Seconding that “yep!” Being a hate-filled asshole often comes with being racist, but it’s not a pre-requisite. Racists can still be polite and even make friends or acquaintances with the race they feel is inferior to them.

I once heard that you know you’re a North Dakotan if the only reason you ever lock your car doors is to prevent people from leaving bags of zucchini in it. This is legit.

Lol. For sure. I’m almost 20 yrs removed from Alabama, and many of my mannerisms, like saying hi when passing a stranger, have been forced out of me. But as I was writing about the deer, it struck me how that type of gesture up here would be received lol.

Kinda OT, but this whole conversation is reminding me of what it was like to visit Germany as an American Jew. People were polite, but AWKWARD. They were tripping over their tongues trying not to offend me.

Only in the South would randomly leaving half a deer on someone’s front porch be considered neighborly.

My wife and I moved to Kentucky about eight years ago. Her sister finally came to visit this last summer and was amused that we waived or said hi to everyone in our neighborhood. “Do you know them?” she kept asking. “No. It’s just what you do.”

What about “the nod?” In TX, I always get the nod from any brotha over age 25. If there’s no nod, it’s because they’re recent African arrivals. When I worked in Chicago....maybe 1/10 brothas would nod.

Born and raised in Alabama, now on my second trip through Ohio and... yeah. These Ohioans like to think that the South is some openly, horribly racist place, and they are always shocked when I tell them the first time I was openly called “n*gger” was in their backyard.

My first time in DC, I gave out 231243414 nods and smiles before I even got to the rental car.

>> In my county, people wave at strangers as they pass on the road, usually at least nod in passing at the store and the older ones will often say hello. (Now, of course, they are probably whispering trash about you once you move to the next aisle.)

That doesn’t seem “polite” to this northerner, it just seems…

As someone who has lived in Virginia (non-DC suburbs) and Philadelphia it’s proven to be 1,000% true. I knew people who’s racist-as-shit grandparents grew up in Jim Crow south and talked about how they were practically raised by black housekeepers. It’s weird.

It’s like in Russia I guess, they don’t trust people who aren’t dead on the inside.

It’s kind of weird how being not particularly social is spun as a good thing. One wonders how they handle going to the Caribbean, Latin America, or Italy or places like that.

I’ve never thought of it that way before. I’m going to end up spending the weekend chewing on this.

I tend to repeat myself but I always explain race relations like this: “In the south white people are fine with POC as long as they don’t get too high. In the north white people are fine with POC as long as they don’t get too close.”

“My friends are always having to remind me to not make eye contact and stop responding to goddamn strangers.”
 

I love that you think your first sentence is helping to make your point. Bless.

I got into it with Curt Schilling on twitter yesterday over this. The guy is better than about half of the starting quarterbacks in the NFL. Numbers show that, even tape shows that. He’s not in the league specifically because of his protest.

Nobody is going to point out the British Army wasn’t deployed to Tunisia or Morocco in any part of the 1800's huh?

I changed my original comment because I decided to try and not be so negative, but, yeah. Reincarnation is a hallmark of decidedly non-white religions and this entire enterprise smacks of white people quite literally capitalizing on a culture that isn’t theirs.