Thoughts From The Great State of Texas

On the road this week, 18-hour days in the eternal quest of furthering my evil capitalist gains. Blogging has been severely curtailed until now.

One quick thought: I'm in Houston this week and it's shocking to me that race relations in this state--and the entire South--are far and away better than in the Northeast. I could take a marker and delineate the black, white, hispanic and asian neighborhoods in Philly and New York. You can't do that here because that's not the case and when I discussed this fact with the seventy-so people I trained so far this week, they seemed incredulous that that is the case.

The elites in New York, led by the New York Times, believe that one true fact is that the people of the South as a whole and Texas in particular are a bunch of racist, Lone Star--swilling rednecks. Maybe they ought to actually visit the state and see for themselves just how far off they are in that assessment. Perhaps they can do as I've done and spend 56-hours in a room full of blacks, Mexican immigrants and whites and see just how wrong they are. I've done the same in New York, Newark and Philly and the camaraderie down here is stunning in comparison.

Update: Here's a great piece showing exactly how media elites write about race.

More: Reading this again, I realized that I didn't quite make the case of just how different race relations are in the South.

I grew up in the Philly suburbs and spent a considerable amount of time in the city. I'm a firm believer in the idea of idiotism: if you are an idiot, regardless of color, I want nothing to do with you. I don't give a damn about your color or history, I care about who you are now. If you are a black guy who makes $30K a year and are cool to me, I'm cool with you. If you are a white guy making $250K a year and actr like an a-hole, I want nothing to do with you. We are well passed judging one another by race. I'm a firm believer in MLK's "content of character" philosophy and it seems that most in the South are as well.

In the Northeast, it's rare that blacks and whites mingle at all and rarer still that they become friends. That is the major issue in our views now. How many black friends would you suspect Maureen Dowd has? What about Paul Krugman?

In the South, everyday starts with a hearty "good morning" to each and every person that one meets and continues on from there. I wonder how many people of color that Frank Rich greeted this morning with that simple sentence.