A City Too Busy To Hate
And what that phrase really means
You won’t find a better example of modern Southern passive-aggression then this “concession” video from mayoral canidate Mary Norwood.
Norwood posted the four minute video last night, bringing an anticlimactic, sputtering conclusion to an explosive and bitterly fought run-off mayoral campaign between Mary Norwood and Keisha Lance-Bottoms. After the newspaper and TV stations delcared Bottoms as winner by 800 votes the day after the election, Norwood requested a recount. Then the next day she asked her supporters to report “administrative problems” and “voter intimidation.”
Finally, after dragging it out, Norwood released this “concession” video, the gist being that she’s doing everyone a favor by “deciding” not to contest the results — despite, she mentioned in passing, some “irregularities.”
There’s a lot to unpack in the video, but let’s start where Norwood starts: “a city too busy to hate.”
It’s a popular set of words closely aligned with Atlanta. Most Americans have probably heard this phrase at least once. For Atlantan’s part, they love it; its everywhere, on murals, posters, and shirts.
The phrase is over fifty years old, a marketing slogan attributed to Mayor Ivan Allen who spent millions of dollars in the 1960s to promote Atlanta as a business-oriented city, a city moving past its racial past and into a brilliant new future.
Mayor Allen was far from perfect when it came to race, both by our standards and 1960s standards, but he did some things to move the city forward. He sat down with people of color in the City Hall cafeteria. He removed the Jim Crow signs from all civic buildings. He apologized for the so-called “Atlanta Wall,” a racialized physical barrier he himself had ordered built to designate where white and black people could live in Atlanta.
And so “a city too busy to hate” persisted long past Allen’s administration. Civic leaders and Atlantans use the phrase all the time.
We can assume, given Allen’s other actions during his administration, that Allen meant the phrase to be heard by white people. The hate was theirs to let go.
But here, 50 years later, in Norwood’s concession speech (which, by the way, looks she filmed it on a discarded Divergent set) she is twisting the original meaning and directing the phrase towards black people.
This is how she does it. She first frames her campaign and entire outlook as part of this “city too busy to hate” narrative. According to her video, Norwood is simply a nice person, trying to do nice things for everyone by being mayor.
The “but” comes at 2:02 in the video, when Norwood says that people called her a racist. People were being “divisive. People made the race all about race. People sowed division.
And these people violated the spirit of a city too busy to hate.
And by people, she can only mean people of color.
Why? Though some white people voted for Bottoms, and some black people voted for Norwood and endorsed her, these were outliers. Overwhelmingly race split the vote.
How covenient for Norwood that race doesn’t matter for months leading up to the campaign, and then here, when she loses, it suddnely does matter.
This convenience is a quintessential attribute of White Southernism.
Look at the way she answers when asked, “Is Atlanta still the city too busy to hate?”
Norwood :
“When I’m out in the neighborhoods, I see people getting along wonderfully — people who are very diverse … but what gets in our way is power and money. Who has it, who wants it … Race is framing this. But we as Atlantans are better than this. And what I see every day is people in Atlanta crossing lines, crossing artificial barriers, working together.
There’s some truth in her statement, the power and money piece. And it’s nice to see her finally acknowledge that race is a thing. She implies that race is an “artificial barrier,” and all that needs to happen to fix the problem is to work together. It’s that easy. She’s seeing it happen out there on the streets.
As if it wasn’t and weren’t white people putting up the barriers up in the first place. Literally.
But she’s suggesting, as she did throughout the campaign, that if people could just discard the notion of race, we’d all be better off.
It’s not just covenient, but it’s naive. It’s the expression of an unwavering belief that the absence of conflict is a barometer of progress.
This is yet another legacy of racist White Southernism.
Historian David Blight documents how former slaveowners in the 1890s collected stories of “negro devotion,” and went as far to organize happy “reunions” of slaves with their former owners. All of this was predicated on the idea that things are better when black people just move on and get along with white people, the way white people want them to.
Beyond the turn of this particular phrase in the concession video, Norwood’s campaign regularly flirted with language used also by the alt-right movement, itself a marriage between White Southernism and Nazi Euro-centricism. Her campaign slogan, that she’d be Mayor of “All Atlanta,” implied that other candidates were only for a specific part of Atlanta, that part presumably being black.
When seeing the Norwood yard signs, it was hard for one to disregard the slogan’s similarity to “all lives matter.”
The “all lives matter” is a tried and true method for the alt-right to be racist at arms length, a method dating back to Jim Crow itself. It’s dogwhistling and plausible deniability, a wink to fellow whites, and a feigned, Southern “How dare you accuse me?” when directly confronted.
Another Atlantan example of this is the one documented by Kevin Kruse in his history of Atlanta’s neigborhoods in the 1940s. Black vets were coming back from WWII and using their benefits to buy homes in historically white neighborhoods in Southwest Atlanta. At first the KKK resisted violently, with physical threats and bombs and burning crosses. But those methods no longer worked; blacks kept moving in.
