for hours without ever being served.
The premise of Northernism, as presented by Dr. MartinLuther King, is that knowing someone’s race means nothing. He longed for the world where judgment was made on the content
of one’s character, while Bob Jones and Co. stared stubbornly at the color of one’s skin.
I ask you, for the record, who has won this argument in America?
THE SOUTH ROSE AGAIN
Forty years after the Civil Rights Movement, America is committed to the principles of southern-style segregation. Listen
to the national conversation on race, and all that’s missing forty years later are the dogs and fire hoses.
Glancing through the
Washington Post
in September 2001, for example, readers were asked the question “Is Chocolate City Turning Vanilla?” The piece was written
by Natalie Hopkinson, a
Post
staffer who tells of how proud she was to have bought a home in a downtown D.C. neighborhood. Buying this house in a gentrifying
neighborhood sent a message (in her own words): “We damn sure are not about to let white folk buy up all the property in D.C.”
She went on to decry the fact that white people—
affluent
white people, who are even worse for some reason—were moving into traditionally black neighborhoods. This is a bad thing.
“From our perspective,” she wrote, “integration is overrated. It’s time to reverse an earlier generation’s hopeful migration
into white communities and attend to some unfinished business in the ‘hood…. We not only have to invest in the inner city,
but we can’t let white people beat us to it.
“[My husband and I] wanted to hold a line, stake out our turf,” she went on. “As black middle-class parents, for example,
we may be more open [than whites] to the idea of sending our children to public schools…. Many whites want to help out, too,
and their privileged racial status can only improve the city’s prospects. But this is the Chocolate City.”
The conclusion: “A few months ago, as I left a take-out on Georgia Avenue, a gentleman passed me a flier. It invited me to
a community meeting where residents planned to debate the question, ‘Is the Chocolate City turning Vanilla?’… Not if I have
anything to say about it.”
Wow.
Now, ask yourself what is worse: that there was a college-educated, professional woman spouting racist homilies straight out
of the Jim Crow “concerned citizens’ councils” of the 1960s or that the
Washington Post
was comfortable enough with these overtly racist statements that it ran them without edits?
And how could anyone in the year 2001 get away with using the term “Chocolate City”? Why not “Nigger Town,” a favorite geographical
marker of the racist losers I grew up with? Both are racial road signs reading “Ours” and “Yours.”
In fact, Ms. Hopkinson is just one small voice in a national chorus of Americans, white and black, North and South, who long
to bring back segregation. In this modern, post-civil rights era of resurgent redneckery, the buzzword of the day is “resegregation,”
which is a code word for “good racism.” Self-declared leaders of America’s black community are, according to the
Boston Globe
, “tossing around the word ‘resegregation,’ using it with a new kindof cachet—segregation without the meanness of the fifties or the fire of the sixties.” Translation: There wasn’t anything
actually wrong with the idea of whites-only and blacks-only public spaces, segregated rest rooms, etc. There was just a failure
in the execution. These new black leaders want to have another try at racial segregation, doing it the
right
way.
Who knows, maybe they’ll take another crack at slavery while they’re at it…
The same
Boston Globe
piece quoted Deval Patrick, assistant attorney general for civil rights under President Clinton and a steadfast integrationist,
as saying that “integrationists are losing in a fight that was never fair. Since Martin
The premise of Northernism, as presented by Dr. MartinLuther King, is that knowing someone’s race means nothing. He longed for the world where judgment was made on the content
of one’s character, while Bob Jones and Co. stared stubbornly at the color of one’s skin.
I ask you, for the record, who has won this argument in America?
THE SOUTH ROSE AGAIN
Forty years after the Civil Rights Movement, America is committed to the principles of southern-style segregation. Listen
to the national conversation on race, and all that’s missing forty years later are the dogs and fire hoses.
Glancing through the
Washington Post
in September 2001, for example, readers were asked the question “Is Chocolate City Turning Vanilla?” The piece was written
by Natalie Hopkinson, a
Post
staffer who tells of how proud she was to have bought a home in a downtown D.C. neighborhood. Buying this house in a gentrifying
neighborhood sent a message (in her own words): “We damn sure are not about to let white folk buy up all the property in D.C.”
She went on to decry the fact that white people—
affluent
white people, who are even worse for some reason—were moving into traditionally black neighborhoods. This is a bad thing.
“From our perspective,” she wrote, “integration is overrated. It’s time to reverse an earlier generation’s hopeful migration
into white communities and attend to some unfinished business in the ‘hood…. We not only have to invest in the inner city,
but we can’t let white people beat us to it.
“[My husband and I] wanted to hold a line, stake out our turf,” she went on. “As black middle-class parents, for example,
we may be more open [than whites] to the idea of sending our children to public schools…. Many whites want to help out, too,
and their privileged racial status can only improve the city’s prospects. But this is the Chocolate City.”
The conclusion: “A few months ago, as I left a take-out on Georgia Avenue, a gentleman passed me a flier. It invited me to
a community meeting where residents planned to debate the question, ‘Is the Chocolate City turning Vanilla?’… Not if I have
anything to say about it.”
Wow.
Now, ask yourself what is worse: that there was a college-educated, professional woman spouting racist homilies straight out
of the Jim Crow “concerned citizens’ councils” of the 1960s or that the
Washington Post
was comfortable enough with these overtly racist statements that it ran them without edits?
And how could anyone in the year 2001 get away with using the term “Chocolate City”? Why not “Nigger Town,” a favorite geographical
marker of the racist losers I grew up with? Both are racial road signs reading “Ours” and “Yours.”
In fact, Ms. Hopkinson is just one small voice in a national chorus of Americans, white and black, North and South, who long
to bring back segregation. In this modern, post-civil rights era of resurgent redneckery, the buzzword of the day is “resegregation,”
which is a code word for “good racism.” Self-declared leaders of America’s black community are, according to the
Boston Globe
, “tossing around the word ‘resegregation,’ using it with a new kindof cachet—segregation without the meanness of the fifties or the fire of the sixties.” Translation: There wasn’t anything
actually wrong with the idea of whites-only and blacks-only public spaces, segregated rest rooms, etc. There was just a failure
in the execution. These new black leaders want to have another try at racial segregation, doing it the
right
way.
Who knows, maybe they’ll take another crack at slavery while they’re at it…
The same
Boston Globe
piece quoted Deval Patrick, assistant attorney general for civil rights under President Clinton and a steadfast integrationist,
as saying that “integrationists are losing in a fight that was never fair. Since Martin
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