For many, the South goes hand in hand with racism, conservatism, and white privilege. Being raised in Georgia, I don't recall ever thinking that my life was harder because of my skin color, nor did I think any of my classmates were racist. It wasn't until I got older and left my hometown that I realized how blind I was to the micro-aggressions and various forms of discrimination that I faced in my hometown.
While approximately 46% of the people in my hometown identify as Latino, my classes mainly consisted of white students. My peers did not have to endure racism, nor did they recognize the struggles of immigrants and people of color. Since my experiences weren't being talked about by my classmates, I felt like I was the oddball out. My problems obviously had to extremely rare, because no one else around me was facing them.
During my K-12 career I was never introduced to the concept of micro-aggressions. I also never encountered it on TV or in books, but this did not mean I never experienced it. I recall having friends and acquaintances tell me things like "Mexicans are so loud, but not you, though. You're different." There were also times when people at work didn't think I spoke Spanish because my English was "so good." At the time I thought nothing of it, but this was because I had heard things like this so many times that I became numb to it. I never accused my coworkers or classmates of being racist, because the racism that had been taught to me had died back in the 1970's. Racism, as I knew it, looked like segregation, whites only signs, and burning crosses. Society taught me that since segregation was no longer legal and the KKK was no longer given free reign, racism had ended. I know many people will argue that I am simply over analyzing these comments, things like these imply that Latinos who have no accent when speaking English just have completely abandoned the languages of their home countries and that all Latinos are disruptive, except for a select few. Micro-aggressions may not be easy to point out, but they still assist in reinforcing hurtful and false stereotypes about people of color. Our society shuns and punishes individuals that are overtly racist, but still, fails to acknowledge the harmful day to day comments made about people of color.
I now realize that the South does an excellent job of sugar coating it's racism. In its efforts to try and prove that they are no longer living in the Jim Crow era, the South has normalized stereotypes, dismissed microaggressions, and limited racism to being something only extreme white supremacist groups participate in. Because of this, I never realized how much racism I experienced growing up.