Instead, the KKK adopted sublter tactics. They reorganized into homeowner associations, and instead of outwardly mentioning race, they used the language of decreasing home values to advocate for codification. This codification would, for a while, prevent blacks from moving in. It was this movement that later led to the construction of the Atlanta Wall — the same wall that Mayor Allen would have to apologize for in order to broker political power with rising black political power.
Jim Crow as a method persists to 2018 because it works. It enables white people like Norwood to use phrases that reassure other white people that she is on their side, while also providing plausible deniability to any accusations of outright racism. It’s a adroit flip into feigned victimization.
At 1:58 in her video, Norward is basically saying “Who, me? Racist? How dare you.”
At the same forum where Norwood explained her interpretation of “a city too busy to hate,” other candidates did the same.
Peter Aman’s response was insightful and oddly philosophical; he endearingly misquoted Holocaust survivor Ellie Wiesel by suggesting that the opposite of hate is indifference (Wiesel said that indifference is the opposite of love, but whatever), and that Atlanta has a lot of indifference.
John Eaves was the most honest, citing the segregation of schools and churches as evidence that “a city too busy to hate” is merely a phrase and not the reality, and well, what are you going to do.
Most of the other candidates weren’t as bleak, but also didn’t embrace the phrase, instead preferring to acknowledge the problem of an inequitable city and then of course offer their own campaign promises to fix it.
Besides Norwood, one other candidate embraced the motto: Keisha Lance-Bottom.
She said:
That’s still our core value — that we are the city too busy to hate … I watched my son sob one day, and it was shocking to me. He said, ‘Mom, you just don’t understand how hard it is to be a black boy now.’ And it breaks my heart. We have to acknowledge it and confront we still have issues about who we are in this country, and then we can truly be the city too busy to hate.
I’ve mentioned before that Bottoms and Norwood are two sides of the same coin.
But at least Bottoms acknowledged that we need to acknowledge the issues. That’s a start I guess.
Though, it’s tough to believe her when Bottoms’ first act as Mayor wasn’t to acknowledge these issues, perhaps by addressing housing inequality, or displacement, or job or health access.
Instead, her first act was to expand the police force, a contentious and arguably symbolic act in a post Michael Brown — hell, a post Emmet Till — world.
Sure, progress has been made in Atlanta in the last 50 years since Mayor Allen first coined the slogan.
Maybe Atlanta hates less than it did?
But you wouldn’t know it if you looked at income distribution as recent as 2015, or displacement of the poor as far back as the 1996 Olympics or as recent this year along the Beltline.
Given all that, and more, it’s safe to say that Atlanta has never stopped hating. It just transferred the hate to a low boil. It’s put hate at an arms length. Made it something in the shadows, rather than outright in the light. Systematic rather than personal.
Not unlike the KKK as homeowner association in Southwest Atlanta in the 1940s and 50s. We don’t hate black people, we just hate the low housing values they bring with them.
Or: Me? I’m not racist; black people are racist when they bring up race. How dare you suggest such a thing.
It’s time for Atlantans, leaders and citizens alike, to stop using the phrase “a city too busy to hate.”
Words have meaning. Whether we intend to or not, saying the phrase buys into and buoys a system of hierarchy built by racist White Southernism over the course of centuries. Is Norwood a racist? Probably not. She seems sweet. But maybe? This is how this kind of thing works; we can’t ever really know.
But what is clearer is what Norwood directly means when she releases a four minute video that begins with her saying that Atlanta is a “city too busy to hate.” She wants the absence of conflict.
That’s not good. In his Letter from a Birmingham jail, Dr. King called this kind of psuedo-peace “a negative peace.”
When, what Atlanta really needs, is exactly what Dr. King suggests: the presence of justice.
Less of Norwood’s negative peace, and more of this justice kind of peace, the kind that really only comes with the presence and resolution of conflict.
It’s working our salvation out with sweat. It’s listening to Dr. King’s admonition to narrow the gap between what Atlanta professes and what Atlanta practices. It’s disentangling what Dr. King called illusions wrapped in superficiality.
Perhaps it’s time Atlanta — white Atlanta, like Mary Norwood, and myself — stops for a moment, stops being so busy dealing with dealing, and deal with race head on.
Atlanta needs to stop being city too busy to hate, and find the time to do some old fashioned hating — hating towards the things that make our city so unfair.
Perhaps it’s not just time, but high time. Perhaps it was time to stop using the phrase back in 1963, when a group of white and black college students gathered at Christmastime outside Mayor Allen’s home and protested the slogan by singing Christmas carols and holding up the sign “Black is not a vice nor is segregation a virtue but Atlanta’s image is a fraud.”
Hmm.
That last bit, “Atlanta’s image is a fraud,” isn’t as catchy or positive as a “city too busy to hate,” but . . . it rings truer.
