9 Ways FDR's 'New Deal' Purposely Excluded Blacks

[BumRushDaShow]

70. "I don't get it."

When the black community was FINALLY allowed to vote, we were ALWAYS left to vote for the "lesser of evils" because certainly none of us would be running. This occurs at every Presidential election and POC look at the choices and make a decision.

And regarding Bill Clinton (and this could apply to Jimmy Carter and LBJ) - it seems many non-"southern" whites (or other non-black POC) are completely oblivious to the relationship dynamics between "southern" whites & "southern" blacks and "northern" whites & "northern" blacks (using the terms based on the areas settled longer than other areas of the U.S.). I.e., there is quite a sociological contrast that the regionalism in the U.S. brings to bear. Or in other words, the "public" faces of these regions often-belied what went on in "private" -

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When the young historian Mark Schultz ventured to Hancock County, in Georgia's lower Piedmont, to collect oral reminiscences of the intersection of black and white lives in the first half of the twentieth century (primarily the 1910s through the 1930s), he expected to gather a record of unrelentingly brutal oppression and a rigid color line. His actual findings, presented in The Rural Face of White Supremacy (Illinois), an unusually rich and dense portrait (as much a work of sociology as of history), have led him to draw a far more complex and subtle picture. To be sure, Schultz found abundant evidence of a white-supremacist society (one ultimately upheld by violence, and in which blacks who found themselves in unfamiliar circumstances had constantly to negotiate the convolutions of racial etiquette). But in this rural setting he failed to find the formal segregation that characterized black-white relations in the South's cities. Instead he discovered a world defined by what he calls "a web of interconnectivity," in which blacks and whites (especially in the lower classes) regularly attended one another's churches; played ball, fished, hunted, and ate together as neighbors; chatted and spun yarns together, visited one another's homes, and helped and consoled one another in times of sickness and death. ("[You could] act like you were of the same family with close white sharecroppers," one black sharecropper remembered.) In short, in this shared culture the races were intensely intimate—and their interactions were usually characterized by decency and good manners—if never equal. Although Schultz scrupulously eschews romanticizing what Martin Luther King Jr. called the "intimacy of life" between rural blacks and whites, his work corrects some of the best-publicized recent chronicles of southern life in this period, which too often treat white racial attitudes and behavior as a static and monolithic force.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/11/the-south-in-black-and-white/303566/

Since the majority of the black population lives in the south, the above dynamic very much colors the decision of who to vote for and why. And this is what makes the U.S. a fascinating but often frustrating nation to study.

Interestingly, I grew up hearing about this black/white dynamic in my household - basically being told and observing for myself, that in the south, whites and blacks were often distant "in public" - maintaining separation in work life or in various public venues, but in private, they had much more social and personal interaction (eating meals together at home, attending weddings or funerals, etc). Where in the north, black/white relations tended to be quite a display of public interaction during the day - willing to work together, go to school together, etc., but with very little "socializing" after dark (e.g., bbqs, clubbing, etc). This is slowly changing during my lifetime, but nonetheless, the regionalist differences cannot be dismissed.