Greetings from midair. Today I’m flying to visit my mom in Florida. She’s a snowbird these days, living not far from where we would visit my grandparents and various other aged relatives every winter, not to mention a certain Mouse. So I used to think I knew something about the state. “Florida is IN the south, but it isn’t really THE SOUTH,” I would say assuredly, as if I knew what I was talking about. In my experience, Floridians were pretty much like us Northerners; in fact, most of them WERE Northerners, transplanted for the winters or forever. No silly twangy accents. No racism that I could see.

Turns out, the key words there are “in my experience” and “that I could see.”

What’d I miss? 1) Florida is MOST DEFINITELY the South in its history of racism. 2) Also, the North is MOST DEFINITELY part of our country’s history of racism too. So I’m 0-for-2 there, if you’re keeping score at home. Here’s the real score. Part of it, anyway. Because this game has been going on for hundreds of years, and it’s all too easy to see who’s winning if you’re willing to look.

1. Florida is the South? Sheriff Willis V. McCall got elected 7 consecutive times by the good white citizens of Lake County, from 1944 to 1972, to make damn sure it was. Yes, he enforced miscegenation and segregation laws that entire time, but that’s only the beginning. In 1951 he personally lynched members of the infamously unfairly tried Groveland Four, a group of black men falsely accused of rape by a white woman. The black Executive Director of the Florida NAACP and his wife were killed in a mysterious bombing of their home six weeks after calling for McCall’s ouster over the Groveland case. He then kept this legalized white racial terrorism going for two more decades, right up until he kicked to death a mentally disabled black prisoner before finally losing an election the year I was born. From my mother’s house this week, I could simply turn left out of the driveway onto Old Dixie Highway and drive 70 miles to visit the street that was named in McCall’s honor. In 1985. When I was already 13 years old. And his name wasn’t removed again until 2007. Only 12 years ago. And by the way, the Groveland Four weren’t officially pardoned until January 2019. Two months ago.

I can’t recall whether I learned of McCall in Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns or from Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law. Or maybe from Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told. All are excellent and if you’ve read this far and don’t already know everything I’m saying, you should definitely go read those immediately because they will shake your world to its core.

Pretty sure it was in The Warmth of Other Suns that I learned about Florida’s laws that LEGALLY RESTRICTED black men to manual labor such as picking crops, AND REQUIRED that if they were found NOT working on any day but Sunday, they were subject to arrest… with a penalty of immediately being taken to the groves and FORCED to pick crops.

Not to mention Florida’s having seceded from the Union in 1861 and all that. So yeah, definitely the South.

2. OK then, what about the North, are we clean? Sorry. Nope. Nope nope nope. Just started listening to Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. I’m up to the 1690s when Cotton Mather is preaching from the pulpit of famous Old North Church in Boston about how it’s really God’s will that white people should convert enslaved black people to Christianity without freeing them despite the old rules that no Christian could be a slave, because that will a) make white people’s enslavement of them more virtuous AND b) make them more passively accepting of enslavement. For this wisdom, he was given an enslaved boy by his congregation.

This was again MOST DEFINITELY not part of the glorious history of New England that I was taught growing up in the Boston suburbs. Specifically, growing up in Natick, where our lovely brick downtown’s public library had a mural depicting good Puritans in sober hatted-and-buckled clothing converting a group of Native Americans in headdresses and little else to Christianity, because Natick was once famed as a settlement of Praying Indians where the natives supposedly set an example for the colonies by freely adopting the new religion. Mm hm. That painting was literally the backdrop for some of my happiest childhood memories.

Fast forward to more of my happy memories, in college, hanging out with friends in the dining hall at Harvard’s Mather House, a dorm named for Cotton Mather’s father Increase Mather, who was an early President of Harvard and whose opinions didn’t differ much from his son’s according to Kendi. I doubt any of us had any idea that we were eating dinner under the name and a 20-foot oil painting of one of our country’s most influential white supremacists… and so you’ve gotta wonder, why didn’t we? We were the best and brightest, marinating in the history around us until we were practically pickled in it. Just not that history. No wonder I thought “Northerner” rhymed with “not racist.”

3. BONUS EXTRA CREDIT QUESTION! What about Californians, we good when it comes to this stuff? I’ll take “NO” for a thousand, Alex. (And hey Alex, get well, k?) On the flight, besides writing this little rant, I started reading Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir of her Japanese-American family’s World War II internment, Farewell to Manzanar. Re-reading it, I should say, because I did read it decades ago in high school. Back then, I thought it took place a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. Today? She’s talking about my everyday places: she’s in Long Beach when the news of Pearl Harbor hits, her family has to move out of Santa Monica, they assemble at a Buddhist temple in downtown LA that’s less than a mile from my office, from which they are put in a military bus to Manzanar, just a four-hour drive away. This “history” starts exactly thirty years before I was born. Yeah, I’m getting old. But I’m gonna say that anything that big, that happened during my parents’ childhood, shaped them; and they shaped me; and I’m part of the generation that’s pretty much running the world now, so if racist shit happened then, chances are it ain’t gone now.

Anyway. I guess it’s been sort of a bumpy flight, huh? Welcome to Florida, everyone. My mom is awesome and I can’t wait to talk about this with her. Hope you’ll talk about it with someone too. Let me know?