Race in Memphis vs Dallas

                  For my last blog post, I wanted to talk about something that actually means something to me, something that I could really relate to as a white college student.  Talking about the black narrative in the United States this semester opened my eyes, but it wasn’t like living through another person’s life and being in their shoes so much as looking through a window into a world I could never truly understand.  So for this last assignment, I decided to write about my experience with race and the transition I had moving from Texas to Memphis.

            Both cities are very Southern, and both have been known to be the home of more racism than almost any other city in the United States, but the difference lies in how that racism manifests itself, or more specifically how it is allowed to manifest itself. Dallas is one of the best examples of housing segregation in the country; I went to a private school with one black student out of a graduating class of ninety-one, and the main public school for uptown Dallas, Highland Park, had one black student out of a graduating class of more than five hundred.  Almost all of the minorities live either in South Dallas, close to downtown and in Deep Ellum, or well to the west in South Oak Cliff.  Uptown Dallas is the preppy part of Texas, where country clubs and party schools are paired with cowboy boots and southern accents, and it has been that way for as long as anyone can remember, allowing that country club mentality to plant roots over time.  Racism isn’t so much a problem because rarely will anyone from the Park Cities be given an opportunity to appear racist, but that doesn’t mean it still doesn’t exist.  Some of my best friends have told me they’re “definitely a little racist” in casual conversation, and simply blame it on their upbringing, and how could you not be racist living in Texas?  The argument made sense at the time, and holds some sway in that we are all products of our surroundings, but not to accept some responsibility for your own thoughts seems asinine. 

            When I got to Memphis, that whole mentality changed.  Race wasn’t on the other side of the Trinity River anymore, it was right in your face, and that was strange to me.  I had rarely experienced black and white thrown together into the same living space and told to live together.  And it wasn’t always a smooth transition.  I saw more cases of flat-out racism in my first couple months here than I had my whole life before, not necessarily because people in Memphis are more racist but because they have more opportunities to be racist.  They also aren’t nearly as concerned with social standards in Memphis as in Dallas; just because you’ll never see a Dallas soccer mom and school-board member disparaging black people doesn’t mean they wouldn’t if they could.  This is what I found most interesting moving from two cities that are classified among the most racist in the country; Dallas has “solved” its race problem just by making sure blacks and whites don’t interact, while Memphis has many more race problems thanks to the close proximity in which everyone lives.  Right now, Dallas certainly looks better on the surface in regards to race, but the long-term may show that ignoring such issues because they don’t seem bad now will backfire later.