Racism has brewed throughout the history of mankind, four hundred thousand or so years. My direct male bloodline pretty much ends with me. Think Stone Henge and you’ll have an idea of my last name and a massive peaceful community effort. Think of the King George War; William and John my great Uncle and Grandfather fired the first shots or as I call it “murders of war.” Karma kind of plaid a role here too. Documentaries in those days are found lacking, cause I am here. During the Civil War, our color was blue.
In June of 1970, my sermon as an Army Specialist E-4 was on “love” ~ you know the word opposite of hate. So, I think it safe to say that over the four hundred plus or minus thousands of years, hate has raised its ugly head from time to time. In the eighties after I was commissioned I began to hear whispers of “the south will rise again.” Because I believed in truth and justice, and the fact that a war had been fought, the Civil War, legally this was BS to me; the South could not rise again ~ RIGHT. Aha, the power of hate. President Nixon put into play the Southern Strategy. That is why Reagan and Trump switched from the Democratic party to the Republican party.
If you are astute, you will look around today and discover we are the Confederate States of America and not the United States of America ~ Bottom Line. Politically speaking, “Red is the new gray.” Our President and Generals won the Civil War, but they lost democracy. Sadly, I am the last surviving US Army Officer. Unlike my peers, I believe all men and women or if you choose, all women and men are born equal. Call me a fabricator of the truth, but be honest, you are afraid to look yourself in the mirror. We all have played capture the flag at one time in our youth. During the last presidential election, one candidate displayed proudly behind himself both the confederate flag, and the US flags as equals. How fast did the streets change before your eyes? Soon, the confederate flag was replaced with the US flag ~ I saw it, and it turned my stomach.
There is more, but I neither wish to bore you or be attacked yet one more time. I have solutions ~ but most (people) do not have the stomach, the band width or energy to seek out real solutions. They are too complacent with their trickledown down wealth.
I've mentioned it before, but there is a book called
American Nations that covers this.
https://www.amazon.com/American-Nat...rican+nations&qid=1565649339&s=gateway&sr=8-1
The current Republican coalition is made up of three of the US nations (cultures) of the 11 the book documents. The ring leader is the Deep South which has been one of the poles of American politics for a couple of hundred years. they are allied with Appalachia and what Woodward calls the Far West, which is the interior west stretching from around longitude 100W to the Cascades in the North and the Coast Range in California.
The three cultures have different drives, but the Deep South has bamboozled the other two into voting for Deep South interests. The Deep South was founded by plantation owners from Barbados who ran out of room and moved to the mainland. When they arrived there was a hippie colony in Savannah, Georgia, but otherwise the South was only settled by Native Americans.
The Deep South was slave from the start and their utopia was an apartheid culture with a few rich white men on top, a second class made up of poor white people, and a mass of slaves from Africa. The culture in the Handmaids Tale is much closer to the Deep South ideal than anything that would ever happen in New England.
The other coalition in American history has been centered on the New England centered Yankee culture (which spread westward across the northern Midwest). This is the progressive culture that was most anti-slavery and has driven a lot of the progressive movements in US history. They are currently allied with El Norte Spanish culture along the US Mexico border, the Left Coast (strip along the coast from Los Angeles on up into Canada including the I-5 corridor in Oregon and Washington), new Netherlands (New York city area) and recently the Midlands (a strip starting at Philadelphia and extending west through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, then expanding to take up most of Iowa and hooking north into Canada).
The New England Yankees and Deep South have been locked in a political ideological war for generations. One culture or the other has controlled the national political narrative at one time or another. From 1932 to 1980 it was the Yankees with the New Deal and the civil rights movement. Since 1980 it's been the Deep South trying to return to the days of the robber barons and stripping away all the advances of the New Deal and civil rights.
The Deep South white culture has racism baked into the cake and both Appalachia and the Far West have some racism too because they battled the natives for the territory they currently control.
There is also a bit of human nature in all this too. Humans tend to be xenophobic about the unknown and fear "the Other". Throughout American history various cultures have faced a period of xenophobic discrimination until they integrated and people forgot they were "other". It happened with the Irish, Jewish immigrants, Eastern European, Southern Europeans, Asians, etc. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first immigration law passed in the US and it was the only one on the books for a few decades.
Hispanics have always been in the SW US. Some families were there before the US existed as a country (Eva Longoria comes from one of these families). There have also been other pockets of Hispanics like Cubans in south Florida and Puerto Ricans in New York, but large swaths of the country had no Hispanics. The more liberal parts of the country don't have much issue with Hispanics moving in (it's not an issue in Portland). But there are many areas that are going through culture shock at Hispanic immigration.
I once worked with someone who had grown up in North Dakota and she said she never saw a non-white person until she went to college. She had seen them on TV of course, but she found it weird the first time she saw one in person. She was quite liberal and ran herself into the ground volunteering for various charities around Seattle in her spare time. But she knew plenty of people back home who were xenophobic about the unknown others.
Add to that the fact that whites in the US are going through a demographic shift from the majority culture to just a largest plurality. There is fear among whites who have never lived around non-whites that it could be a bad thing for them. The whole "you shall not replace us" chant of the white supremacists comes from this fear.
I grew up in Los Angeles and never went to a school that was more than 15% white until college and it was OK. Being the only white person around was normal for me. So I have a different perspective on the browning of America. Things may change, but it will be OK.
So there are two prongs to American racism, one is backed deep into the culture and it's going to be tough to root out with some people and the other is a culture shock from integrating a new ethnic group and the overall culture usually gets over it in a generation or two.
