[Samseau]

(12-22-2015 05:24 PM)kosko Wrote:  

New England is a Puritan backwater. No way anybody with a strait face say that place is any way like the greater USA.

The mix uptight conservative lifestyles with over the top liberal ideals. That place should be its own country, they are weird over there and have little in common with Americans, The French/Acadians, or Eastern Canadians at large.

Even though segregation in NE is pretty intense, I wouldn't say it's not like the rest of the country. America is very segregated no matter where you go.

The token mixing you see is the 20%. The other 80% of people live within their racial enclaves.

Down south the segregation is extremely pronounced. When I was visiting Atlanta, I accidentally crossed the street into a Black neighborhood. I saw a bunch of blacks hanging out by a convenience store in broad daylight (must have been unemployed) so I walked by and looked into the windows. One of the men said, "Watcha doin, boy? Don't just stare go into the store if you want to look." I said okay and went inside the store, and there was just a clerk sitting behind some bulletproof glass and the shelves were nearly empty. There was one guy in there loitering in the back doing apparently nothing.

I walked back out of the store and the Blacks had taken an interest to me, talking very fast with one of the girls shouting, "DAYUMMMMMMM" over and over. They asked me where I was from and I told them. Then one of the Blacks came up to me, put his arm over my shoulder, and began to walk with me back into downtown Atlanta.

He was clearly high on something, and told me through slurred words how things worked around there.

"Now you see mang, you and yer kind stay over on that siiide of the streeet, and we stay over heeer. Butttur for evryone. Oh if you neeed sum guuud stuf, then you jus remebar I am your man. Jus' go to the Hard Rock cafe later and I can get somethung for ya."

I tell you right now, I've never seen or heard of anyone in New England who has been escorted out of a neighborhood for being the wrong skin color. And I was right next to downtown Atlanta, not even a 10 min walk away from the center of the city. The south's segregation and casual racism is obviously 10x worse than anything else I've seen.

And yet, despite the fact that everyone understood segregated neighborhoods as a fact of life, I've never met so many friendly Blacks and Whites in my life. I saw all the races openly talk with each other, including Black girls who would actually go up and start talking to me. That also has never happened to me once in New England. But I also saw that the races did tend to talk with "their own" more than with the others.

So, I'm not sure why you say NE is unlike the rest of the country - if anything, racism here is much less than almost anywhere else, even if the people here mostly live in their heads and are quiet. We don't have race riots, and the ghettos here are easily some of the finest in the country. I've been in quite a few welfare homes of Blacks and Whites and boy do they have it GOOD. Beautifully furnished homes, the finest appliances, widescreen TV's, the latest iPhone, etc. And yet even in spite of the royal treatment they get, still many Blacks will commit crimes of aggression more so than other races. And a lot of it is covered up and ignored by the media. The cops here definately know the score and look at non-Whites with greater suspicion than Whites. Yet few hold grudges up here, but there is the preference among at least 1/3 of the Whites here to stay in a mostly White neighborhood. Whites who enjoy mixing it up go to clubs/bars in Cambridge, Brookline, and Jamaica Plain where lots of mixing happens.

I'm pretty sure NE has the best race relations in the country, but it's probably because of the supermajority status Whites have here.