About Race

I know this is going to be a long and complicated topic.  But I have to start with two things.

First, yesterday when I read Naipaul's book A Turn in the South, I noted that, even though he comes south from New York City, he still apparently is looking for race for the first time in the south.  In the first few pages of the introduction he writes, "A black boy was hosing down the veranda floor of the doghouse.  He looked timid -- for the first time that morning I had a feeling of racial constraint.."  It's as though race and "racial constraint" is only visible in the south and not in the north.  Naipaul, if he's felt racial constraint in NYC, hasn't stated it.

Having said that, I read this disturbing statistic this morning in Florida:  A Short History:  "The lawless character of the hinterland (the interior), combined with whites' racism, caused Florida to lead the country in lynchings, 4.5 per 10,000 blacks, twice the rates in Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana, three times the rate in Alabama, six times the rate in South Carolina.  An entire black town could be obliterated on the slightest suggestion of wrongdoing, as happened at Rosewood (near Cedar Keys) in 1923 with, it is believed, six black people killed, including women and children; so could an entire black section of a town, as at Ocoee (near Orlando), with four deaths, three years before.  In both cases, the entire populace fled."  (p. 135)

The writer marks a difference between the interior areas of Florida (backwoods, center of the state) to the booming coastal towns where the rich played and bought property.  It's funny that in my first essay for Michael I wrote about Florida being the interior, and not the coasts.  The popular conception of Florida is this coastal, tourist idea of Riviera living.  But the interior has always been much different, more devoid of northern influence and tourism, more agricultural, more dense, unknown, and apparently, more of what we traditionally conceive as the South, right down to its racist backbone.