I would suggest you compare that map with one that shows income per capita, because I think SES accounts for a lot of this.
As usual in America, we muddle around with vague talk about race because we don't have a clue about class. Talk about class is very taboo. I bet somebody here is probably going to chide me for sounding "marxist" LOL.
In my experience, working-class white, black, and brown folks all get along better with each other than with rich people of any color, and it goes the other way too. In my travels across the spectrum of "middle class", I've found that prejudice (and certainly *unexamined* prejudice) reliably co-varies with SES.
I agree: envy and insecurity up and down the middle-class ladder is probably the root of this. I suspect it's a byproduct of class mobility (which after all goes both ways!)
"Middle" and "upper" class are kind of vague and euphemistic terms. I think the natural complement to "working" class is the "owning" class. The middle class is then just those who both own a little something but still have to work for a living. Spans quite a gap, from skilled laborers with starter mortgages all the way to Blackrock and Vanguard's fund managers.
Have you read Carroll Quigley, perchance? He has some astute observations about this stuff, and certainly knew which side he was on. I think he was miffed about how his patrons so thoroughly suppressed his work for so long. Now it's all reprinted and the cat's out of the bag.
Another thing: I disagree about orthogonality. The top 1% in the US still represents quite a few different social groupings. But the top 0.0001%?
The very top of the ownership class is and has always been a small pond, replete with intermarriage and many intermingled existential concerns. Entry is not so easily gained, and these folks pull a lot of strings.
Like Carlin said, it's a big club, and you ain't in it. (Although I don't doubt that you come from a good home etc!)
Hmm. Tripartite tribal identity seems like an awfully broad brush to me. But there certainly is such a thing as social class, and it's all tied up in family and group membership.
For Quigley, I guess I'd start with The Anglo-American Establishment. It's a lot shorter than his magnum opus Tragedy and Hope, which like war is reasonably described as long periods of tedium punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
Came here to say this. I live in Seattle, I straddle working class and bourgeoisie, and the richer the person, the more sure of white privilege they are and the more they try to excuse their plain old fashioned Privilege by making sure everyone knows they never say anything bad about marginalized identities while supporting politics that continue to harm the poor; comprising most of those identities.
"In this house we believe no human is illegal, etc. ... unless you're trying to build some cheap housing in this neighborhood for them--in which case, nevermind."
On a purely anecdotal basis, I agree wholeheartedly with this assessment regarding prejudice. Growing up in Watkinsville, a little town on the outskirts of Athens, Georgia, we always knew those angry, bitter old racists, but the vast majority of people were more accepting. Especially as the demographic got younger the racism faded away.
About twelve years ago my mother married a Chicago Yank that puts the old racists from the south to shame. I always put his racism down to him being a generally unpleasant person in general. He was a former military guy that got drummed out for multiple DUIs and other infractions. My mother is his seventh wife, the other six finding him so unpleasant to live with that they ran him off. I still don't know what she sees in him.
I've recently had cause to reexamine my beliefs, though, when my little brother got engaged to a young woman from New York. She moved in with him about six months ago in anticipation of their wedding next year. While there was a subtle sense that she thought our lifestyle beneath her, she was otherwise fairly pleasant. That changed when Jamal, his wife and daughter moved in next door. Jamal is, as you would guess, a black man moving into a fairly white area. My little brother wandered over and offered to help carry in a few boxes to help with the move, as Jamal seemed a little overwhelmed, and the two of them wound up agreeing to a cook off to see who can smoke the best pork shoulder.
Her reaction was, supposedly, incandescent when my little brother got home. You would have thought the man went over to invite the antichrist to dinner. She is now pushing for him to sell his house and move away before more 'bad people' move in. Absolutely insane.
Holy shit. That's a sign. Like, I know you can't actually tell your brother what to do, but he should DTMFA. (Dump That Mother Fscker Already) That's not the sort of woman you want raising your kids. Also, my dad lives in that area, and yeah, people seem pretty chill.
Fair enough. Hopefully he figures it out before he gets legally entangled, but if he didn't get the picture from that interaction, he might not. Like, I understand about overlooking the flaws of people one is in love with, but I've dropped people like hot rocks for blatantly racist crap, too. Getting laid is nice but you gotta have some self respect, too. Fingers crossed!
Heh, it did show that at least. She's a nice enough girl for the most part, but I don't like that she's pretty well stopped us from going clay shooting together, and I think her reaction to their new neighbors is very telling.
