I grew up as a teenager in Oakland, Ca and played basketball with black team mates in high school and my best friend was a Fillipino. I had a number of close Chinese and Japanese friends. When I enlisted in the military during the Korean war it was the first time I ever encountered really hardcore racists of the worst kind. They were all from one of the southern states and were still fighting the civil war. They could not understand how I could stand going to school and playing ball with n-----Needless to say, I never developed any close friendships with them. I met my first wife in Tampa Florida and her father, uncles, cousins were all racists of the worse kind. Many KKK members. They tolerated me as THE YANKEE. My wife was not a racist and felt detached from her family because of that. When she came with me to California and met my friends and family it eliminated any prejudice she may have held and years later became very critical of her own family.
Lon, that was a long time ago. Things have changed. Sure, there are still some racists but of all the people I know, there are only two that I know who are racists. And they are stupid people. I mean really, really stupid people. If any of the others are racist, they keep it to themselves.
They have changed SOMEWHAT Shirley only because some have found that being a Racist or having Racist ideas is SOCIALLY UNACCEPTABLE.
When I was very young and way before I joined the military, I got a job at Arnaud’s Restaurant in New Orleans as an assistant dishwasher. It was my job to scape and stack the dishes prior to being racked and in a place that seated 1,400 guests at one seating, I stayed busy. Getting that job was a good thing but only after a few things were ironed out, namely, I was the only white guy in a kitchen that employed nearly 70 black employees. In essence, I invaded their territory and many of them believed I needed to be moved out. I still have the scar on my arm where one of the cooks cut me because overall, I was extremely unwelcome and it was just one of the many ways that they tried to get rid of me. I guess that “slicing” was the last straw because the Exec Chef,with one of his knives in hand, took the cook out into the alley and after a bit, came back without the cook. Some said the cook lost a couple of fingers and others say he simply got his rear end handed to him but nevertheless, I never saw him again. In those days, black people worked the back of the house and whites worked the front but when I was hired, things started to change but not without a lot of issues between the front and back house. Eventually, things worked out and as a matter of history, I hired the first black waiter and the first waitress ever to work at Arnaud’s. I haven’t been back to New Orleans in around 25 years but the last time I left, the more militant blacks and whites were well on their way out of the restaurant business. Oh, the back of the houses are still probably predominantly black and the front is still probably predominantly white, but it’s not because of some unwritten rule but because that’s just the way it is.
I met and talked with several of these despicable bastards in Pre Civil Rights Florida 1958. Incredible!!
The subdued ones are the worse. At least those who are overt let us know who they are. And Byrd held positions of power. A long time ago (15+ years) I was watching Mississippi Burning and realized that the Klan had not been in the news during most of my lifetime, so I went on the ACLU website to see exactly what they had been up to. The worse act cited was "leafletting" (handing out offensive flyers.)
I really don't know. I have met many low down mangy dog scum bag racist's,but whether they were anointed or just freelancing I don't know.
^^^^^ Maybe David Duke has changed his mind and repented his racist remarks like President Biden has.
“I’m presented as a white supremacist all the time. You’ve been interviewing me for years. You know that I’ve never embraced that term. In fact I condemn – in fact in my work, in my website, in thousands of interviews, to my own people, to European Americans, by the way – I have a concern about the well-being European Americans in this country.” Duke said, “I believe human rights must be accorded to all people, all heritages and all nations. I believe that European Americans – I think that the government of our country is embarked on a purposeful program to destroy the European people in America by making us a tiny minority in the nation that our forefathers created.