Racism Rebooted (Page 4)

For some in town, making money may be the first and only reason. At the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce you can find a glossy pamphlet titled "Neshoba County, African-American Heritage Driving Tour: Roots of Struggle, Rewards of Sacrifice." Inside you are invited to join "a journey toward freedom," complete with a map detailing where the three young men were murdered and buried. Such civil rights tourism would be a difficult sell as long as the perpetrators were still on the streets and everybody knew who they were. So Killen's trial was part of the town's business plan--a bid to capitalize on its ugly past in order to make money, at least in part, by showing how it has improved.

The desire of many Southerners for a makeover is understandable, as is their irritation at the North's continued attempts to caricature them. The smug and superior manner in which the rest of the country has embalmed the region in the 1960s, so as to better patronize it, has echoes of Europeans on an anti-American binge. Like the Europeans, Northerners have a point--but without sufficient humility and self-awareness of their own shortcomings, that point can soon implode under the weight of its own arrogance. According to a census report from 2002, the top five residentially segregated metropolitan areas in the United States are Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis and Newark. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, you will find higher rates of black poverty in Wisconsin, Illinois and West Virginia than in Mississippi. And of the senators who refused to co-sponsor the anti-lynch-law apology, more than half were not from the South.

Mississippi shares the South's desire for change, and indeed has changed considerably. Two huge casinos run by Choctaw Indians are now among the largest employers in the Philadelphia area. You can see black and white youngsters interacting casually at school, and a few black people have moved into white areas. But these changes have come about not because most white Southerners wanted them to but because many black people and a handful of whites forced them to. "I'm happy to see everybody joining forces to make sure that we get this done now," says Eva Tisdale, 55, a native Mississippian who came to Philadelphia to participate in the Freedom Summer and stayed. Tisdale believes it is the business case, not the moral case, that has won over many of the whites who now back resolution of the legal case. "We organized marches and we marched and there were no white people marching--not from Philadelphia. So I know the reason we came together is not the same reason for all of us."

For if a lot has changed in Mississippi, an awful lot has also stayed the same. In a state where African-Americans constitute 36 percent of the population, they make up about 75 percent of prisoners. In a state that is already poor, black people are poorer still: According to the latest census, Mississippi has the fifth-lowest median income in the United States; the per capita income of black Mississippians is 51 percent that of their white counterparts. If there are tougher places to be black than Mississippi it is because those places are so bad, not because Mississippi is so good. The problem is not that some whites are trying to rebrand the South but that they are now peddling false goods. "There's a kind of civic religion in asserting that the past is the past and we should put all these problems behind us," says Payne. "Some people are using the progress that has been made to wipe out any sense of the past, as though they have conquered the past. The extent to which these convictions can get people to think critically about how privilege is shaped is the extent to which they strike me as being real and useful." Some would rather not acknowledge that racial privilege exists at all. "Race is not an issue now for younger people," says Prince. "Today, if you're willing to work hard and be honest, then you're able to succeed. There is equal opportunity in Philadelphia."

If Prince is right, then the poverty, low levels of educational achievement, unemployment and high prison rates among blacks not just in Philadelphia but elsewhere in the state and the country can be explained only by black people's genetic inability or inherent unwillingness to seize those opportunities. And so it is that even as these trials seek to cure one symptom, the racist infection mutates into an even more hardy strain. Killen may end up behind bars, but the logic and the system that produced him and made him infamous still remains free.

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