Socrates might have us believe that the unexamined life is not worth living, but plenty goes unexamined in this life.\u00c2\u00a0 Or maybe we know it is there, and we look at it from time to time, but we’d rather not.\u00c2\u00a0 We’d rather not see the clutter in our own houses.\u00c2\u00a0 We have other things on our mind.<\/p>\n
So it is that talking about racism is very difficult.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s easy to look at other people’s social ills.\u00c2\u00a0 Not so much our own.<\/p>\n
In Mississippi where I live, inevitably if the subject of racism comes up, someone has a story to tell about how it is actually worse somewhere else.\u00c2\u00a0 We’re just the ones carrying–unfairly–the brunt of the blame.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s some truth in this.\u00c2\u00a0 Try being a Mississippian traveling to other places.\u00c2\u00a0 People glance down to see if you are wearing shoes.<\/p>\n
Once while in another state, I invited a woman to come visit me in Mississippi.\u00c2\u00a0 She said, “I’m not going there.\u00c2\u00a0 They shoot black people there.”\u00c2\u00a0 You know I’ve lived here my whole life, and I’ve never actually witnessed a shooting against a black person or anyone else.\u00c2\u00a0 The only people I’ve known who’ve been shot were victims of hunting accidents. In many parts of Mississippi the racial populations are fairly evenly divided between black and white, and in most of those places people just go about their daily lives with shootings of anything other than a deer or a turkey a rarity.<\/p>\n
That’s not to say we don’t have our share of violence.\u00c2\u00a0 Jackson has a notorious number of crime reports on the evening news.\u00c2\u00a0 Largely, it is a race issue, but it’s of the sort that has to do with the general woes of urban poverty–drugs, gangs, kids growing up without a sense of hope, and so forth.\u00c2\u00a0 Jackson has a history of racial segregation to blame for many of the lines between the poor and the affluent.\u00c2\u00a0 It also has white flight to blame for many of the problems in the public schools and for failing businesses in areas that have now become more crime ridden.\u00c2\u00a0 All this is true.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t know, however, that this makes Jackson’s problems any different from other cities.\u00c2\u00a0 The degree of poverty is the only thing separating any city with a high crime rate from those with lower crime rates.<\/p>\n
If you live in Mississippi, though, you hear more than your share of bad things about your state.\u00c2\u00a0 We have the lowest literacy rates, the highest teen pregnancy rates, the highest obesity rates, the lowest test scores in math and science.\u00c2\u00a0 We’re the state that makes all the other states feel better about themselves, and no one ever lets us forget that.<\/p>\n
But surprisingly enough for those who don’t know, we wear shoes, we read books, we even have art museums and symphonies, as we’ll be happy to tell you<\/a>.<\/p>\n We’re used to defending ourselves against crazy accusations from people who don’t know that it is actually safe to walk across the street here, and if you do, you’ll probably find a Starbucks on the other side.<\/p>\n So it is that the most natural course of action is to defend ourselves against any accusation of racism.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not as bad as you think, we say.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s actually worse in other places where people don’t live side by side, we say.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s complicated, we say.<\/p>\n That’s all true enough, but it isn’t good enough.\u00c2\u00a0 We have a bad reputation for civil rights because we earned it, and we still live with it every day.<\/p>\n