My life in Houston and Texas has been soaked in multiculturalism. Houston is a functional melting pot. Most of the country is more like rock with some inclusions. My dad came from Illinois and some of his people and their neighbors are often hardcore racists of a much more nefarious kind than an in-your-face klansman. They’re also not very nice to any strangers. It’s just a whole other worldview.
You'd have to use an extension that automatically ran it on every page, but:
---
const e=document.createTreeWalker(document.body,NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT,null,!1);for(;e.nextNode();){const t=e.currentNode,n=t.parentElement;"SCRIPT"!==n.tagName&&"STYLE"!==n.tagName&&"TEXTAREA"!==n.tagName&&(t.textContent=t.textContent.replace(/white privilege/gi,"mostly rich white bicoastal privilege"))}
---
I think the rebuttal would be that you were only treated poorly after you brought up your otherness, a privilege (for lack of a better term) not available to the Black population.
That's not the point of the extension, though. BJ's point, if I have understood it correctly, is that it isn't generic and universal white people who have that privilege, it's the bicoastal rich liberals who have that privilege. They're the ones that are actually racist towards black people whom they only ever experience on TV, as opposed to those of us po' white folk who actually hang out with them.
https://github.com/iamtravisw/replacer is a generic version of this; IIRC, there was a different extension that swapped 'woman' for 'man' (and vice versa); it made it great fun to read feminist websites....
I grew up in one of the reddest states - one in the Mountain West. Also among the least populated. In other words it was a small town scaled up to an entire state so everybody knew or had a few degrees of separation from everybody else. It was for sure not a diverse place but I think the small town nature aspect of it kept people reasonable. Well, and the guns.
Lived for a brief period in two Latin American countries. Those were largely uneventful but different being an obvious foreigner. Speaking Spanish and having family (thus a cultural connection) probably helped.
I lived for awhile in a purple state too. In general, there few problems but did notice the college towns and "resort areas" to be a bit out of whack but otherwise normal. I also had a friend group who at the time composed mainly of people from either the SF area, Boston, or the NY area. They came from upper-middle class families, some "old money" and all went to prominent schools. That was where I really encountered something that nowadays appears to be at least proto-woke. Now there are some parts of that state that make much of the coasts look sort of sane.
Then I moved to California, as in "west of the five," California.
Oh good Lord!
And that was *before* 2020, in an area that was until recently still purple.
This is where the white savior types refer to the one black person they barely know as "my black friend."
This is where they shit their pants when I show them pictures of my bi-racial family shooting guns together.
This is where they will complain about rising crime, yet still insist on "defunding the police" and refuse to budge on guns.
"This is where they shit their pants when I show them pictures of my bi-racial family shooting guns together." It's like seeing a unicorn. So much cognizant dissonance to reconcile.
This mirrors my experiences being from NC. I remember being in Chicago in the early lights and people asking me: “Isn’t it so terribly racist there?” Yet I’d never heard the n word more than from the south side Irish. And the whole city proved Schelling right. But Charlotte, like Atlanta is a “chocolate city.”
Fellow NC person here. The exact same thing happened when I spent the summer of 09 in the bay area. It's fun to pick on the hicks, but I would argue that folks from NYC, LA, and SF are some of the most parochial people in the country.
Living in Austin now, and very soon moving to South Carolina, the NYC, LA, and SF defectors are looking for the exits. (Kindly leave your voting patterns at the door.)
Metro Detroit reporting in. The Census data doesn't lie, but it IS 13 years old. Black folks are rapidly migrating north of Eight Mile Road now. The neighborhood I grew up in, roughly at 10 1/2 Mile, is about 50% Black. I live right along 15 Mile Road, and over the past twenty years Black folks have slowly, quietly grew in number in my suburb as their fortunes have improved and the corresponding ability to live in the suburbs has increased. Nobody in their right mind really wants to live in Detroit proper with it's horrible services, corrupt Democrat politics, and slow responding EMTs and police. If you ever make your way up to this neck of the woods I'll give you the five dollar tour. I'm a planning commissioner in my suburb and I can give you some perspective on what's going on.
It's not that we don't integrate. Far from it. It's more like there are other ethnic groups with more money that have immigrated here and squeezed Black folks out.
Shitdog, yes sir I would love the five dollar tour of Detroit. I can't say I have any near term plans to make it up that way, as a full custody single father widower with two elementary school kids, but if/when I do, I'm definitely going to look you up.
