The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Racist Liberal Yankees of Boston

Posted on | December 11, 2017 | Comments Off on The Racist Liberal Yankees of Boston

As a Southerner, I enjoyed reading this:

Google the phrase “Most racist city,” and Boston pops up more than any other place, time and time again.
It may be easy to write that off as a meaningless digital snapshot of what people say about us, and what we say about ourselves — proof of little beyond the dated (or, hopefully, outdated) memories of Boston’s public and fierce school desegregation battles of the 1970s.
Except that Boston’s reputation problem goes much deeper than an online search. A national survey commissioned by the Globe this fall found that among eight major cities, black people ranked Boston as least welcoming to people of color. More than half — 54 percent — rated Boston as unwelcoming.

The perception of my native Atlanta was much better. In truth, most of what is perceived as “racism” is simply bad manners. Teach your children to be courteous — “Yes sir,” “No sir,” “Please” and “Thank you” — and also teach them Christian ideals of kindness and mercy.

Furthermore, we should teach children to have a sense of their own personal dignity. Treating others rudely damages your reputation, as the rude Yankees of Boston demonstrate. Also, being rude is bad for business. During the civil-rights era of the 1950s and 60s, Atlanta was hailed as “the City Too Busy to Hate.” Local cynics joked that, in truth, we were the City Too Greedy to Care — but it’s the same thing, really.

There was always a pro-business attitude in Atlanta, and the Chamber of Commerce didn’t want to do anything that would undermine the city’s growth. Business leaders were less concerned with black and white than with green, and Atlanta’s reputation as a friendly place owes a lot to the legacy of such leaders. It is a historical irony, of course, that Boston was a notorious cauldron of abolitionism before the Civil War, and that Atlanta was burned to the ground by Sherman’s army. The biggest city in New England, a bastion of Democrat Party liberalism, now has a worse reputation for racism than the capital of conservative Georgia.

Save your Confederate money, folks. The South will rise again!

 

 

Category: Racism

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