Racial Attitudes (3)

There’s a difference between racial attitudes among the rank and file of white people in the North and the South.  We did not realize it until we moved north.

I learned this when I moved to New York.  No one in New York (at least among the people we knew) would ever admit to being racially biased, but it seemed to me like many people in New York accepted black people as a race, but did not engage them on any kind of  meaningful social level as individuals.  The might profess love for  people of other races, but a Marcello or a Rufus would not have been among their friends.  On the other hand, we may have likes the Marcellos and Rufuses of the world, while using pejorative language about their ethnic background when we weren't around them.

One experience that confirmed this for me was trying to rent a house in New York.  When we were trying to find a place to live, at first Ann would call.  Ann’s accent is thicker than mine.  When she was in high school, she often played Southern Belles in school dramas.  The accent stuck.  Some people in Texas have been known to ask if she’s from Alabama. 

On the other hand, I grew up talking “West Texas Country Boy,”  but I took a lot of speech courses in college, and that included phonetics.  I can speak the general American dialect if I work at it very hard, but I’ve never allowed it to become my primary way of speaking.  I just don’t think it would be me.  However, I don’t speak West Texas Country Boy anymore unless I want to for some reason.  I speak “Texas Cosmopolitan” (especially if I’m delivering some kind of public speech) which means I probably sound like I’m from Dallas.  Well Dallas may be a bit too sophisticated, so let me say, “Fort Worth.”  That’s more uptown than Clyde.

Back to my story.  When Ann would call she would curtly be told that the place was rented.  We began to suspect that the people who heard her speak on the phone thought she was black.  To confirm this, I started making calls, and got a totally different reaction.  It was obvious to us that some New Yorkers wanted to avoid the racist label, but they didn’t want black people occupying their rent houses.