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Comment by macintux | Hacker News Reader

> Often, on his arrival in a new town in Alabama or Mississippi, he would head straight to the police headquarters to ask for advice on which areas he should avoid for his own safety. Wherever the local sheriff warned him not to go, he went. Did he encounter any animosity on his lone travels? “The only hostility I experienced was from white people,” he replies. “I had a number of run-ins that were not pleasant – guns pulled on me, a rifle aimed at my face. There is a lot at stake there for some people when they suddenly see an outsider, especially an outsider with a camera.”

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White people in these areas don't trust people from outside these areas. The only reason other people come to them is to paint the people in a bad light in some way or scam them (why else would anyone come? it's certainly not for work or pleasure). It has nothing to do with there being "a lot at stake," they just genuinely don't like outsiders.

source: from these areas.

edit: removed the "white" from people

Then why weren't black people pulling guns on him for "painting people in a bad light"? It's because in the South, the dominant white population has always hated any narrative that didn't show the chattel slave system or the Jim Crow system in a good, if not benign light. This links up with the history of the South and it constantly feeling that it's moral and social structure were always being under attack for being wrong.

People don't come to the South to write stories that will paint the black people in a bad light. I can't speak for the time that this photographer went to the South, but nobody defends slavery or Jim Crow or, from what I can gather, cares about discussing it.

There is an entire civil religion called Lost Cause Ideology which has defending the chattel slave system as a cornerstone of it's beliefs. It's the reason that there were so many confederate statues created in the 1920s-1970s, well after the end of the Civil War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy

That really isn’t an accurate summary of the ideology. Wiki:

> The Lost Cause of the Confederacy…claims the cause of the Confederate States…[was] not centered on slavery.

Personally I think lost cause is weird (to say the least) but they generally try to avoid, rather than defend, the slavery issue.

If you celebrate a war over slavery as heroic while falseley claiming it wasnt about slavery, that is glorifying slavery.

Same as holocaust deniers are glorifying the Nazi regimes murders by claiming it didn't happen, when they know it did.

Oh, wow, a Wikipedia page about something created in the 1920s-1970s. I actually learned about this through the internet several years ago. Not once in my entire life growing up did I actually hear about it.

You don't hear about it, it's a term used by others to describe a set of ideals held by many white southerners. Just because you haven't heard of something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I’m not saying it doesn’t exist but that maybe it’s not as prevalent as you think.

I’m aware of it but only through seeing folks online in comments (and generally they are folks not from the south) making me aware of it despite living in the the south for half a century.

No one I know down here wastes two brain cells dwelling on or “upset over the loss” from a war fought 160 years ago, but to read it online you’d think every other home has an altar to Robert E. Lee in a special alcove in their living room.

> set of ideals held by many white southerners.

I am a white southerner and have been for more than five decades, in all that time I have never met a single person who holds this view. I think if it was “many” I’d have encountered at least one in that time.

Sure you get the random redneck flying a tattered confederate flag outside their broken down trailer, but ascribing an adherence set of ideal to a complex philosophical hero worshipping belief system is probably a bit of a stretch.

If you were an African-American Southerner at the time, wouldn’t you be more worried about locals, for this sort of thing? Baldwin Lee is a Chinese-American art professor from New York, I suspect people would not be too worried that he might be a secret confederate.

It's not just those areas. I had some months of "door-knocking" experience in Chicagoland, early noughties. The neighbourhoods tended to be racially segregated: Latino, white, or black. As a white person, we were often warned to avoid certain latino or black neighbourhoods by police and civilians, yet they were almost always more friendly and welcoming than white neighbourhoods, and never ended up being dangerous.

In the white neighbourhoods there was a tendency to be greeted with suspicion, aggression, loud guard dogs, threats, and occasionally with guns. I imagine that the difference would be more pronounced if I was black and walking around in those same neighbourhoods.

There is a social narrative that white poverty doesn't exist in the US even though it is the bulk of all poverty. I've been places exactly like those in the article but everyone is white. Someone making that explicitly visible exposes a truth that many don't want to have acknowledged.

I think this discussion is a losing discussion, as history is recast as being strictly only one way. I could speak of the stories I heard on Thursday from a historian down here, but people would instantly discount it. It very much reflects our current times, where all is seen as either white or black, but nothing seen as a shade of gray. Polarization has benefitted no side, in any debate.

Polarization benefits both sides. It just doesn't benefit the truth.

