Reply #78: There is a line in James Joyce's Ulysses to the effect of

[PurpleChez]

"Ireland is the only nation that never persecuted the Jews...because it didn't let them in in the first place." Even though the story's protagonist is, in fact, a Jew.

Prejudice in the south is an odd thing. On the one hand, I think Southerners are more accustomed than many Northerners to live, or at least operate on a daily basis, in close proximity to African Americans. My admittedly amateur impression has been that Southerners don't see Blacks as outsiders to the extent that many Northerners do. I certainly don't mean to deny Jim Crow and lynchings and all of that. The old-school southern man may have been horrified at the idea of "mixing" and miscegination... But I think that Southerners on the whole were more used to sharing the streets, etc., with Blacks (so long as they "knew their place"), if only because the African-American presence in Northern cities became sizable only in relatively recent history. I remember living near Harrisburg PA in the 1970s, and when the first Black families moved into our town it was a major topic of conversation, while a comparable community in the South had probably had a Black community for two- or three-hundred years. I am in Athens GA, a funky lefty oasis in the middle of Bush Country. But even in more conservative settings (I worked in a hardware store for several years and overheard my share of RW diatribes) it seemed that most folks don't think twice about having Black neighbors, about their kids having Black classmates and Black teammates, about using the same stores, theaters, etc., as African-Americans. No one seems to have any overt interest in returning to the days of Jim Crow. BUT...fifty years on it still pisses them off something fierce that the gummint came in and made their granddaddies shut down the colored water fountains. They don't want to go back but it riles their notion of sovereignty that that they COULDN'T go back if they changed their minds.

Sorry for rambling....