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May 16, 2005
Still bananas
Matthew Yglesias: Bye, Bye Brown
Matt is so innocent. He honestly thinks that no state government would allow segregation if the Supreme Court reversed Brown v. Board of Education. Is he aware that, for instance, segregated schools are still the law of the land in Alabama?
Matt may be in Washington now, but he still has that view of the world from that old New Yorker illustration, you know the one -- everything in New York is really big, and almost everything else is small and indistinct. He really underestimates the number of unreconstructed bigots there still are out there. It's adorable.
Posted by Mac Thomason at May 16, 2005 09:41 AM
Comments
"...it's extremely hard to imagine that any state government would allow school boards to resegregate. Which is not to say that Brown made no difference at the time, but nowadays it seems pretty irrelevant."
Oh my God. Poor deluded bastard.
Posted by: Susan at May 16, 2005 02:09 PM
Still, I would like to know where he gets his weed from. Based on his writing, its sounds like he scored a pretty good bag this past time. I'd like to believe these things, too. Even if it's just for a few hours.
Posted by: Susan at May 16, 2005 02:11 PM
He's just (1) young, and (2) an upper-middle-class New Yorker by birth. I mean, check out his voyage deep into the heart of gasp Northern Virginia:
Road Trip
Notes On The State of Virginia
Notes On The State of Virginia, Part II
People in the South have accents!
Posted by: Mac Thomason at May 16, 2005 02:26 PM
Well, we were all young once, but even young I did my best to avoid holding (and publishing) stereotypes and gross ignorance about entire swaths of the country. I mean, I haven't believed that gunfights (of the "Gunsmoke" variety) are still going on in the West since I was seven.
But, sadly, ignorance of and condescension to the South are plentiful, even among very intelligent, very enlighted writers whose work I otherwise enjoy (witness the NY Times on any given day). And with people like this serving as fish in the barrel, it's hard to blame them at times.
Posted by: Susan at May 16, 2005 03:01 PM
Actually, his voyage was to Norfolk, so he did get into the heart of...southeastern Virginia.
Posted by: Haggai at May 16, 2005 04:10 PM