Hearing people talk today in the south, you'd think we're all a rainbow coalition of peace, brotherhood and fuzziness! Everybody in the south claims to be colorblind nowadays. Jim Crow? Segregation?? That was years ago!! We're so past that, I'm not racist at all- why just yesterday me and my black friend at work went out to lunch! Would I do that if I was racist??
I think a lot of people are stuck in the mindset that racism only comes in the form of white hoods and lynchings. So if you live and work with people of other races and subscribe to general platitudes about racial equality, like "we're all god's children", then apparently you're in the clear.
I think that's setting the bar way too low. Because, from my experience, these same people will also say terrible things about other races and make really unfair generalizations. A common topic that comes up among whites down here is welfare. Apparently, every person on welfare is black and they're refusing to work or keep their legs closed in order to keep those checks coming in. Every problem in America seems to come back to this. And it's never, "some people" or "some black people on welfare" it's always, "the blacks on welfare." But then they'll compliment their black friend at work who (miraculously) broke the cycle in order to save face.
So, in the end, they seem to use their apparent colorblindness as a crutch to defend their racist attitudes. Things are better now, segregation is over, and any problem in the black community is not a residual effect of the racial hierarchies that have been in effect for centuries, but is instead a moral failing or weakness that black people are solely responsible for.
And for the record, I'm not entirely blameless either. It would be wrong to make this indictment yet exclude myself from blame, since this is exactly what many of the people I'm talking about do to escape criticism or self evaluation. Also, it's weirdly comforting to know that other areas of the country are dealing with this same attitude. The south always has to carry this burden of racism when it really exists everywhere.
My thoughts exactly
