David Mittell has an interesting column about riding the train and racism (which, for some reason, sounds not-quite-right to me, but anyway...) in yesterday's paper.
Read it. I link it only to recount something I heard somewhere (sorry so vague) that struck me right, since I've lived in both the south and the north:
Southern whites think it's fine for blacks to be near them, so long as they're not uppity; northern whites think it's fine for blacks to be uppity, so long as they're not near them.
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