My colleague Ed Kilgore was raised in Georgia which gives him a totally different perspective than I got being raised in the relatively “enlightened” and idyllic Ivy League town of Princeton, New Jersey. What Ed lived with every day, I mostly learned about in textbooks. It also helps him that he is a little older than I am. Racial tensions in Princeton were significantly more pronounced for my brothers, who are ten and thirteen years older, than they were for me. By the time I was in third grade, a Georgia Democrat was our president, and the Jim Crow Era was taught in school as something shameful from the distant past.

Ed visited the Atlanta exurbs this past week, and it ain’t seeming like the distant past to him.

I’ve just spent nearly a week back home in exurban Atlanta, and I regret to report that the events in and in reaction to Ferguson have brought back (at least in some of the older white folks I talked with) nasty and openly racist attitudes I haven’t heard expressed in so unguarded a manner since the 1970s. The polling we’ve all seen about divergent perceptions of Ferguson doesn’t even begin to reflect the intensity of the hostility I heard towards “the blacks” (an inhibition against free use of the n-word, at least in semi-public, seems to be the only post-civil-rights taboo left), who have the outrageous temerity to protest an obvious act of self-defense by a police officer…

…Putting aside the legal issues (you can’t really expect lay people to understand how grand juries work unless they’ve served on one), there seems to be a complete lack of reflection on the fact that it’s the black kid who is dead and the cop who is alive and free. This skewed perception of the equities of the matter is what most reminds me of the very bad old days back home, when to a shockingly overwhelming degree white people believed all that civil rights stuff was a fabrication of outside agitators and lying yankee reporters inciting the normally placid if potentially dangerous local helots to “act ugly,” richly earning whatever hellish retaliatory violence that might ensue.

I think Ed was better prepared by his upbringing than I was to meet America in the Obama Era. I had unlearned a lot about race relations in this country prior to 2008, but I still harbored delusions that most of the ugly past was dead and buried. Didn’t the success of Barack Obama in some sense prove that?

In reality, it proved something different. It proved that we could beat these folks in pitched battle, but it also revealed that this would be more necessary and more urgent than I ever imagined.

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