Vivi McBride
Sep 9, 2018 · 2 min read

I’m a Yankee born and bred, but I was nodding along with your writing. I learned racism from my parents and schoolmates in ever-so-bleeding-heart-liberal Massachusetts. This country has a racism problem. Not the South, the entire country. It’s the pathetic classism of those of us whites who live outside the South that paints all Southern whites as inbred, poor, racist, and uneducated.

And I know about the whites outside of the South who go whole hog on it as the white paradise, at least its past. A friend of mine in Alabama spent a few years north of me in the town of Hanford, CA. It was an area of the state that was pro-Confederacy before and during the War. And he said he saw the Stars and Bars more often in Hanford than he could recall ever noticing it in his home state. The fact the Central Valley’s population exploded during the Dust Bowl had its impact on that to be sure, but that particular conflict was settled over 150 years ago. The secessionists lost. The flag is a symbol of what the racists want to see come back that actually never existed.

And that’s what you and I likely both understand, too. That glorious South of the “darkies knowing their place” and all was only good for those who could afford to own slaves. The rest of the people had sub-standard everything in the public sphere but were lied to about how it didn’t matter because at least they were free whites. All of these Yankees and Westerners who cling to the illusion of Tara before Sherman’s March forget they would most likely be the schmucks doing the work deemed too dignified for slaves but still far below the real power-holders’ notice barring its usefulness to them on a direct level. But as the saying roughly goes, you have a lot of white people who could be living under a bridge and cooking a fish they caught out of the local river over a makeshift fire who’d be glad to know the black family next to them had been kept from getting the fish by the police.

    Vivi McBride

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    Lysana needed a name change. Still the same me. Writer of shorter and longer things. I hope you stick around.