How fricking easy is this?
I deeply dislike my home state of Florida. It began when I was old enough to start deciding if I wanted to go to church in Winter Haven, my home town. When I grilled the local pastors why there were no Black people in his church, and this was a question I asked Baptists to Lutherans to Methodists, the answers weren’t sufficient.
There is a terrific line in one of my favorite sports movies, 42, wherein the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who has decided to bring on Jackie Robinson, is in an argument with the owner of the Philadelphia team. I LOVE this scene:
I despise Florida for its redneck, backwater, nasty undercurrent of racism that, like the tiny NC town in which I worked briefly for a bank, the rules have barely changed. With respect to those who don’t fall into this category, for my money Florida has too many armed redneck Billybobs for my taste. For them, as in many other places, the Civil War is still in play.
I am currently in Tanzania. I am the minority here. When someone takes me to the market, it’s overwhelming to be in the middle of such a crush of people. If you’re White, you stand out like a beacon, and everyone but everyone is shoving stuff in your face, grabbing and touching.
It’s a real lesson in what it feels like-a micro lesson, granted- to be a minority. Those tiny windows might be brief but they are very telling, Marley. Our comfort level with such things is informative. This is not a place for threatened White folks. But it is a good place to learn perspective.