Time Will Tell
___________________________________________________________________
washingtonpost.com
A Song of Sorrow -- and Endurance
By Jim HoaglandSunday, October 2, 2005; B07
Excerpt from Editorial:
Look, the poor people of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas already know how part of the story ends, even as Congress starts it by appropriating tens of billions of reconstruction dollars they will never see. Fast-talking city slickers of all races and the politically adept of all persuasions will find ways to corral those dollars and leave the poor once again with the crumbs. Why would this be different from everything they have known before?
___________________________________________________________________
White Southerners of my age will remember the segregated drinking fountains, the separate entrances for blacks and whites, the hovels in the “Hayti’s” and Walltown's of every little Southern town, where poverty beyond anything anyone who did not live in the South in those times can imagine: dirt floors, no running water, no indoor plumbing, dirt streets, no sidewalks, no paint on the barren boards of the shacks, and the dusty, dusky plain faces of the black folks living in those “neighborhoods” (read ghettos) from which there were no exits.
Even well-to-do blacks were relegated to functionally ‘richer’ ghettos: the black college professors of North Carolina College in Durham, the black funeral home owners, the administrators of black-owned businesses, lived elsewhere than Hayti but were still ghetto-ized.
Durham, North Carolina changed with the decades. I only returned twice in the thirty years after I left the South, and each time I saw the changes in the black citizens of Durham: better jobs, new cars, bright, shiny, well-groomed and well-dressed children with open eyes, friendly folks who took my ‘Yankee’ accent as proof that I was no racist. But the razor-edge of resentment still percolated just beneath the surface of these people, and I, for one, did not blame them for their resentment.
As I watched the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina, I realized that poverty among black folks in New Orleans has not much changed from the Sixties and Seventies in North Carolina. Thirty years later, not much has changed in the Deep South.
The Black Diaspora of this age has moved some of these people to places like Washington State, which currently has 3, 000 victims of Hurricane Katrina living here: primarily black folks who will realize that they can open their eyes and relax to some extent the constant vigil against racism that permeates the psyches of black Southerners. They can live in places where their children no longer must wear the definitions of black as defined by the South.
I have, on occasion, seen young Afro-American men transplanted for whatever reasons to the area of Washington State in which I live, and they came here wearing (still) the deferential masque of black male with white woman: downcast eyes, the “yes-ums” and “no’m’s” , and that peculiar and subservient look of the deep South black. I have watched their metamorphosis into bright and articulate and proud young black men over scant weeks after arriving here in Spokane.
Nobody can tell me that these transplanted people will want to return to New Orleans. Nobody can tell me that these people will want to take their children back to the oppressions of the New Orleans that they knew.
Racism still exists here in the Northwest. No doubt about it. The KKK fanatics are close by, but to now, they are diminished and whenever they decide to get out their sheets and march, all the locals come out to protest their existence. We all know they hate everybody except hillbilly whites.
Perhaps racism in the Pacific Northwest is reserved for local and indigenous Native American tribes, and blacks, for the most part, represent a somewhat exotic portion of our society which has historically not been particularly well-represented in this area of the country.
Perhaps Hurricane Katrina will be the death-knell of Deep South racism and poverty. Perhaps this diaspora will result in the general betterment of America.
Time will tell.
washingtonpost.com
A Song of Sorrow -- and Endurance
By Jim HoaglandSunday, October 2, 2005; B07
Excerpt from Editorial:
Look, the poor people of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas already know how part of the story ends, even as Congress starts it by appropriating tens of billions of reconstruction dollars they will never see. Fast-talking city slickers of all races and the politically adept of all persuasions will find ways to corral those dollars and leave the poor once again with the crumbs. Why would this be different from everything they have known before?
___________________________________________________________________
White Southerners of my age will remember the segregated drinking fountains, the separate entrances for blacks and whites, the hovels in the “Hayti’s” and Walltown's of every little Southern town, where poverty beyond anything anyone who did not live in the South in those times can imagine: dirt floors, no running water, no indoor plumbing, dirt streets, no sidewalks, no paint on the barren boards of the shacks, and the dusty, dusky plain faces of the black folks living in those “neighborhoods” (read ghettos) from which there were no exits.
Even well-to-do blacks were relegated to functionally ‘richer’ ghettos: the black college professors of North Carolina College in Durham, the black funeral home owners, the administrators of black-owned businesses, lived elsewhere than Hayti but were still ghetto-ized.
Durham, North Carolina changed with the decades. I only returned twice in the thirty years after I left the South, and each time I saw the changes in the black citizens of Durham: better jobs, new cars, bright, shiny, well-groomed and well-dressed children with open eyes, friendly folks who took my ‘Yankee’ accent as proof that I was no racist. But the razor-edge of resentment still percolated just beneath the surface of these people, and I, for one, did not blame them for their resentment.
As I watched the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina, I realized that poverty among black folks in New Orleans has not much changed from the Sixties and Seventies in North Carolina. Thirty years later, not much has changed in the Deep South.
The Black Diaspora of this age has moved some of these people to places like Washington State, which currently has 3, 000 victims of Hurricane Katrina living here: primarily black folks who will realize that they can open their eyes and relax to some extent the constant vigil against racism that permeates the psyches of black Southerners. They can live in places where their children no longer must wear the definitions of black as defined by the South.
I have, on occasion, seen young Afro-American men transplanted for whatever reasons to the area of Washington State in which I live, and they came here wearing (still) the deferential masque of black male with white woman: downcast eyes, the “yes-ums” and “no’m’s” , and that peculiar and subservient look of the deep South black. I have watched their metamorphosis into bright and articulate and proud young black men over scant weeks after arriving here in Spokane.
Nobody can tell me that these transplanted people will want to return to New Orleans. Nobody can tell me that these people will want to take their children back to the oppressions of the New Orleans that they knew.
Racism still exists here in the Northwest. No doubt about it. The KKK fanatics are close by, but to now, they are diminished and whenever they decide to get out their sheets and march, all the locals come out to protest their existence. We all know they hate everybody except hillbilly whites.
Perhaps racism in the Pacific Northwest is reserved for local and indigenous Native American tribes, and blacks, for the most part, represent a somewhat exotic portion of our society which has historically not been particularly well-represented in this area of the country.
Perhaps Hurricane Katrina will be the death-knell of Deep South racism and poverty. Perhaps this diaspora will result in the general betterment of America.
Time will tell.
posted by FancyRage at 9:50 PM
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