Racists: Where Are They Now?

Doree just linked to this great slideshow from the Civil Rights Movement, which reminds me of something I always think when I see old photos and especially video clips from back then: I'd love to see a documentary that goes back and finds the racist white people and interviews them now. I'm always wondering "Whose mom or dad or grandparent is that? And what do they say about it now?" It would be fascinating to find that the most visible and familiar anti-civil rights activists have changed their minds and are mortified by their place in history. It also might be a good lesson for current battles over basic human rights like gay marriage and abortion. (Though, like a This American Life story arc, the documentarians might find people as stubbornly bigoted as always, though who could watch themselves spewing such hate and feel proud of it?) If this documentary already exists, I want to see it.

Comments

[Jared]

Right here.

[John]

I've wondered this, too. When my mom was a young girl in Alabama, the phone rang just after my grandparents left to go to dinner. My uncle, who was 14 or 15, answered, and a voice on the line said, "Tell your father to stop it or we'll rape your little sister," and hung up.

(My grandfather, at the time, was part of a group of businessmen in Birmingham who favored integration--on the grounds that institutionalized racism was killing the economy in the South, which it was.)

I mean, these people lived close enough to my grandparents to see them leave the house, right? They were _neighbors_.

But whenever I ask my mom about this, she is always careful to point out that there were, basically, _no white people_ who were not racists. (Even my grandfather, who realized the importance of integration, believed in it for practical reasons not moral ones.)

Any white southerner in the 1950s could have been in those photographs.

[Kate]

yeah, i'm willing to bet at least 80% of those people would stand by their racist pasts. in fact, i don't really get what you're wondering about. do you really think a lot of them would change? why? the way it's put here... you make it sound like racism doesn't exist anymore, like it would be almost a novelty to find someone who still believed in segregation. i know that sometimes it can be easy to forget how awful racism still is today, especially if you're white and live in a liberal part of the country, but there's still plenty of hate crimes, discrimination, and institutionalized racism to go around.

in short, i think a documentary about where these people are now would be exceedingly boring, because it would just be the same thing as the old footage, but with a few more lines in their faces. sad but true.