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Many years ago while speaking at a large southern university, a white student in one of my audiences asked why, if the South were really so racist, black folks seemed to be moving back to the region in such large numbers?
Indeed, he was right about the trend: in a reversal of the Great Migration of the early 1900s, the last few years of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st have witnessed the substantial movement of African Americans from the North, Midwest, and West back to the South whence so many of their forbears came.
Although his premise was itself flawed — after all, I had never claimed the South was uniquely racist (far from it), and as a southerner, I’ve long known better and said so — the question itself was easy to answer. It’s the answer that most any black person would have offered had he asked them, which he had never apparently thought to do.
Simple, I explained: Sometimes it’s just easier to deal with the racism you know — the kind that doesn’t come with pretense or liberal denial or protestations of greater enlightenment. Southern racism isn’t fancied up or often camouflaged. It’s raw and unambiguous. Northern versions — and God knows the versions one finds in places like…
