Beyond Black and White in the Mississippi Delta

ARTICLE: "Beyond Black and White in the Mississippi Delta"

by Gene Dattel

In three small-town Southern elections, community and trust trumped race.
This op-ed doesn't really delve into any real issues, but I thought that the way the author articulated the following comment was nice:

Each of these towns experienced the civil rights movement. They also experienced mechanization, which displaced the black labor force. When the promise of the civil rights revolution was challenged by the realities of deindustrialization, hope was replaced by disappointment and disillusionment. The moral clarity of the struggle against legal segregation was replaced by de facto segregation and self-segregation — a problem hardly unique to the South.

It reminded me of the conversation we had last week, where Ann was talking about how students don't think about all the reasons behind the surface "reality" of what their observations.  Similarly, I think that when people talk about problems rising from racial discrimination, they often don't think about how class/the economy compounds/compounded those issues.  The article I posted before about the housing market also speaks to this point.