https://www.census.gov/...tlas/censr01-106.pdf

look at page 4 ( listed as page 39) of the .pdf

I'd add that those counties in the south that are majority black are low population rural counties.

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It doesn't really matter what Phil is saying, the music of his voice is the appropriate soundtrack for a bicycle race. HTupolev

So you decided to live where you think it is best for you and you like it best. Ok.

Before you speak of your impression of people in Alabama and their racism, you need to establish some street cred first.

Tell us about the demographics of your life. What percentage of people on your phone address book are black? How many black people live on your street? What percentage of people with whom you interact socially are black? What volunteer work have you done this month to help poor black people?

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It doesn't really matter what Phil is saying, the music of his voice is the appropriate soundtrack for a bicycle race. HTupolev

That pdf refutes your thesis. It shows the data I referenced, there are counties North of the South with more than 25% black population

edited based on scorpio's comment.

many of the counties in the South are rural black, but some also not. For example DeKalb (part of City of Atlanta) isn't. Population appx 700k. for what it is worth, Maryland would have been included in my "South" comment. i think the point remains the same though -- much of the country, especially west of the Mississippi river, is super-majority white. by default there will be different perceptions of race, and necessarily more interactions with people of other races.

scorpio, if i can find the map i have at home, i'll try to figure out how to post. maybe there is a slightly different definition of "black" to ferret out the dozen or so counties in the entire country that aren't in the south with greater than a 25% black population. certainly based on the information you posted you'll agree there are none greater than 50% anywhere in the country other than the south. for the sake of argument, i'll acknowledge that there may be a handful of counties with a black population greater than 25%, but my point is that it matters. people in Oregon who have always lived in Oregon don't have any standing to argue race relations based on experience.

MOP_Roy -- i wasn't trying to hijack your thread with demographic info, but i think demographics explain a lot of political/voting choices people make. i primarily vote democrat, so does my wife, live in suburban Georgia an hour from ATL. we struggle with the guns first/Jesus first/social concerns be damned attitude here as well. (acknowledging i'm broad brushing). but there are tremendous upsides. i don't criticize your "x"ing out the south. i do think though there would be plenty of places in the south where you'd now be comfortable -- especially on the coasts, florida, atlanta, the college towns, etc... the more urban areas and the areas where there has been an inflow of outsiders or college educated has changed attitude wise. that has an entirely different set of problems (see the geechee people being taxed out of their generationally owned land off the Georgia and South Carolina coasts for example).

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Look at what areas had real problems with red-lining and the like most recently, and the story of institutionalized racism gets a lot more real, and a lot more northern. I'm reminded of a quote from a great thinker: "I like my beer cold, my TV loud, and my homosexuals fuhlaming". I don't doubt many brown people prefer the more overt racist, to the subtle.

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edit to credit the phrase to Homer Simpson

Did you think you wouldn't? What was the point of your OP, other than to highlight your disdain for the south based on a vote that happened 17 years ago which you recently read in a book which reminded you why you don't like it down here? Your post comes across as if you think you're better than others, especially the others of us who live in the south. It's a ridiculous notion.

And as for your 40% number, I remember that vote and I wasn't proud of it. But in context, it's not like the rest of the nation felt all that differently about inter-racial marriage then. Google shows me that that 60/40 number was about the national average in 2000. You'll probably stay snuggled up in your outrage, but Alabama didn't vote any differently than the entire country may have.

http://www.gallup.com/...e-blacks-whites.aspx

Didn't realize I need to provide this forum with a list of "street cred" in defense of a family decision my wife and I have come to based off choosing not to live in a region of the world that we have actually ALREADY LIVED IN for almost four decades...

Demographics of my high school -60% black / 40% white small town public school. I was one of 2 white guys in the basketball program. Not team, the entire program (coaching staff, Varsity, JV, Frosh, and development teams). My wife works four days a week literally driving through medicaid serviced urban St Louis communities providing medical care to those in need (Ferguson was her a.m. service area yesterday, lots of substance abuse / addiction / mental illness, mostly black, 100% lower class / poverty level). The demographics in my early adult neighborhoods and phone book were determined by military service rank, so I had no real control over that. Lots of people from all flavors of backgrounds, from the junior-est enlisted to senior officer. Post retirement, lots of flavor in my current apartment phone book, its mostly medical students and young interns, I say about 40% of which are not American by birth, given the varied languages I hear and study groups I see in the lobby, at the pool, and walking their dogs. I've personally met white, black, Turk, Afghan, Japanese, and Korean that live in my complex. As I said previously, my father-in-law is black (as is our extended family).

The whole "do you have 'black' friends? question is a bit played.

