What clear storytelling and a beautiful voice. What is strange is that the first paragraph reflects my experience almost exactly. Moving from New York State to Pittsburgh for college (you know, not the Philly city) I experienced a lightly different attitude of character of the place. But after graduating and moving to Mississippi for grad school on the recommendation of my father, who believed experience is the master and himself was based in Texas during the Korean world, a whole different world than New York City and white (at the time) Newark, New Jersey, I realized a profound shift. However, because I was raised in western New York and went to white school with the same diversity as yours in Philly, I had a good ‘native’ understanding of racism in America as a backdrop that kept me out of Arkansas which somehow seemed a “step down” from even Mississippi.
Or so I thought. Within the first few weeks I was order my usual breakfast next to my graduate student office, not ordering the usual Southern breakfast of a Coke and Donut but a milk and donut, the middle-age white woman at the campus bakery counter asked me, after seeing me as a regular after the first week, “Soooo, where are you from?” The sugary overly sweetened Southern way of drawling out the question immediately told me something to reflect in my heart what I Conley thought with my mind. “I’m from up near Niagara Falls, on the border of Canada.” Again, she seemed suddenly almost over-nice and even a bit slower. “Oooooh, sooo yer a Yaaang-keee.” I had that feeling again I had before when studying in Germany or living in France: I’m in a foreign country. I was in a place where I might struggle to learn the “language” but felt I would never truly belong in.
The whites were so separated from me, and I found myself befriending the “odd bunch”: a few foreigners, some white art students, northeastern professors looking for conversation in their style, one with intellectual curiosity and not merely showing group acceptance or denial based on pre-arranged judgements in every talk. I encountered some moments of pure terror: accidentally offending a younger white male student and the confront by a violent physical threat to pulverize me so disproportional to some trifle I said briefly said from a shallow and passing encounter. What exactly set him off? It was foreign his response, as well a dangerous. I was not in *my* America.
Danger has a way of searing a memory into the mind so brightly that we forget what surrounded it. Looking back with distance, I noticed the quite around those few terrifying moments. I realized every black American I encountered was friendly, never threatening and only warm. They were living under that sudden white male wrath and had been for so long. They too knew the fear of Deep South, a country of white origin. In fact, the value are different there. America does not just differ by regional dialects, but by a division of mental values stemming from two very different regions of opposing beliefs. You have now lived in both and perhaps have experienced all three sides of it. Don’t take Arkansas to be all of America, but it is a more dark country representing a violent white male character that forces female agreement through physical expression of fear, like ripping the baseball cap off a girls head because it looked “wrong.”
That insidious expression of a cancerous mindset spread outward across America in its posts Civil War expansionist period, settling in states and regions as a power hostile to Democractic principles upon America’s founding. Do not blame the disease for trying to kill the patient. Blame the doctor who went into cure it, then withdrew from fear—which we call the Great Compromise of 1877. They were afraid to stay, not knowing then what need know now: the cure from cancer is chemotherapy, which freezes the good cells from growing while radiology comes in to kill the tumor. They withdrew back then, after 12 years of attempt therapy, not real understanding the main tool they had, voting, letting black Americans vote, could be so easily resisted by the terror of lynching violence and the mutation of the legal gene to disguise itself in Jim Crow.
Democracy really requires either whole organ transplant and living through the sudden shock, or a complex mixture like chemo, radiation and immunotherapy patiently delivered and constantly administered. I’m afraid the first choice was tried and failed. The second is still being developed, and our current head surgeon in the White House really doesn’t seem interested in administering it and only went into the profession for the money. Don’t blame the country of disease it brought from the Old World. Blame the doctors who have little patience administering the cure.
