When I was a small child, in the early 70s, in an integrated, suburban neighborhood of Huntsville, Alabama, I lashed out in a fit of anger, calling one of the few black boys on our street a "nigger."  My parents were not shocked by my outburst of rage and cruelty.  By then they were well aware that I was a mean kid with a short fuse. But they were absolutely aghast at my invocation of gutter, "white trash" language.  I think they were even stumped at how I knew the word, as I had certainly not learned it from them.  

The lesson I thought I had learned that day, after a severe whipping, was that my parents were not racists, that they were decidedly against acts of cruelty against any human merely because of his skin color. And they were.

But as I grew into a teenager and beyond, I learned that the fight for civil rights was one that my parents had sat out, despite the fact that it raged on their very doorstep.  If the integration of the University of Alabama, which they had witnessed first hand while my father was in graduate school, was mentioned, they only joked, "Of course we were in favor of integration! How else could Bear Bryant build the best football team?"  On the subject of Birmingham, their own hometown, they were absolutely mute.

I always had a hard time reconciling these two sides of my parents' story. They were clearly in favor of individual human rights, but at the same time seemed extremely wary of a political movement meant to broaden those rights to more individuals.

As it happens, lots of others struggled with this contradiction, too.  Malcolm Gladwell beautifully elucidates this very issue in this week's New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/10/090810fa_fact_gladwell). The actions of my parents' mirrored those of their fictional hero, Atticus Finch, the central figure in Harper Lee's novel "To Kill a Mockingbird," and their real-life leaders, such as Governor James (Big Jim) Folsom. The stories of these real and imagined characters still raise questions about the actions of millions of "liberal" white Southerners during the height of the Civil Rights movement.

As Gladwell points out, Southern politics of the mid-twentieth century was largely driven by loyalty to local candidates. I would add that a class-based sense that a candidate was "one of us" also moved voters, no matter what the regional source of the candidate was.  Very few issues were viewed from a scale larger than the community of people whom one knew personally.  (A lasting remnant of this localism during my childhood was the frequent question, "Who's your daddy?" One's answer to this question would presumably provide the asker with everything he needed to know in order to proceed in social interaction.)

Most white Southerners lived quite contentedly with the status quo in the burgeoning post-war years.  Many, like my own parents, were happily deluded with the idea that separate could be equal and that, under such a system, one could still maintain that "All men are just alike," as Gladwell quotes Big Jim to have exclaimed in a public square while enthusiastically pumping the hands of two black strangers.  

What these newly middle-class whites failed to acknowledge was that they were making a deal with the devil, and the devil was the underclass of poor, uneducated whites who lived not so far away.  In my own hometown of Huntsville, they lived in the crumbling "company houses" of the cotton mills that were winding down their lives in the city. Perhaps those devils were even one's cousins, from a branch of the family that had not been lifted out of poverty by government programs. (In my family,the G.I. Bill raised the two laboring sons of a dairy farmer into the middle class of engineers that still dominates the social structure of Huntsville.)

The racist beliefs of their less educated relations were not consistent with the humanitarian and Christian beliefs held strongly by my father and mother, respectively.  But (as Gladwell makes clear) as sides became more polarized after the desegregation ruling of the Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education, many liberal whites simply refused to take sides.  The political change that was sweeping around them was unfamiliar (in many cases imported by Yankees and clearly not local) and disorienting.  They were loathe to stand on either side of a debate between two parties not formed by "one of us."  The failure to stand their ground against racism established the "limits of Southern liberalism" cited by Gladwell.

Slick operators like George Wallace, at first, and the Republican Party, later, were allowed to whip up the fear levels all around and dominate the political landscape of the South of my formative years, and on to this very day.  They contributed more than any other factor in my adult flight from the South.

I would like to add a couple of personal observations to Gladwell's thesis.  In the case of my parents' generation, I found them to be extraordinarily cautious on the subject of any revolutionary change.  Only one generation after my parents, the hippies (young, white, college students, just like my parents had been) took to the streets (I suspect greatly encouraged by the success of the civil rights movement) to protest the Vietnam War.  My parents were openly derisive of these protesters. Why? Why were my parents so stiff and conventional, and so committed to the infallibility of the government?  

I think their childhood experiences during World War II had formed them so.  They had witnessed the downfall of evil at the hands of good.  Not only that, but they had personally contributed, even as children: they had collected metal and grown vegetables and sewn clothing. So, too, they had suffered hardships collectively and celebrated the victory as community.  Revolution was not a feasible answer to them; their own civic pride was too crucial to who they were.  And upheaval of any sort was very threatening, even upheaval in the name of justice.  The ends didn't justify the means in their minds and they were satisfied with what little progress had been made in the post-war years (my father served in an integrated Army during the Korean War, for example.)

Finally, the sense that justice was personal and politics local was strongly fortified (at least in my parents' cases) by a profound cynicism that the hatred of poor whites against blacks could be legislated away.  In 2008, my father (my mother passed away too soon) and both my brothers, still living in Alabama, proudly voted for Barack Obama to be President of the United States.  But the counties where they live did not even come close to going for Barack Obama.  My father would smugly point out to you that the haters are still out there hating.  And they are.