@JLeslie – Yes, I grew up in Northern MN…I just recently encountered a term that I think fits the mentality up there, used in relation to Sarah Palin of all people…“snowbillies”. Definitely I think if you lived in somewhere like NY, San Fran, any of the real urban, cosmopolitan centers of culture outside the deep south, you probably wouldn’t have encountered large scale discrimination, and I don’t think even in the backwoods of northern MN they actually had separate drinking fountains. On the other had, about 15 years ago, a friend of mine was telling me about a time he was with his grandfather, probably born around the turn of the century (19th to 20th obviously) and his grandfather was chatting with one of his friends, and was overheard to lament, “I miss the good old days when you could hang a nigger if he got out of line”.
The thing about smaller, more rural areas is, they didn’t have anything but whatever ethnicity decided to settle there by and large, so we had a lot of Swedes and Finns up in the north country…a lot of people in my parents’ generation had never even met a black person, but what they would certainly have heard on the radio and on TV when it came around were non-PC depictions of non-whites, because that was what was institutionalized. Even outside the deep south where segregation had to be taken down by force, as recently as the early 1960s I’d contend that the vast majority of white people outside your major urban centers really did not have any role models to suggest to them that blacks were equal…I’m not saying they were seen as “animals” by and large, but certainly I believe it wasn’t until the 1950s or early 1960s that the unwashed masses began to consider black people…I think in the minds of many they were almost mythological…you may have known they existed but you’d never seen one.
Here’s kind of an example of how racism, though not necessarily meant to be hurtful, played out in the every day lives of regular people. I don’t know if you’ve heard of a former NFL player named Phillip Wise or not, I guess he played for the NY Jets in 1971. He is now a regular on a morning talk show here in the Twin Cities, and according to a story he told, apparently he and a couple of other black atheletes in the mid 70s were traveling through the midwest, and had a car break down. So, they took to foot to go find help, and walked through a middle class residential neighborhood. There they say a little girl I believe, maybe 4 years old, playing in her yard, and she saw them coming. She ran up to the fence and yelled excitedly, “HI NIGGERS!!!” She had no hate for them, but she was excited to see something she’d probably never seen before, and that was how this mythological beast was known to her based on how her family communicated the world to her.
Another thing typical of the attitude of the time, when I was growing up, my dad, who certainly isn’t out there wearing a white hood, told me I’d better not marry a black woman. I was appalled, and he explained to me that his concern was the kids, that them not being either black or white would get them teased relentlessly, and that was because that was HIS experience. He had seen it happen. I was in touch with the present and future world and he was living in the past, but to gain acceptance, you have to have exposure. And though NYC was certainly a place where you’d have that kind of exposure to actual people. It’s a lot easier to fear and misunderstand that which you do not know.
Personally, I think one of the most important shows ever put on television was All in the Family, because the argument between Archie and meathead was the exact thing I went through with my adult role models. If you watched the show, Archie was really ignorant, but he was not hateful…they never depicted him as a hateful man. But he did harbor a lot of stereotypes about people who didn’t look like him, and it was through the course of the show that we saw him soften up on things, as he encountered the very people he had been prejudging.
So while you and @Jeruba and Larry King were the world’s meatheads, the vast majority of America was Archie Bunkers…and we didn’t really see the tipping point in popular culture and from the viewpoint of the American masses in my opinion until the mid 1980s. Realize that MTV at first refused to play Michael Jackson videos when Thriller came out because they were a “rock” station…it wasn’t until the late 80s when we actually had black rock and roll acts hit the mainstream. When Cosby hit the air, there were no other shows with all or mostly black casts on TV…up until the 1970s in fact you didn’t even see blacks on TV unless they were of the Amos and Andy variety. In other words, I’d say most of America, aka the “heartland” (or as the aforementioned Palin derisively put it last year…REAL America) seemed to lag about 30 years behind the more enlightened population centers. I say if you were lucky enough to be raised in a culture that embraced equality, you were the exception, not the rule. And I think the proof of that lies in popular culture, if the rest of the country were as enlightened in your parents generation as your parents seemed to be, then I don’t think there would have been shows like All in the Family, or even Diff’rent Strokes…I think those things were downright controversial in middle America at the time.
Just a hunch.
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