Race in Mississippi

Racism in Mississippi did not present itself to me in the overt way that I had expected. All of the people I worked with and interacted with were deeply regretful of Mississippi’s past and expressed the desire to have a continually more cohesive future. Many made the point that the state of Mississippi has seen greater change in race-relations in the last 50 years than any other state in the U.S. Many consider other states’ finger-pointing at racial-inequity in Mississippi as a means to deflect attention from their own racial injustices. Some don’t see Mississippi as any more racist than other places in the world, they see it as merely a state with a terrible history of racial discrimination.

I cannot say that Mississippi is more racist than anywhere else I have been especially given Australia’s past and present discrimination of Aboriginal Australians. However, I have never seen such clearly racially segregated living as I did in Cleveland. 

A train used to run through the centre of Downtown Cleveland, cutting it in half. Though the train no longer passes through Cleveland its divisive quality remains.  On one side of Cleveland is (with perhaps a few exceptions) the white population who live predominately in affluent to middle class housing. 

On the other side of the tracks, in East Cleveland, it is a whole different world. Here virtually everyone is black and while there are upper and lower middle class houses, the majority of the area is defined by poverty.

As I walked through the area it became very obvious that white people rarely venture this way.  Shouts of “Hey white girl!”, “What you doin’ white girl?”, “What you looking for? You want a ride?” greeted me everywhere I went. I had never before felt so conspicuous and guilty for my 'whiteness' as I did that day. Though I did attract those shouts and some suspicious glances, everyone in the area spoke to me with typical Southern charm. I met a fascinating man who had grown up picking cotton on his grandfather’s farm in Cleveland. We sat talking in Mississippi’s sweltering heat and learnt a bit about each others lives, Sydney was as interesting for him as Mississippi was for me.

After leaving East Cleveland I never really saw the area in the same way again. It is very easy working downtown, living with scholars and interacting with locals of similar economic status to completely miss the cycle of poverty and disadvantage that still rules Cleveland, and probably a lot of Mississippi. 

Mississippi in a lot of ways is no more inequitable than many other places in the world, my two homes, Sydney and Durham included. Seeing such inequality through my ‘outsider’ eyes highlighted for me just how easy it is to pass over entrenched racism in our everyday lives. My Community Summer then, taught me not only to open my eyes to Mississippi, but also to a different and more perceptive way of thinking and seeing the world I am in.