I'm watching a documentary on Independent Lens, The Order of Myths, on PBS. It's about the Mobile, Alabama Mardi Gras celebration which is segregated between blacks and whites. Aside from that fact that this does nothing to assuage my perception that southerners are ugly, and very, very stupid, something else hit me.
During one of the interviews with the numerous Nobel Prize winning white people, the interviewee repeatedly talks about "the blacks" and "the whites" and how they all get along. It just struck me how much it sounded like a dumb, southern version of The Sneetches.
Furthermore, on the website, it says that "Separate but unequal royal courts preside—one queen, from a family of outlaw slave traders, the other, a descendent [sic] of runaway slaves. Beneath the surface of pageantry lies a complex story about race relations and the ever-present racial divide that persists in America today."
Ok, ever-present racial divide? We just elected a black guy president. Granted, I don't really consider him "black." I just think his skin is dark. He's just as much black as he is white. Calling him black is superficial. Moreover, this isn't America. This is Mobile-fucking-Alabama. It's as much representative of America as SoHo is representative of Appalachia.
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