Guy, when you grow up in a place, that place becomes your *normal*, your perception of how things are supposed to be…even if you’re dirt poor. Maybe you grew up in a better place - I hope you did. When someone is living what they see as a *normal* life, if someone like you comes along and tells that person “your way of life is wrong”, that person won’t give you the time of day. Read up on what happened to Emmitt Till and the other social worker with him sometime - that happened about 30 miles - just down the road, in Delta terms - from where I grew up…and I suspect my older family members knew more about it than they ever told me. They had come to the Delta to help educate the locals on civil rights…and they were lynched for it.

Mark Twain knew a thing or two about Southern culture. He said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

He was absolutely right - the only ones who could learn just how backward and racist the Delta was, were those who left and saw the rest of the world like I did. That’s what was fatal to my own bigotry…and when as a well-traveled grown man I visited my family there, it was as if we spoke different languages. They simply could not conceive why my attitude towards racism had changed, why I would no longer say the n-word, and later on, they were deeply ashamed that I had become a vocal Obama supporter. They wondered, “Where did we go wrong raising him?”

Okay? No offense, but just as I cannot know nearly so much as you about where you grew up, unless you grew up in my particular part of the Delta, you cannot know nearly so much as I about where I grew up - not the land, but the people, the culture, the traditions…and the dark secrets the locals try to keep from becoming public knowledge.