Thank you so much for this post. I was born in Kansas, grew up in New Mexico, spent 20 years in the Navy moving between east and west coasts and Hawaii, then spent 20 years in Virginia. Lots of opportunities for culture clash; it was interesting that the only time it hit me in the face was in Hawaii, which is about as much a racial chopped salad as a person could ever find. Notice that I said chopped salad, not soup or stew. What I and others noted was that despite some persons’ obvious mixed race heritage, a lot of folks seemed to identify EXCLUSIVELY with one race. So maybe in addition to the Leftist view of their own superiority, apparently other folk just want a reason to dislike others. Very sad.
BTW - Those of us that live 50 miles or so from Atlanta seriously hope that that city’s leftist tendencies stay right where they are. ;-)
There’s an extension called Word Replacer II that I use in Chrome; I have entries in it to replace every permutation of (she/her), (she / her / hers), etc. with empty strings so that I don’t have to look at that nonsense in people’s email signatures.
Hard to keep your situational awareness going when wearing such full-field rose colored active-optics goggles!
I always found the idea of these translator extensions amusing, all the way back to Cloud2Butt. And then there's that anecdote of the designer who forgot to turn off his "Millenials to Snake People" extension before giving that big presentation... fun times.
The basic premise is bunk, though. It just doesn't matter much if you know what they really mean, if THEY don't know what (you think) they really mean.
New Mexico is sort of a weird one on this front. We have ~2% black people here too. But also 17% natives, and a huge chunk (obviously) of Hispanics and Mexicans. There's still some of that bullshit here, but *vastly* less than where I was before, in Hawaii. Now that place is a racist hellhole.
BJ, I didn't know you were serious about fluid mechanics! Shucks. Now all your album titles suddenly seem a lot less pretentious... I sometimes get you mixed up with Bj Cole in the playlists.
I had to bone up on that fascinating stuff in a hurry when I was implementing Dynamic Mode Decomposition for a work project a couple years back. Wished I had done more vector calculus during my math undergrad. And stats. Ah well, now I'm just another code monkey.
HAHAhaha wow, yeah. My album titles are what they are for a reason, fluid mechanics is my actual job. All this writing and music making and whatever else is just ephemeral hobby bullshit. Y'all are all just along for the ride on the hobby.
And there is no greater honor than to be mixed up with BJ Cole in the playlists, especially if it was that Luke Vibert collab album.
Fascinating article with great anecdotes. I just want to comment on one small part of it. Martha's Vineyard is not a stereotypical white vacation enclave. It has a large and thriving black populace in the Oak Bluffs section of the island.
I 100% agree with this thesis. That was me 12 years ago- just a west coast dude that had the same prejudices I didn’t realize, although I wouldn’t say I was a consistent blue voter. Then I moved abroad and my perspective changed massively as I learned that I have way more in common with any American than I ever realized. My appreciation for the US has only grown since (in spite of the Orange Man).
I still struggle with the slow talking, but a couple of beers levels the playing field and who gives a shit as long as the conversation is interesting!
the "rich white liberal" is the most racist person in America, but his ego requires him to assuage his guilt by believing that everyone else is even more racist than he is.
That's why he perceives massive amounts of racism everywhere.
Chicago Yankee here who moved to Georgia for graduate school and stayed after graduation. The first time I ordered an ice tea I had the same reaction you did, but in reverse. "Good lord this tea is sweet. I will need to brush my teeth after I finish this glass" I thought to myself.
I never noticed much regional prejudice, but then again I do my best to avoid people. I remember when I first came to Athens to visit the graduate school and I was having a beer with a current student at an outside bar. We were chatting about the program and when about 15 gorgeous girls walked by wearing sun dresses and cowboy boots. I had never seen such a beautiful site. I asked, "is it common to wear those outfits?" He replied, "yes it is." I then realized I needed to accept the school's offer. Still live in the state and when my family in Illinois ask, "when are you moving back?" I promptly respond, "never."
I would suggest you compare that map with one that shows income per capita, because I think SES accounts for a lot of this.
As usual in America, we muddle around with vague talk about race because we don't have a clue about class. Talk about class is very taboo. I bet somebody here is probably going to chide me for sounding "marxist" LOL.
In my experience, working-class white, black, and brown folks all get along better with each other than with rich people of any color, and it goes the other way too. In my travels across the spectrum of "middle class", I've found that prejudice (and certainly *unexamined* prejudice) reliably co-varies with SES.
"We" don't talk about class in this country because the Narrative gatekeepers are almost all of the privileged but unfashionable class.
Damn right. The working class is looked down upon by the rich. If I remember right we are all deplorable.
