Responce to Anna's Post
Dear 14 year old Anna,
When you move from NY to Alabama and are thinking to yourself about how backward the South is, how its 2012 and there's still immense racial tensions, how you can't imagine living there as a black person in the 60s or 50s or 40s, how if you were black and given the choice to move North you would take it in a heart beat... just pause for a second. Black folks did emigrate from the South during the Great Migration, but what they met in the North was far from a Promised Land. Just because they weren't subject to lynching's or the KKK, does not mean their lives got substantially better. Wilkerson's statement: "the very thing that made black life hard in the north, the very nature of northern hostility – unwritten, mercurial, opaque, and eminently deniable..." was important because it underscored the unique challenge the North posed for black folks, in that it presented a façade of fairness and openness to blacks, but was extremely racist in practice. While there weren't discriminatory laws on the books, black people were unable to obtain decent jobs or housing because of "personal discriminations" (387). Blacks were met by mobs when attempting to move into white neighborhoods, with one individual saying "Every time we hear of a Negro moving in, we respond quicker than you do to a fire" (378). So ask yourself, would a life in the North even be more desirable?
-Mariah
When you move from NY to Alabama and are thinking to yourself about how backward the South is, how its 2012 and there's still immense racial tensions, how you can't imagine living there as a black person in the 60s or 50s or 40s, how if you were black and given the choice to move North you would take it in a heart beat... just pause for a second. Black folks did emigrate from the South during the Great Migration, but what they met in the North was far from a Promised Land. Just because they weren't subject to lynching's or the KKK, does not mean their lives got substantially better. Wilkerson's statement: "the very thing that made black life hard in the north, the very nature of northern hostility – unwritten, mercurial, opaque, and eminently deniable..." was important because it underscored the unique challenge the North posed for black folks, in that it presented a façade of fairness and openness to blacks, but was extremely racist in practice. While there weren't discriminatory laws on the books, black people were unable to obtain decent jobs or housing because of "personal discriminations" (387). Blacks were met by mobs when attempting to move into white neighborhoods, with one individual saying "Every time we hear of a Negro moving in, we respond quicker than you do to a fire" (378). So ask yourself, would a life in the North even be more desirable?
-Mariah
Excellent!! Great questions, beautiful response. I particularly love the quote that you use to describe the North ("unwritten, mercurial, opaque, and eminently deniable....") Outstanding!
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