing to cause them. The nearly-lily white county I live in has a BLACK sheriff and he's been re-elected even when the weekly neocon rag came out against him. A funny thing about that neocon fishwrap is that the owner took a black lady to a fancy seafood place, where treatment was bad, so he wrote about the perceived racism in a front page article. Even the rightwingnuts here aren't all that racist...LOL!
Now I have seen what things look like down South. The first time was summer 1974 in Biloxi when I was in tech training at Keesler AFB and the second time was from summer 1996 to early 1999 in Louisiana. The time at Keesler was short so not much was seen but my one story from that time was about a poor black guy who owned a beater cab he called Soul Cab. Now my sympathies are with anyone struggling to make a living and it was with sadness that as I was walking out one of the gates of the base that I saw his beater being towed away after a wreck.
In Louisiana I saw the white kids keep to themselves as did the black kids in various parking lots where they congregated. At the football games at SE Louisiana State's stadium, which at the time had no program so Hammond's Tornadoes played there, the crowd self-segregated. On the bathroom floor, little black kids were playing dice games for money...LOL!
In the city of Hammond, you saw a gorgeous city entrance and signs announcing it was an award-winning city for it's cleanliness. Guess who kept the city clean? Black inmates. You rarely saw a white inmate despite the area being 50/50 for black/white. The black neighborhoods were trashed out in the extreme and that is where those inmates should have been working!
Hallowe'en was the scariest time. Why? Not a SINGLE trick or treater was out anywhere. The street drug dealers owned the streets. The cops worked with some of them as informants and even the police chief said that 99% of his cleared crimes were solved due to informants. The starting salary in the late 1990's for a Hammond city cop was all of $1000 a month, which does not buy a truly professional law enforcement person. Is it any wonder the streets were a jungle?
People were overly polite but you knew that it masked a lot of stuff. The unsaid code of social segregation was just as powerful as the former Jim Crow system of laws. David Duke drew 20% of the white vote during a campaign when I was down there, so it's not like a majority of whites support racist policies. The blacks who are socially conservative hard-working church-going Baptists have more in common with the whites of the rural Midwest than they do with the thug culture by a long ways but they can't do much in the social setting or take a stand due to the violence wrought by the criminal element.
Government corruption and ineptitude is legendary in Louisiana and that just adds to the mess. Former governor Edwin Edwards was convicted for his role in working with former 49er owner Eddie DeBartolo to help him get a casino setup while I was there. Two white guys running for sheriff in a podunk parish got into it so bad that murder threats were made and one of them was jailed. The mayor of New Orleans was black and he presided over a city with a terrifically high murder rate and a dysfunctional government. Big city or rural countryside, black or white, nothing worked well when it came to government in Louisiana.
Until justice is seen as equitable, until effective measures are put into place that deal with the problems with effective leaders to implement them, until people face up to what's going on, the rot of racism will continue to drag down this nation.
A historical point: Blacks were slaves because the Indians and whites used early on died off when subjected to the harsh physical conditions in the sugar plantations and precious metals mines. Blacks were enslaved by blacks in the interior of Africa and sold to slave traders. Then those who were caught by the stronger enslaving blacks had to survive a long overseas voyage under horrendous conditions. If they made it that far, then they had to find a way to hang in there while being used as hard labor. The lucky ones were able to breed and they had to deal with this level of living from the 1500's to the 1800's before slavery ended.
Yet somehow they survived and hung in there as a people. They're a TOUGH and RESILIENT people. Do they have their problems as a group? Sure, but as was shown by the little story of my childhood in Coos Bay, they are not the root of all evil. Kill them all off and all you'll see is a world full of white people screwing it up royally...LOL! Bad people like good people come in all colors, shapes, sizes, religions and ****** orientations. Look at the individual as a person instead of seeing their accident-of-birth skin pigmentation. One time I read a sci-fi story in which some prankster came up with a virus that turned all black people white and all white people black. Talk about a really funny predicament...LOL!
Rick
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