IPFS News Link • Racism
How Relations Between the Races Were Ruined
• https://www.paulcraigroberts.orgPaul Craig RobertsMany of my American readers, judging by their emails, enjoy most my remembrances of the civilized times in America's past.
My column, "I have outlived my country," on March 16 reminded many Americans of the civilized country we once had. A Vietnam War era fighter pilot wrote that he grew up in Georgia during the same era and remembers that his black acquaintances on neighboring farms were opposed to the coercion that came with integration. Blacks had been experiencing a voluntary increase in acceptance as equals, and they saw willing acceptance, nor coerced acceptance, as the promising path.
That set me to thinking. I realized that in the South white Americans were better integrated with black Americans prior to the enforced "integration" that has been imposed. In those days we were intermingled. Blacks worked with us in our households. They helped produce our meals and raise our children. Many white Southern Americans were partly raised by black American women. I never experienced tension or animosity with black Americans. They knew our problems as they were involved in the household, and we knew theirs, and if resources were available we pitched in to help. These facts have been buried by Hollywood movies and morally superior novelists.
None of us had any fear of entering black areas. Unlike today, we did not expect to be verbally abused, robbed, raped, or murdered for being a "white racist exploiter of black people."