Sometimes one side or the other is on the side of truth, but even then, the other side benefits from the uncertainty. The further they are from that position the greater the relative benefit. If there's even the slightest hint of gray they benefit even more.

Representing the middle is a pure loss. Both sides benefit from the clarity of their positions and the ability to commit. Usually both sides will assume your are on one or the other, and both benefit from that. One side gets a slight advantage from your numbers. The other benefits more from painting you as the enemy who will stop and nothing to destroy you and must be stopped at all costs.

Reality, it turns out, is badly overrated.

It can be quite lonely and frustrating having any centrist views, for many of the reasons you mention. Many assumptions made merely on the basis of hearing but one view. The hive mentality is two sides of the same coin, but I don't think anyone is incentivized to change it.

Keep sharing your centrists views.

Independents are the largest political bloc in the country at over 40% of voters. Partisans are not convincing, they are just loud and have representation.

Everyone knows the ways in which both sides are different, we are frustrated by the ways in which they are the same, and that is valid too. Keep sharing, we’re watching. You’re not alone, we are actually more numerous than them.

Independents are technically unaffiliated, but they often vote for the same party in election after election. They may claim to be put off by partisan rhetoric, but it's usually effective at scaring them away from one party or the other. They may choose not to vote, but it's rare that they are truly centrist.

The "swing voter" has been called a "myth" for well over a decade, e.g.

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/sw...

Yes, after being presented with ridiculous choices chosen almost exclusively by partisans.

All states/parties now need to let independents vote in their primary elections, and the choices will smooth out. A couple states do already.

I don't think it's only a matter of partisans being louder, it's that partisanship is easier. Seeing only one side of an issue is always easier, in the same way that empathizing with only one of two (or more) sides of a dispute is much easier.

What are the shades of gray of racism or slavery?

The shades of gray are blacks and whites living in unison in many rural parts of the south in the time period in which these pictures were set. They lived together in poverty in many of these rural areas.

The historian I spoke of mentioned this. He could back it up with pictures of them co-mingling extensively.

Is it to say no racism existed in that time period? Hardly. But far too often I've seen it painted that the south is deeply racist to this day. Generally I only tend to hear it from people who have never been. I say this as someone originally from the north.

The south is indeed still deeply racist. I lived in Charleston SC for several years and was exposed to plenty of it. People like Dylan Roof and the McMichael family don't come out of nowhere. Doesn't mean there aren't Black and white people who do get along.

Lived in Georgia for six years. I'd say something like, "Venture out of any metro area and you'll see it,", but even that's being generous.

I'm sure it's progress compared to times past, but it's still got a way to go.

I lived in Georgia for seven years as a brown guy, mostly in Atlanta but also visited a fair amount around the coast and in Douglas, where my buddy used to live. I just got back from a trip to Tybee Island with my white wife and mixed kids. Never encountered any racism from a white person in Georgia.

YMMV. But in my experience, it was much nicer and less alienating to be down there than it is in a major liberal metro area amongst the "good white people."

I had an Indian friend who grew up in Alabama when his parents immigrated. We were both in San Francisco talking to a white guy and he said "Wow, that's must have been horrible growing up there!"

And my friend said "No, actually, I had a wonderful childhood. Never had any issues with racism, everyone was really nice."

There’s a cultural overlap between the American south and at least Bangladesh (and I assume some parts of India) that I appreciate. Small talk, face saving, indirect communication, social roles, expectations about timeliness, meals, hospitality, that I appreciate. (I grew up listening to country music because I guess that’s the closest thing on American radio to the village music my dad likes.)

Same with Korean evangelicals at Southern megachurches

Checkout Hilton Head Island, if you haven't already. It's pricey, but very nice. I've also heard the praises sung about Edisto and Jekyll too.

Jekyll is great. Also, I was just in Sea Island last year—amazing.

So you acknowledge the anecdotal evidence but then make the same accusation towards "liberal" cities? As if cities are solely composed of one type of political spectrun?

So the countless accounts of blacks in the south concerning racism mean nothing? I say that as a black person who is in the South and whose family originates from there.

Did they say it meant nothing? No.

Theyre just saying its more complicated than "all the south = racist" which is obviously true on its face

They're saying it's "more complicated than that" as a way to get away from the truth which is the South has always had race and white supremacy as a cornerstone of it's society.

How do you know that?

To me its sounding like they are saying "it's more complicated than that" as a way of saying - hey, yeah, racism exists in the south and is probably far more prevalent there than other places in the US, but there is a perception that every community in the south is racist on the whole, and that most or all individuals in the south are raised to be prejudiced.