Wdrhoads, understand your points. As a once die-hard conservative, GOP politics of the last 10-15 years have slowly driven me to the left. Although I have always considered myself a candidate voter (instead of party voter), I find myself identifying more with left positions and candidates (that's for another thread). People seem to have gotten the idea that I'm sitting here raging against the evils of racism and that is in itself the sole cause of my dislike of the south. It isn't. Again, I've spent almost all of my life there, with the exception of a few years in Cali, a few in Japan, and a few more in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is a whole laundry list of things that make my family not want to go there. State / Local officials who insist on flying rebel flags and the ten commandants on state / local government property, limitations what my wife is allowed to do professionally due to state medical requirements, the prevalence of truck nutz (and yes, I'm serious on this one), as you put it "Jesus / Gun first mentality", the dominance of the GOP and 'family values' (which loosely translates to me as Christian values forced down your throat). These are just a few that immediately pop to mind. I received my undergrad from Auburn so I'm very familiar with and like Atlanta. And I know there are great people and communities everywhere, the south included. However, when we look at things from the macro level and prioritize what's important to us as we raise our family, places in the south don't rise to the top of the list. I've lived there. For a LONG time. No desire to go back.

Why does everyone always use the word "outrage" when I post something in the LR? Disappointment in my fellow humans is more accurate. 17 years isn't that long ago (and any place is walking distance if you have the time). Honestly, in 2000, I was more worried about getting my platoon of Marines ready to go on deployment from North Carolina to the med, so I had no idea of voting issues on the ballot in Alabama. The point of my post was to use the LR as a place to vent my continued frustration on a human failing from MY OWN HOME STATE and in general. (realizing that in that statement, I am guilty of broad, sweeping, over-generalization) As to "not much different than any where else", since Alabama was literally the last to vote it off the books, the facts might lead one to make a different conclusion.

My translation: If you you're lucky/rich/intelligent enough, you can insulate yourself from the ilk that give the South a bad name and have no idea why people play the bumkin card when referring to it.

For me, its a numbers game. Do I want to put myself in a place where there is a 40% chance of experiencing overt racism? I know its statistically fallacious, but the basic idea applies. Do I want to do anything where there is a 40% of something undesirable happening? No. I have a lot of relatives in Pennsylvania's Appalachia region. Ill visit for funerals. Otherwise, I just cant deal with the willful ignorance and racism (e.g. In reference to my Chinese wife, there was repeated mention of "At least she's not a n****r"). Yes, there are pockets of enlightenment, but they are few and far between, at least geographically. To plop myself down in one of those areas and be insulted when its lumped in with the areas around it is just as dishonest as claiming the whole state is backwards.

Its like an oasis in the middle of the Sahara that gets pissed off because its lumped in with 'desert'.

Well all you have established so far is that you care so much for black people in Alabama that you want to trumpet that you'll never live there. Ok.

So you are in the St. Louis area. Lots of poor black communities there. What you doing for them?

Whining about an Alabama vote 17 years ago on the internet -- that's gonna change the world. But I guess it makes you feel good.

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It doesn't really matter what Phil is saying, the music of his voice is the appropriate soundtrack for a bicycle race. HTupolev

Whining about an Alabama vote was actually part of the title to the thread. It does actually make me feel better. Expressing my frustration goes a long way to reaching peace with an issue in my process. :)

As far as your continued insistence on my singular focus on racism as a reason I dislike the south / Alabama, I can only assume that you are either trolling or willfully ignoring the rest of my posts where I go into other personal family calculus. Either way, you win and your next "gotcha post" to me will be the end of our exchange. Thanks for the help

I don't know but if "everyone" takes your posts the same way maybe it's you and not them.

Most of your reply was a deflection from the issue. I basically showed you that the thing you were outraged about in Alabama was pretty much the tenor of the entire nation at the time. You shoulda just said "oops" with a blushy face emoji. Lots of states have antiquated laws on the books that they don't bother to remove because they are trumped by federal law. The only way to change a law in Alabama is to amend the constitution. It's cumbersome. People don't like doing it. In fact, I know people (with whom I disagree) who voted no on this because they thought it unnecessary because the federal law on this was 30 years old already at the time and they hate seeing any amendments to the constitution on the ballot. I didn't like their vote because I thought it would give ignorant people a reason to throw darts at us unnecessarily if a lot of people voted no.

Apparently you live near St Louis. I could probably make lots of generalized criticisms about that, but why would I, unless I just wanted to be a dick?

Well as you can see, you'd have had to leave the country to escape that number in 2000, statistically speaking.