And we hang out in baskets.
If Hillary had a blue-collar lexicon, she would have said "bucket".
Moloch only knows how she ended up with that ambitious Arkansas redneck.
I agree: envy and insecurity up and down the middle-class ladder is probably the root of this. I suspect it's a byproduct of class mobility (which after all goes both ways!)
"Middle" and "upper" class are kind of vague and euphemistic terms. I think the natural complement to "working" class is the "owning" class. The middle class is then just those who both own a little something but still have to work for a living. Spans quite a gap, from skilled laborers with starter mortgages all the way to Blackrock and Vanguard's fund managers.
Have you read Carroll Quigley, perchance? He has some astute observations about this stuff, and certainly knew which side he was on. I think he was miffed about how his patrons so thoroughly suppressed his work for so long. Now it's all reprinted and the cat's out of the bag.
Another thing: I disagree about orthogonality. The top 1% in the US still represents quite a few different social groupings. But the top 0.0001%?
The very top of the ownership class is and has always been a small pond, replete with intermarriage and many intermingled existential concerns. Entry is not so easily gained, and these folks pull a lot of strings.
Like Carlin said, it's a big club, and you ain't in it. (Although I don't doubt that you come from a good home etc!)
Hmm. Tripartite tribal identity seems like an awfully broad brush to me. But there certainly is such a thing as social class, and it's all tied up in family and group membership.
For Quigley, I guess I'd start with The Anglo-American Establishment. It's a lot shorter than his magnum opus Tragedy and Hope, which like war is reasonably described as long periods of tedium punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
Came here to say this. I live in Seattle, I straddle working class and bourgeoisie, and the richer the person, the more sure of white privilege they are and the more they try to excuse their plain old fashioned Privilege by making sure everyone knows they never say anything bad about marginalized identities while supporting politics that continue to harm the poor; comprising most of those identities.
"In this house we believe no human is illegal, etc. ... unless you're trying to build some cheap housing in this neighborhood for them--in which case, nevermind."
On a purely anecdotal basis, I agree wholeheartedly with this assessment regarding prejudice. Growing up in Watkinsville, a little town on the outskirts of Athens, Georgia, we always knew those angry, bitter old racists, but the vast majority of people were more accepting. Especially as the demographic got younger the racism faded away.
About twelve years ago my mother married a Chicago Yank that puts the old racists from the south to shame. I always put his racism down to him being a generally unpleasant person in general. He was a former military guy that got drummed out for multiple DUIs and other infractions. My mother is his seventh wife, the other six finding him so unpleasant to live with that they ran him off. I still don't know what she sees in him.
I've recently had cause to reexamine my beliefs, though, when my little brother got engaged to a young woman from New York. She moved in with him about six months ago in anticipation of their wedding next year. While there was a subtle sense that she thought our lifestyle beneath her, she was otherwise fairly pleasant. That changed when Jamal, his wife and daughter moved in next door. Jamal is, as you would guess, a black man moving into a fairly white area. My little brother wandered over and offered to help carry in a few boxes to help with the move, as Jamal seemed a little overwhelmed, and the two of them wound up agreeing to a cook off to see who can smoke the best pork shoulder.
Her reaction was, supposedly, incandescent when my little brother got home. You would have thought the man went over to invite the antichrist to dinner. She is now pushing for him to sell his house and move away before more 'bad people' move in. Absolutely insane.
Holy shit. That's a sign. Like, I know you can't actually tell your brother what to do, but he should DTMFA. (Dump That Mother Fscker Already) That's not the sort of woman you want raising your kids. Also, my dad lives in that area, and yeah, people seem pretty chill.
Believe me, I've tried.
Fair enough. Hopefully he figures it out before he gets legally entangled, but if he didn't get the picture from that interaction, he might not. Like, I understand about overlooking the flaws of people one is in love with, but I've dropped people like hot rocks for blatantly racist crap, too. Getting laid is nice but you gotta have some self respect, too. Fingers crossed!
Well, at least your brother has gotten fair warning of the nightmare he is too close to BEFORE the wedding.
Heh, it did show that at least. She's a nice enough girl for the most part, but I don't like that she's pretty well stopped us from going clay shooting together, and I think her reaction to their new neighbors is very telling.
My life in Houston and Texas has been soaked in multiculturalism. Houston is a functional melting pot. Most of the country is more like rock with some inclusions. My dad came from Illinois and some of his people and their neighbors are often hardcore racists of a much more nefarious kind than an in-your-face klansman. They’re also not very nice to any strangers. It’s just a whole other worldview.
