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August 6, 2003

I’m Gonna Pack My Trunk and Make My Getaway

A couple of weeks ago, at closing time at Beerland, I stumbled into a conversation between Jacob and Shawn wherein they were discussing St. Louis and how segregated it is. Shawn was saying that he lived there when he was a kid, and thought of it as a terribly racist place. That was interesting and a little surprising to me. Having been born into a Southern family and growing up in the South and then moving to Missouri, I’ve always heard people deride the South as a segregated and racist place. I’ve never really heard anyone have the same ideas about Missouri, except for my roommate in college who was from Chicago and whose friends ridiculed her constantly for going to school in the backwoods of Missouri, because they had it confused with Mississippi. People in Chicago don’t really know much about anything outside of Chicago, because there’s nothing to know for miles and miles and miles, so they just bury their heads in Lake Michigan and comfort themselves in their icy isolation.

This seems like a big bite to tackle, and I already know it’s way more than I can chew today, but I’m going to jump in all the same.

Yes, the South (and whether or not that includes Missouri will depend on your geography and upbringing, I guess. To my thinking, the South includes all the Southeast U.S., all the mid-Atlantic states and extending west to include just the furthest east reaches of Texas. I really don’t consider Texas or Oklahoma part of the South, but it’s really all negotiable. I had a professor who taught a class in the History of the New South and she maintained that all it took to be a Southerner was to consider yourself one.) is racist. And segregated. Racism, and not just against black folks, but against every hue in the spectrum, is so deeply enmeshed in the making of this country that it’s not even a question.

Here’s the thing, though: all cities are segregated. And when it happens now, I think that it sometimes is a matter of racism, but not always necessarily so. Every city I’ve ever been to is divided into neighborhoods, and these boundaries are most often drawn across cultural and class lines. The only St. Louis I can speak of is the one I lived in, and I left in 1994. It is very divided, and it is very white in many ways. It’s in the Midwest and the Midwest is full of a whole, whole lot of white people. (I mean, have you ever been to Iowa?)(Don’t go.) The divisions I noticed mostly were ones of class. West is rich, South is redneck, East is poor and everywhere else is everyone else. For the most part, people are going to assume South Grand to be Southeast Asian, the Hill to be Italian, Soulard to be GermanFrenchSpanishPolishWhoCanSayWhiteMidwesternPeople, Cherokee to be Latino, East St. Louis to be African-American. When I go back to visit I’m always excited to visit new neighborhoods that weren’t there before, like the huge, new Bosnian neighborhood near Bevo Mill. But really, I don’t see these neighborhoods as being segregated. They occur where they do for a reason. The build up because it’s much easier to make a home and a community where people are going to understand you and what you do and why you do it. It’s going to be easier in every way to rent from a Vietnamese-speaking landlord if that is the only language you know. You’re going to want to live in a Muslim neighborhood (especially in these fucked up days in the U.S.) if you are Muslim so you won’t have to be constanly defending yourself and explaining yourself. Also, oftentimes (as is the case in St. Louis) people tend to settle near immigration centers where they will have an easier time with transportation, employment and just plain communication. These things are so obvious to me. Perhaps it can be called segregation. I guess it is, but I don’t see it on the same level as I do Jim Crow laws. I see individual communities that make the whitewashed Midwest a little more bearable to be in. All cities are comprised of neighborhoods, and all neighborhoods have their own distinctions.

I imagine this isn’t what Shawn was talking about. I personally think Austin is just as segregated, if not more. Everyone can make any assumption they want to about you as soon as they know whether you live east, west, central or south (I don’t really know anyone who lives north.) And of course, that’s wrong, but it’s what happens everywhere. And if you really could use a good example of racism, just come to work with me today and meet the stupidass motherfuckers that I spend forty hours a week with.

Posted by pogo at August 6, 2003 3:35 PM