To your google stat, I would offer while it is a relevant data point, the fact that Alabama still had the law on the books (instead of an underlying personal opinion in some percentage of the population) is meaningful. Racism is everywhere (I saw my first live kkk group in full regalia in 1992 in Maryland of all places) but not having it ingrained in our legal system is a good start. Dinosaurs along with their outdated beliefs all die eventually.

As to disparaging St Louis, the wife and I do it almost daily. We live in the city and the crime, the food, the drivers are all horrible for starters. Like anywhere, we have our pockets of goodness, great school and school community for the munchin, easy access to a great park / running groups, and a job that my wife loves. We've promised our daughter five years here until we pack it up and move again. Hence our constant conversations about where we go next.

I've lived in the deep South, Savannah, GA. for >20yrs. I'm socially liberal, but a fical conservative. That makes me either a Blue Dog Dem or a libertarian.

The only time I ever saw a racist white person was an Army guy who'd immigrated with his parents from Rhodesia. The government had taken their family farm and given it to the locals, who promptly destroyed it.

IMO, we worry way too much about racism. Racism has been the norm since the 2nd human village 100k yrs ago. In our life times, but only in the minority of the planet known as "western culture" we've decided that (white) racism was ugly and had to go. In a very short time white racism has gone from perfectly acceptable, to the most vile epithet of our day.

The success of our small experiment, small both in terms of duration (vs. 100k yrs) and geographical region (western culture only) was/is a tremendous achievement. One that we should be very proud of. But instead, whitey is constantly berated as a racist. Any perceived slight, no matter how ludicrous, is fair grounds for whitey to be called a racist. We've made it the "goto" complaint against whites, and it's wearisome.

What I've seen, day after day, decade after decade, is whitey being excruciatingly not-racist. Whitey has event invented an odd contest where we sometimes try to out-do the other in expressions of, not just non-racism, but anti-racism.

We're never going to completely beat racism. It's too fundamentally human. But what we've done, by making racism completely intolerable in polite circles, is pretty darn awesome. At what point tho, are we going to call the fight against racism "largely a success"? Is it necessary that we find the last redneck in the last single-wide and demand that he sees things our way? Or can we accept that the redneck has the right, the freedom, to have his own dark shitty racist worldview.

Go to Mexico and see how the Mexicans with no Spanish heritage are treated. Go to any oriental country and see how the foreigners are treated. Anyone that complains about racism in our country needs to take a hard look at their measuring stick. Compared to any reasonable measure, meaning other epochs or countries, we've been fabulously successful at making whitey less racist.

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"If only he had used his genius for niceness, instead of Evil." M. Smart

Yes, it is when that is the case of any perceived slight. Let's not forget the fact that, as you point out, racism has existed for a hell of a long time and we've only went all-in on addressing it over the last ~60ish years. Overcoming the weight of history is a weight that takes a while to move. There's resistance to it. We see it in things like the OP's point about mixed-race marriage laws still being on the books as recently as 17 years ago. We see it in cultural stereotypes that take generations to die off, stereotypes that most all of us have heard or grown up around, hoping that our children, grandchildren, and beyond can see the majority of those buried. We see it in things like incarceration rates today and laws that, purposefully or coincidentally, have adversely impacted minority populations. We saw it in the way the FHA redlined minorities from home ownership, a blow to generational wealth that takes generations to overcome, something white folks haven't experienced.

There has been improvement. And quickly. That's incredible to see, incredible to live through.

And racism still lives on and always will to a degree, not being limited to just the white folks. But as white people we cannot go without acknowledging that we've been in charge of Western society for as long as it's existed; we've held the power and with that have come certain privileges which take time to even out, and that evening out cannot be undone in 60 years of effort when there are still living hearts and minds who advanced awful forms of racism, so the changing of hearts and minds overall comes with generational death and then more changes to systematic structures.


You're right, though, that we'll never completely beat it. I don't think anyone expects that to be the case. If there's one thing that unites all of us as humans, it's that we're all going to struggle in some way, have pain in our own ways, and die. What most of us can do a better job of as white people is recognizing and acknowledging that some people experience a pain and struggle so different than our own simply by a thing they cannot control and while we're being much better and more successful about that as a society we cannot say that our efforts are over and that it's "good enough." Before we can say we've really succeeded, I think we need to be in a place where the history we're teaching about racial justice no longer has surviving perpetrators of the deep injustices and is yet further a couple of generations removed from them.

Above and beyond our discussion about Alabama, I am grateful for your service to our country. Thank you.

Now, turning to your comments about Alabama:


Now did I strike a nerve? ;)


Ok. So you have a number of reasons for disliking Alabama, and I'm glad you are somewhere where you are happier. But the primary reason you gave in your OP for disliking Alabama was racism.

