The Trailing Edge

 I've been a "Yankee Transplant" to the South since the mid-1980s and am still having unexpected epiphanies about the sociological differences. The latest one has to do with the anxiety that Yankee-born parents feel when their kids don't seem to be excelling in the Southern schools they attend. Maybe we should call it YEAS -- Yankee Educational Anxiety Syndrome. My grandson (not quite age 6) is a bundle of neuroses. So is his father, my son. I don't get to spend that much time with them, so my occasional visits offer lots of revelations. What I witnessed this weekend was very concerning, and reminded me of some preceding generations (his, mine, and my parents'). I think Southerners are insecure about their educations, and so are Yankees, for entirely different reasons. Somewhere along the way, Yankees had it drilled into them that THEY are the standard-bearers for educational excellence, and most Southerners are pathetic, dimwitted, knuckle-dragging, barefoot,

  As a White person, my ability to speak about racism and related subjects comes up against some hard limits.* During my elementary school years (in a community that was 99% White, I might add), the Civil Rights movement was at its peak, and fortunately, many teachers and community members cared to be on the right side of history. Still, what it boiled down to was "Racism=bad! Slavery=bad! Now that we all agree on that, we can move on to other subjects."  Having read Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility, I've come to understand how pathetically weak so much of that teaching was, however well-intentioned, and how it gave rise to so much ignorance and naive thinking that easily backfired, doing more harm than good. I'm relieved that so many activists have found their voices -- people who understand what racial justice means from the inside, rather than spectators watching from the sidelines, thinking they understand so much more than they actually do. The Washingto