Confederate Flag and the KKK

[mattnyd]

The town I live in is purported to have housed a top KKK chapter, which may or may not have died out when the last remaining 80 year old member kicked the bucket, circa 1985. Not that I think the clan has anything necessarily to do with the Confederate Flag, but there are some happy happy CFlags a-wavin' in the breeze all over the town. It's a really small town, kind of backwards, about 10 square miles total, most residents have been their since their family arrived back in the 1700's and they've never been outside of a 10 mile radius in their lives, so there's nothing worldly or cultural about these people (certainly not their education, nor do they have anything to talk about but hunting squirrels and drinking every day). The population is something like 99.9% white, .5% Polish and .5% African-American. I mean, honest to God, I THINK I might have caught a glimpse of a black guy once. Maybe.

One day, there were two guys sitting on the bench outside the Busy Bee (the local and only convenience store). I went inside to get a bag of pretzels, and this old busy body man whispered to me "Them Indians still out there?" He was referring to the two guys sitting on the bench, Asian Indian, not Seminoles. I just said "I have no idea what you're talking about". I mean, I didn't even KNOW this old man!

In fact, the realtor I bought the house from told me that he moved out of the town himself 10 years ago because he said, "It was starting to become the wrong color, if you know what I mean.". I said "NO I don't know what you mean" and I almost walked away from the house just based on that idiotic statement. My neighbor won't even go into the liquor store -he'll go to the next one literally 7 miles away - because a Jewish guy works in there.

But, anyway, I was just wondering, what exactly would be the big deal to these people about flying the Confederate flag? I really don't know what it could mean to them. Any thoughts ?

[Jon Mercer]

This is the weekend they didn't play golf.

[mattnyd]

don't get it. i'm a dim wit.

[Neal Solon]

This is the weekend they didn't play golf.

[mattnyd]

OH! HAHAHAHAHAH

[mkiker2089]

The flag itself means very little, or it should. It's a piece of our history (assuming the town is in the south) and should be respected as such. It's the people that use it for hate that give it the bad name. I don't have anything useful to add other than you seem to live in a small pocket that is not the norm. In the south racism has become less of a problem than in many areas because we have more minorities and more attention is placed on it.

If you are curious as to whether or not you have a KKK chapter in your area, check the phone book. I don't think they hide, and they certainly wouldn't in a town like you've described. You might do a google search on.

[Dave Ryan]

The ironic thing is that Mattnyd lives in Guam.....

(just kiddin')

[mattnyd]

Closer to Guam than the South - I live in Warren County, New Jersey. I think you're right in that it is used for hate and nothing more. I actually have googled KKK pictures and came across a website that has photos which were taken in my town, around 20 years ago. I could almost swear one of the photos vastly resembles my neighbor's house across the street, as well as his back which is to the camera as he's being sworn in by the Grand Pooba.

[mkiker2089]

New Jersey doesn't surprise me as much as it used to. The south has a bad reputation as being the focal point of racism, but it really isn't possible here. There is NOWHERE that you can move to in the south and not find a minority or a group of minorities and the fluctuations of housing make it to where you never know who you're neighbor will be next month in many developing sectors. That sort of combination makes long term racism either impossible or impossible to express. You move to somewhere like Montana or Cabot Cove, Maine where you're neighbors are not only white but have lived on that land for generations, and that's where the deep racism lies. I'm not picking on either, but you get my point. There are many places where just moving in, no matter what color you are, makes you an outsider.

[Andrew Forbes]

Polish people aren't white?

[mavrach]

Very disconcerting. Again, Mattnyd, before you mentioned you were in New Jersey, I think we all had the stereotype and assumed you were in Kentucky or something. I live in North Jersey, and I always like to delude myself into thinking we're a lot more advanced than we really are. I often visit the Montclair and Bloomfield areas to indulge in Indian, Thai, Ethiopian, Turkish, Italian and Arabic foods, and it's jarring to be reminded that there is still KKK not so far away.

[HGervais]

Marshall there is racism down here but I'd argue it is a more open kind of racism and it runs both ways. Blacks don't trust a lot of whites and the reverse. That isn't profound or anything but in a majority black city like New Orleans or Atlanta it does allow both sides more of a chance to try and put the other side down. With the New Orleans the main reason for the difference is the way the city is laid out. Unlike most cities where different races & classes live in very distinct & separate areas, there is no such barrier here. Drive down St. Charles Avenue and you will see beautiful oaks and multi-million dollar homes but go back two or three blocks and you see bombed out looking houses and total poverty. There is a weird kind of balance here unlike anything I've ever seen anywhere else. I still maintain the most racist place I have ever lived or seen was Boston. I saw shit there, especially from the police towards black people, that I simply can't imagine ever happening here without major riots going down afterwards.

It's like the dog-fighting culture we talked about in the Vick thread. It is all about breaking the cycle of bigotry & ignorance. If people go from generation to generation thinking certain things, nothing is going to change. To do that we need to be more open about race and the differences between them. We need to teach people about responsibility. We need to address the ever widening gap of the haves & the have nots and we need to improve our education system.

[mattnyd]

Polish people aren't white?

Thank you for the correction, that was stupid of me to say, I apologize for not thinking before I type. Anyway, I looked up the racial makeup of my township, it's 96.58% White, 1.21% African American, 0.22% Native American, 0.52% Asian, 0.65% from other races, and 0.82% from two or more races. This is out of a total of 2,300 people in the town.