"our history as southerners forces us to recon with them. "
I reckon there's a typo here.
I reckon I'll take all the free copyedit I can get.
You'd have to use an extension that automatically ran it on every page, but:
---
const e=document.createTreeWalker(document.body,NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT,null,!1);for(;e.nextNode();){const t=e.currentNode,n=t.parentElement;"SCRIPT"!==n.tagName&&"STYLE"!==n.tagName&&"TEXTAREA"!==n.tagName&&(t.textContent=t.textContent.replace(/white privilege/gi,"mostly rich white bicoastal privilege"))}
---
I think the rebuttal would be that you were only treated poorly after you brought up your otherness, a privilege (for lack of a better term) not available to the Black population.
That's not the point of the extension, though. BJ's point, if I have understood it correctly, is that it isn't generic and universal white people who have that privilege, it's the bicoastal rich liberals who have that privilege. They're the ones that are actually racist towards black people whom they only ever experience on TV, as opposed to those of us po' white folk who actually hang out with them.
https://github.com/iamtravisw/replacer is a generic version of this; IIRC, there was a different extension that swapped 'woman' for 'man' (and vice versa); it made it great fun to read feminist websites....
https://medium.com/@ConnorFinnegan/how-to-make-a-simple-text-replacement-chrome-extension-3e7aa9fa301f
Purely anecdotal, er I mean "lived experience."
I grew up in one of the reddest states - one in the Mountain West. Also among the least populated. In other words it was a small town scaled up to an entire state so everybody knew or had a few degrees of separation from everybody else. It was for sure not a diverse place but I think the small town nature aspect of it kept people reasonable. Well, and the guns.
Lived for a brief period in two Latin American countries. Those were largely uneventful but different being an obvious foreigner. Speaking Spanish and having family (thus a cultural connection) probably helped.
I lived for awhile in a purple state too. In general, there few problems but did notice the college towns and "resort areas" to be a bit out of whack but otherwise normal. I also had a friend group who at the time composed mainly of people from either the SF area, Boston, or the NY area. They came from upper-middle class families, some "old money" and all went to prominent schools. That was where I really encountered something that nowadays appears to be at least proto-woke. Now there are some parts of that state that make much of the coasts look sort of sane.
Then I moved to California, as in "west of the five," California.
Oh good Lord!
And that was *before* 2020, in an area that was until recently still purple.
This is where the white savior types refer to the one black person they barely know as "my black friend."
This is where they shit their pants when I show them pictures of my bi-racial family shooting guns together.
This is where they will complain about rising crime, yet still insist on "defunding the police" and refuse to budge on guns.
"This is where they shit their pants when I show them pictures of my bi-racial family shooting guns together." It's like seeing a unicorn. So much cognizant dissonance to reconcile.
Here’s a spot on take on that purple state:
https://fleetingwest.substack.com/p/elections-in-the-west-are-now-entirely
This mirrors my experiences being from NC. I remember being in Chicago in the early lights and people asking me: “Isn’t it so terribly racist there?” Yet I’d never heard the n word more than from the south side Irish. And the whole city proved Schelling right. But Charlotte, like Atlanta is a “chocolate city.”
Fellow NC person here. The exact same thing happened when I spent the summer of 09 in the bay area. It's fun to pick on the hicks, but I would argue that folks from NYC, LA, and SF are some of the most parochial people in the country.
Living in Austin now, and very soon moving to South Carolina, the NYC, LA, and SF defectors are looking for the exits. (Kindly leave your voting patterns at the door.)
Early aughts*
Metro Detroit reporting in. The Census data doesn't lie, but it IS 13 years old. Black folks are rapidly migrating north of Eight Mile Road now. The neighborhood I grew up in, roughly at 10 1/2 Mile, is about 50% Black. I live right along 15 Mile Road, and over the past twenty years Black folks have slowly, quietly grew in number in my suburb as their fortunes have improved and the corresponding ability to live in the suburbs has increased. Nobody in their right mind really wants to live in Detroit proper with it's horrible services, corrupt Democrat politics, and slow responding EMTs and police. If you ever make your way up to this neck of the woods I'll give you the five dollar tour. I'm a planning commissioner in my suburb and I can give you some perspective on what's going on.
It's not that we don't integrate. Far from it. It's more like there are other ethnic groups with more money that have immigrated here and squeezed Black folks out.