I was not trolling you, but was trying to determine whether when it comes to suffering of black people in the south you are a doer or a talker. Moving away from a troubled area to a place where things are nicer is not necessarily a noble action. Yes, with these questions and statements, I'm calling to question your character. Perhaps that is uncalled for and is just poor behavior as a result of my living in backwards, bible-thumping, NRA, I-have-a-nicer-boat-than-you Alabama.

Further, it is simply not true in the year 2000, or today, that 40% of Alabamians are opposed to inter-racial marriage. First, you need to specify what percentage of the populace voted in that election? (Answer, about 15% of registered voters voted no.) I don't ) Second, research what percentage of Alabamians vote "NO" reflexively on constitutional amendments without even reading them in Alabama (there are several or as many as a dozen on every ballot)? (This was pointed out by SL.) I haven't researched it but I don't recall any amendments getting a supermajority vote.

Certainly some Alabamians are racist. However, this one vote does not prove that they are more racist than other states. Also, keep in mind that Missouri was one of the states that still banned inter-racial marriage at the time of the Supreme Court Loving decision.

But if you, or anyone, is concerned about the plight of black people in Alabama, you can come visit me in Birmingham. I can put you in touch with a small group of people that provide food, clothing, and youth activities next to a public housing project. The mostly retired volunteers are about 65% white/35% black. The recipients of the services are 95% black. Volunteers are always needed.

Maybe after a couple days you'd get a different impression of people and race relations in Alabama and the south. Maybe not. But you'd be doing something to help suffering people.

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It doesn't really matter what Phil is saying, the music of his voice is the appropriate soundtrack for a bicycle race. HTupolev

Imo the folks that obsess over whitey being racist are killing the black community. The black male is failing. College graduation rates are lower then incarceration rates by what, an order of magnitude?

35% of black kids suspended or expelled (age 7-12). http://www.naacp.org/...-justice-fact-sheet/
25-30% of black males will spend time behind bars. The precise # depends on the source you use.

I remember a quote from Jesse Jackson where he expressed his relief that, while walking down a dark urban street, that the foot steps behind him turned out to be a white guy.

>10yrs ago we had a nanny for a couple years for 2 infants and a toddler. Years after we'd gone our separate ways, she invited us to her 50th birthday party. Black tie. Our table, all 5 of us, was the only white folks there in this filled banquet hall. Black woman after black woman took the podium and spoke. It was really an eye opener. I heard story after story of strong black women holding the family together because of absent husbands, problem sons, and then problem grandsons. It was stirring.

Imo the black community, particularly the black male, is in crisis and it's not going to be fixed until they quit blaming whitey for their struggles. It's not whitey that is destroying the black family. Well, except for the entirely predictable damage that the well-intended government handouts caused. Oh, and another thing to lay at whitey's feet. Every white person that wrings their hands re. the burdens that racism imposes on the black community is complicit in their problems. Those folks are killing the black community with their ill-considered sympathy.

The only way the black community is going to fix themselves is with a big dose of personal responsibility. Parents need to focus on the values that they imprint in their kids, and the parents need to send those kids to school with the idea that if they don't excel, it will be their ass when they get home. Those kids need to go to school with the same attitudes as little Jewish kids where they know they are expected to do their very best and enter professional careers.

No, I'm not Jewish. What I am is white. And therefore I can't safely say anything in public because anything that could possibly POSSIBLY be construed as criticism, immediately brands you a racist. Because it's always racism. It's always external forces. It's really easy to tell the difference between the folks that want to just feel good about themselves, vs. the folks that really want to help the black community. The former talk about racism, the latter talk about personal responsibility.

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Books @ Amazon
"If only he had used his genius for niceness, instead of Evil." M. Smart

You can just end your diatribe there. The deck is stacked against all sorts of folks, and you can lump in working class rural folks in the same boat. The game is played a certain way, and folks with less capital (monetary as well as educational) are economically and geographically frozen out of paths towrd upward mobility.

I don't agree that the deck is stacked against anyone in the U.S. People make horrible decisions and then compound them by making even worse decisions. If you graduate high school, don't have a baby until you're an adult and don't commit criminal acts your chances of living in poverty are extremely slim.
There are plenty of non white groups doing exceedingly well in this country. East Indian, Asian etc. So it's not skin color that's holding people back.

Black immigrants come here from Africa and the Caribbean and kick ass and take names all the time. It's not about the color of your skin. Get one of those recent immigrants talking about American blacks and they'll be so harsh that you, raised in a culture where speaking poorly of blacks is a serious offense, will feel so uncomfortable you'll want to get up and walk away.

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Books @ Amazon
"If only he had used his genius for niceness, instead of Evil." M. Smart