As HGervais says, I do witness this passing of the prejudice from one generation to the next. My neighbor, who has never traveled outside of this area in her lifetime (or her great-grandparents' lifetime, for that matter), have a 16 year old daughter, whom I recently saw making a finger-to-the-middle-of-the-forehead motion when talking about someone she saw at the grocery store. She doesn't even know what Hinduism is, much less what it means. She only knows her father uses that derogatory term and she blindly follows.

Oh here's another good example of their mindset. The 16 year old daughter got her first job this summer working at a new bagel shop that opened up the next town over. In this business, you have to be very careful with how you handle food to serve the public, obviously. She was supposed to take the leftover chicken salad at the end of the day and put it in a fresh bowl and cover it for the next day. Well she had consistently forgotten to do this, and after a few attempts at correcting her, the owner of the business fired her.

Her parents were very angry that their daughter was fired. But these people insisted that their daughter was not fired because she did something wrong, their argument was

Mother: "Well, she only got fired because Shelly's a girl, and they don't like women, cause they're Pakistani".

Me: "Um, they're not Pakistani, they're Palastinean."

Mother: "Same thing"

Me: "How is it the same thing? It's an entirely different country!"

Mother: "Whatever, they don't treat their women good so that's why she got fired."

I just drank a little harder that night to dull my senses. I couldn't believe the direction the conversation went after that.

[Chris_Sax]

I still maintain the most racist place I have ever lived or seen was Boston. I saw shit there, especially from the police towards black people, that I simply can't imagine ever happening here without major riots going down afterwards.

Boston definitely has a history of hardcore racism, although it is more of an isolated period that stretches from the early 1900's to around the mid-90's, since back in the day it used to be an abolitionist stronghold and compared to the rest of the country a very welcoming place for black people. The most famous examples are the Red Sox being the last major league time to sign a black player, and they were DEAD last, they waited till like 59 or something, Bill Russell's comments in his books about Boston in the 60's, and the riots over bussing to integrate the schools in 68 where that photo of the black guy getting beaten up with the american flag was taken and also where the footage from the beginning of The Departed is from. The thing is, it's really important to understand that a significant portion of the city wasn't really that racist and racism wasn't that prevalent in many of the surrounding towns, it was just incredibly virulent in the Irish neighborhoods in the city itself like Southie and Charlestown and the shore towns like Revere and Quincy. Like, if you went to Cambridge or Brookline or Brighton, no one really cared about bussing, but the working class whites from downtown went nuts. Racism flourished in Boston in ways that it didn't in other northeastern cities for 2 reasons- Boston probably has the most corrupt and entrenched city government in the country excepting New Orleans, and the political machine that controlled the city and all the civil servants, including the police, as Harold mentioned, was controlled by these Irish neighborhoods. So every cop, whether he was walking a beat in Mattapan or Dorchester or the Back Bay, was from Southie or Charlestown, and on the off chance he wasn't, he still came from a department whose culture was dominated by the attitudes from those neighborhoods. So even as racial attitudes started to improve during the 70's and 80's as the working class whites were pushed out of the urban centers by yuppie college kids, the cops were still old school bastards who would beat the bag out of blacks and step all over their constitutional rights without blinking. The other thing that makes Boston different from similar cities is the reason this continued so long without any action being taken- Boston has a far smaller percentage of black people than most other cities of similar size. Even though blacks are a minority nationwide, they make up the majority of many major city populations, and even if they don't, they at least have very large powerful voting blocs that must be reckoned with. The relatively small size of Boston's black population meant that they didn't have the legislative power to bring the police under control. Boston is also probably one of the most ethnically segregated cities in the country, all the black people are concentrated in Mattapan, Roxbury, parts of East Boston,and Dorchester, so even as the city's white people became more tolerant, they really had no idea what was going on in those neighborhoods because they never went there. And the Irish political machine was still there. Boston may be one of the most liberal cities in the country with all these great universities, but there has always been this radically different parallel culture of working class whites who worked very hard to create neighborhoods they controlled and could not abide seeing their kids bussed off to different schools in different parts of the city while other kids from black neighborhoods were bussed in. People in Southie are STILL pissed about this. White working class populations from Chicago to Baltimore to Philly were similarly racist, but they didn't have the power that the Southie Irish did.

All of this can basically be traced back to when the Irish first came to Boston and they were violently oppressed and discriminated against by the old school New England puritans. It's hard to believe now, but during the first wave of Irish immigration, it was incredibly dangerous to be an Irishman in Boston. This led to them banding together and forming incredibly strong political organizations, and it worked, they took control of every facet of the city, but they never abandoned that us against the world ethos. They hated blacks before busing became an issue because they reflexively hated everyone who wasn't Irish, but they saw the busing program as an attempt to break up their neighborhoods by taking their kids all over the city, and their fear of losing their grip turned into hatred of the blacks, and it never really went away.

It really is completely different now, though. Racists are uneducated and poor people who are all variations in the characters in Mystic River, and they can't afford to live in the city anymore so they are moving out and being replaced by tons of liberal yuppies. We have a black governor, and sports tickets are too expensive for the racists to come now either, everyone drives in from Newton and Wellesley and Weston and Brookline now. Of course, no black people can afford to go to sporting events either, so our crowds are incredibly homogeneous, but hey, what can you do?

[HGervais]

Thank you Chris.

[Future Man]

Busing.

[Chris_Sax]

Busing.

I suck.

[Jon Mercer]

Busing.

The act of being Gary Busey?

[Doc Holliday]

only the South bothers trying to keep alive the values of a war they lost