Shitdog, yes sir I would love the five dollar tour of Detroit. I can't say I have any near term plans to make it up that way, as a full custody single father widower with two elementary school kids, but if/when I do, I'm definitely going to look you up.
Thank you so much for this post. I was born in Kansas, grew up in New Mexico, spent 20 years in the Navy moving between east and west coasts and Hawaii, then spent 20 years in Virginia. Lots of opportunities for culture clash; it was interesting that the only time it hit me in the face was in Hawaii, which is about as much a racial chopped salad as a person could ever find. Notice that I said chopped salad, not soup or stew. What I and others noted was that despite some persons’ obvious mixed race heritage, a lot of folks seemed to identify EXCLUSIVELY with one race. So maybe in addition to the Leftist view of their own superiority, apparently other folk just want a reason to dislike others. Very sad.
BTW - Those of us that live 50 miles or so from Atlanta seriously hope that that city’s leftist tendencies stay right where they are. ;-)
There’s an extension called Word Replacer II that I use in Chrome; I have entries in it to replace every permutation of (she/her), (she / her / hers), etc. with empty strings so that I don’t have to look at that nonsense in people’s email signatures.
Hard to keep your situational awareness going when wearing such full-field rose colored active-optics goggles!
I always found the idea of these translator extensions amusing, all the way back to Cloud2Butt. And then there's that anecdote of the designer who forgot to turn off his "Millenials to Snake People" extension before giving that big presentation... fun times.
The basic premise is bunk, though. It just doesn't matter much if you know what they really mean, if THEY don't know what (you think) they really mean.
New Mexico is sort of a weird one on this front. We have ~2% black people here too. But also 17% natives, and a huge chunk (obviously) of Hispanics and Mexicans. There's still some of that bullshit here, but *vastly* less than where I was before, in Hawaii. Now that place is a racist hellhole.
The Adam Shultz Hawaii episode really dug into that, and it was great:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4l0TSGhWTs&t=1s
In NM, for Yankees you've got Texans.
You mean "Very East New Mexicans"? 🤣
Please see my post.
BJ, I didn't know you were serious about fluid mechanics! Shucks. Now all your album titles suddenly seem a lot less pretentious... I sometimes get you mixed up with Bj Cole in the playlists.
I had to bone up on that fascinating stuff in a hurry when I was implementing Dynamic Mode Decomposition for a work project a couple years back. Wished I had done more vector calculus during my math undergrad. And stats. Ah well, now I'm just another code monkey.
Cheers!
HAHAhaha wow, yeah. My album titles are what they are for a reason, fluid mechanics is my actual job. All this writing and music making and whatever else is just ephemeral hobby bullshit. Y'all are all just along for the ride on the hobby.
And there is no greater honor than to be mixed up with BJ Cole in the playlists, especially if it was that Luke Vibert collab album.
Fascinating article with great anecdotes. I just want to comment on one small part of it. Martha's Vineyard is not a stereotypical white vacation enclave. It has a large and thriving black populace in the Oak Bluffs section of the island.
The Obamas don't count.
I 100% agree with this thesis. That was me 12 years ago- just a west coast dude that had the same prejudices I didn’t realize, although I wouldn’t say I was a consistent blue voter. Then I moved abroad and my perspective changed massively as I learned that I have way more in common with any American than I ever realized. My appreciation for the US has only grown since (in spite of the Orange Man).
I still struggle with the slow talking, but a couple of beers levels the playing field and who gives a shit as long as the conversation is interesting!
the "rich white liberal" is the most racist person in America, but his ego requires him to assuage his guilt by believing that everyone else is even more racist than he is.
That's why he perceives massive amounts of racism everywhere.
Chicago Yankee here who moved to Georgia for graduate school and stayed after graduation. The first time I ordered an ice tea I had the same reaction you did, but in reverse. "Good lord this tea is sweet. I will need to brush my teeth after I finish this glass" I thought to myself.
I never noticed much regional prejudice, but then again I do my best to avoid people. I remember when I first came to Athens to visit the graduate school and I was having a beer with a current student at an outside bar. We were chatting about the program and when about 15 gorgeous girls walked by wearing sun dresses and cowboy boots. I had never seen such a beautiful site. I asked, "is it common to wear those outfits?" He replied, "yes it is." I then realized I needed to accept the school's offer. Still live in the state and when my family in Illinois ask, "when are you moving back?" I promptly respond, "never."
Wisdom from the Bandit: When you tell somebody something, it depends on what part of the country you are standing in as to just how dumb you are.