Richard Jernigan -> RE: State of the USA (Jan. 24 2020 0:14:42)
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ORIGINAL: rombsix I have lived most of my USA life in the south, so this may be a biased view, and perhaps it is. I have a fairly long view of U.S. history. My first immigrant ancestor arrived in America in 1635, the last in 1720. My mother's family, loyal to the United Kingdom and foreseeing the Revolution, emigrated from the Colony of New Hampshire to Nova Scotia, now a part of Canada, in 1750. Some of them played a role in the unification of that country. Four of my ancestors served as officers in the Continental Army under General Washington. I never knew my great-grandparents, but they lived vividly in the memories of my parents and grandparents, so they were figures of some influence in my childhood. One of my maternal great-grandfathers immigrated back to the USA in the early 19th century. Two of his sons volunteered to fight for the Union in the Civil War. The other great-grandfather on that side descended from early 18th century immigrants to America. He fought for the Union, some of his ancestors fought on the American side in the Revolutionary War. Both of my paternal great-grandfathers were descended from long lines of large scale southern landowners and slave holders. They were high ranking officers in the Confederate Army. My father was the commanding general of the first integrated U.S. Air Force Base, in Washington, DC in the 1950s. I attended all four years of high school in a white suburb of that city. The overwhelming majority of the population of DC were black. Most of the city was seen as unsafe for white people after dark. Two years before that, we lived in Anchorage, Alaska. At the time there were nearly no black people in Alaska. Virulent white racism was directed toward the Native population. Racism is the besetting sin of the USA. But every culture I have spent enough time in to qualify having an opinion has had some form of racism or class discrimination. In the USA one often hears that racism must be taught. My girlfriend who grew up "hafu" [half European] in Tokyo regarded racism as the default human condition. In the long view, racism has declined in the USA, evolving from slavery before the Civil War, up to the point where it is socially unacceptable and kept covert in Tennessee. A week ago or so I read an article about the science fiction writer William Gibson. His novels are set in the near future. He commented to the effect: the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed geographically. Much of the time I have lived in the USA it's been in Texas. Texas shares many characteristics with the South, particularly in East Texas, but it differs significantly in many respects. It's a big state. Most writers on the subject divide Texas into at least five different cultural regions. Racism varies in character and intensity in the different regions. I lived for a while in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I found racism and government corruption much more widely and deeply rooted there than in Texas. Both were freely acknowledged as cultural features of the state. It was a relief to me to move back to Austin. I lived in Palo Alto and Santa Barbara, California, each for a few years. No government is totally free of corruption, nor have I encountered a society free of discrimination based on race or class--or both. But the places where I lived in California seemed much less plagued by these ills than Alaska, Washington, DC, Texas or Louisiana. However in Santa Barbara I was warned by a few friends against eating at Tacos al Pastor in the tiny barrio, lest I should get knifed. It was a safe and congenial family place. I thought it might have been frightening to my friends because everybody, including the staff, spoke only Spanish. In the San Francisco Bay Area my girlfriend warned me about going to the Mission district after midnight for tacos, but it was not a racist view. She worried about the gang members spaced out on drugs. In San Francisco there were Chinese Tongs, Latino and Vietnamese gangs. Even the Japanese Yakuza pulled off an occasional murder, but I was told their hit men generally came from Japan, did the job and returned home promptly. Across the Bay in Oakland there were black gangs and violent political movements like the Black Panthers. Crime and violence were a multiethnic enterprises, and seemed to generate little racism. I believe the long arc of history in the USA has swung a good distance toward diminishing racism, but the arc has kinks in it. Barack Obama remarked that progress is not constant, sometimes there is progress followed by backsliding. I think we are in a backsliding phase at the moment, but I am encouraged by the long term history of the USA. I derive a good deal of my identity from my citizenship, but not nearly as much of it as many white natives of the South do. I was fortunate in my childhood not to be indoctrinated in racism, and I have lived in enough different cultures to see some of the values of my own as less than absolute. I hope for the disappearance of some of the cultural values held by some Americans at present. But I hold the vision of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the framers of the Constitution in admiration and respect, despite the individual flaws of some of the men themselves. RNJ
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