A week or so back I received my copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo Papers Anthology in the mail, and I’ve been taking my time to lazily go through each page, lest I skim over something wonderful.
Been reading this piece on race-relations in Louisville in the 60s, where Thompson notes how the town has progressed from a more direct racism, to something more subtle, advanced and sinister. There’s ghettoization. People claim not to be personally racist, but do things that are quite so, to respect their neighbors.
A man won’t sell his house to a Negro – Thompson refers to black people as Negroes: he’s either being brash or it’s still the 60s and the N-word is yet above board – not because he personally has anything against Negroes, but if he did it would knock a couple of thousand dollars off the value of every other property in the neighborhood, which wouldn’t make the neighbors very happy.
Conversely, there’s block-busting. A realtor gets a white guy to sell his house to a Negro, then gets the others to sell out cheap by scaring them with arguments about falling prices. Later, the whole block is sold to Negroes at a massive profit.
It is also difficult for a black man to draw a mortgage to buy a house, even if one were to be sold to him, for it would increase the credit-risk for all other mortgages in the neighborhood, what with the prices falling, blah blah.
In newer redeveloped housing complexes, realtors refrain from renting to Negroes until at least 50% of the complex is occupied with whites, for the fear of making it taboo to ‘prestige clients’. In other words, almost no one is racist, but everyone’s neighbor sure as hell is.
All this, to me, is strangely reminiscent of the Hindu-Muslim ghettoization we’ve all witnessed in the 90s and 2000s in metro cities of India, which I’m certain will carry on to the next decade. In less progressive towns, the same pattern would persist for the Upper Castes and the Lower Castes amongst the Hindus, with Muslims serving as a totally other distinct ghetto.
Its interesting to note how all humans share similar prejudice patterns. And I’m not entirely certain as to whether we are above other animals in these matters.