Insightful column about race in America today.
How does a black man win the highest political office in this majority-white town, infamous for one of the vilest acts of racial violence in modern American history?
James Young knows precisely. The chatty, barrel-chested Pentecostal pastor and former town ambulance worker became the city's first black mayor last year, mainly by promising he wouldn't fix anybody's traffic tickets. But despite his well-known face and pro-business outlook, Mr. Young admits he still bears the burden of his race in the eyes of many townspeople.
So how did he overcome the racial odds? "My philosophy is that I refuse to stop the truck and get out to fight you," he says. "I'm going to keep moving forward."
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Meet Marshall Blanton, the prototypical white Southerner. Perambulating the streets of Selma, Ala., in a pair of overalls, he says he had five forefathers who fought for the Confederacy. His own daddy, he says, "taught me to be prejudiced."
From the Ku Klux Klan to church bombings to the flame-carrier for an evangelical movement that helped transform American politics and shape the modern culture wars, the drawling rural white man from the Deep South embodies a unique American antagonist, easily blamed and ridiculed.
Yet Mr. Blanton, like many native whites across the region, is actually a nuanced character whose life represents a potent parable of the modern South: a process in which whites, especially poorer whites, have had to confront their deepest fears in resolving their views of black neighbors.
"The Vietnam War changed it for me," explains Blanton. "When I came back I told my wife, 'We're not raising our son [to be prejudiced].' "
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Most racially tinged debates this summer have been fueled by non-Southerners, their racialized political jabs further abetted by a national media – largely based in the North (save CNN in Atlanta) – that critics say condescend to blacks by portraying them as helpless.
"The worst form of insidious racism in America is the institutionalized elite view where they treat African-Americans, including the president, with a patronizing attitude and condescension; where the press so blatantly expresses that the black guy can't do it on his own, we have to protect him," says Mr. Caddell, the former Carter confidant.
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