[Steely Dan]

i thought the conventional wisdom was that, historically speaking, there were two different types of white racism in this country. white southerners wanted to continue subjugating black people and keep them in their place, whereas white northerners just wanted black people to go away entirely.

white southerners, who had lived alongside black people for centuries, weren't afraid of black people, but white northerners were utterly terrified by the large influx of southern blacks that poured into the northern industrial cities during the great migrations. white northerners where generally against slavery, and agreed that all men are created equal in principle, etc., but when it actually came time to live up to that ethos when they had to accommodate large numbers of black people in "their" cities and live alongside of and with black people, white northerners had one of the biggest collective paranoia-fueled conniption fits in history and ran away from the scary black people as fast as they fucking could, sometimes stumbling over themselves to get away. i think these two different histories play a part in why residential segregation is generally worse in the northern industrial cities to this very day.

it's not about northern or southern whites being more racist than the other, it's about different racial histories in the two regions and how they played out over the course of the 20th century.