Well that idea is obviously wrong, and is prejudiced view to have of the south, ironically.

No one is going to split hairs about the history of the South and how it affects policies even till this day.

Living together doesn't mean racism doesn't exist. Being originally from the north doesn't mean anything for your argument. The south has exchanged their deep racism with, at first a prejudice against gays, and when that group was too large such that it hurt elections they moved to trans people.

Yeah no. You are just making shit up

My wife and I were married in Clarksdale, MS, at the Shack Up Inn. We had several people of color in our wedding. While were told in no uncertain terms to avoid the local haunts, our party didn't.

Things didn't go great.

The shades of gray are that slavery hasn’t been a thing for 150 years and nobody in the south today, or even when those pictures were taken, had anything to do with it. Racism, meanwhile, is universal everywhere that different people live alongside each other. So pinning that uniquely on the south is a shade of gray too.

> The shades of gray are that slavery hasn’t been a thing for 150 years and nobody in the south today, or even when those pictures were taken, had anything to do with it. Racism, meanwhile, is universal everywhere that different people live alongside each other.

The American south is unquestionably better today than, say, the 1950s or 60s. But as a child I lived for a few years in the Deep South (specifically, east Texas) in the early 60s, and then again for a few more years (northwest Florida) in the late 60s, due to my dad's duty-station transfers. It was very racist — and changes in culture can often be slow.

A new New York Review of Books piece reviews a book that studies some of the ~1,000 racist murders — largely unpunished — that took place in the South between 1930 and 1970, in the teeth of federal Reconstruction-era legislation intended to protect Blacks. The piece brought to mind a tweet by an anonymous Army officer from awhile back: "[General] Sherman should have mowed the South like a lawn. With multiple passes." (Quoted from memory and so might be a bit off.)

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/04/06/a-regional-reign...

People forget that things like federal monitoring of elections weren’t limited to the South. Places like NYC and Boston were and in some ways still are very inhospitable to black people.

Slavery was a tool of control. Explicit control of the enslaved people and implicit control of the poor whites and others on the fringe of society. The intersection of race, class and poverty paints a picture that is complex.

That picture really isn't that complex for the black population living under such a system.

When you’re putting guns in peoples’ faces, they don’t need to paint you in a bad light. You’ve given them a photograph.

The photographer in this case, Baldwin Lee, was Chinese-American and grew up in Chinatown in New York. So his experience was probably not due to this phenomenon.

I think it's a safe assumption that holding a camera contributed to this phenomenon.

If you're implying it's because he looks Chinese, you're right but not just because of racism. It's because no one who looks like that lived there.

There's a long history of southerners being taken advantage of. Do they not teach about carpet baggers and indentured servants anymore in school?

The idea that the victor is ever anything but perfect is rarely in history books. The history of Southern exploitation is heavily covered in Socialist literature, though.

It used to be, if you were a Yankee driving through Georgia on the way to Florida, a common corridor with NEasterners, they would often be advised to not detour off from the interstate, else risk get entangled in local "policework".

Don't make excuses for people who just default to mistrust and hate towards people they don't know.

In my experience, Black and Latino people are very warm and welcoming on an individual level. It’s the about 5-10% of individuals in the community that wreak havoc, and the communities already know exactly who those people are.

Have you ever heard the term "carpetbagger" before?

Folks in the South have grown wary of outsiders because of the some hundred years of history of visitors coming to these states with one goal in mind: to profit. Every abandoned coal mine, every rundown pain clinic, they're all representative of the same system which exploits poor rural Southerners and then turns around to paint them as rednecks and racists. If other commenters haven't spent much time with folks in the South, I feel like they'll never really understand exactly just where that perceived distrust of newcomers come from.

This this this this this. This problem is getting _worse_ in the superstar cities due to immigration: the questions I've had people ask me about growing up in the South from born-wealthy Indians, Brits are absolutely insane.

People genuinely believe that Deliverance is a documentary, and that Now This' representations of the Deep South are 100% unbiased.

The South in many ways sucks and I'm happy to talk about that, but the things that New Yorkers/SF/Seattleites believe about the region has very little overlap with reality.

For example, there's a TON of Korean immigrants on the Georgia/Alabama line from Hyundai Kia plants who stay because it's so religious. People should talk about stories like that when discussing the oddities of the South, not JUST how awful Poor White Trash is.

If you don’t consider getting a gun pointed at you “hostility” then you’re not a reliable judge.

Is he not saying that it was the white people he encountered who pointed a gun at him?

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