Review of Southern Racial Issues in Jimmy Carters Memoir An Hour Before Daylight essays

Review of Southern Racial Issues in Jimmy Carter's Memoir An Hour Before Daylight essays Southerners, even racially sensitive Southerners such as Jimmy Carter, often claim that they understand the true' plight of Black Southern people. This statement, so strange on its surface given the racial intolerance that has long marked the South, is made because white Southerners frequently live at greater proximity to individuals whom identify themselves as African Americans. Even advocates of segregation in the pre-civil rights era in the South often had Black maids and Black individuals take care of their children. Whites in the North might endorse racial tolerance in the abstract, but had little contact with African Americans on a personal basis in the pre-civil rights era and even Former President Jimmy Carter, and those who advocate the point of view that Southern people of a liberal ilk have a greater understanding of the Black plight in America may thus have legitimacy in their advocacy of their greater tolerance in comparison to Northern whites. It is indeed perhaps better and more humane from a human rights standpoint to understand someone as an individual human being rather than to advocate the betterment of the race' in an abstract fashion, as Northerners who came to the South to help the cause of civil rights but had never known a Black person as a friend or associate. Carteri ¿Ã‚ ½ states thati ¿Ã‚ ½ in his Southern community, in Georgia our [white and Black family's] daily existence was almost totally Carter grew up on a farm. He knew that the peanuts harvested could not have brought economic gain to the community, without the efforts of Black families. He saw that Black Americas sweat as much as the White laborers, ate as much, and yet were paid far less. He experienced discrimination, not in the abstract, but knowing that his family and lifestyle could not have existed nor been supported without the struggle, ...