Originally Posted by
TexasT
I've been out to Livonia [[grandmother-in-law lives there) and haven't had any issues but that's like 3-4 times so not enough to draw conclusions.
But the south is pretty bad. I spent my whole life down there [[lived in Texas and Virginia and spent quite a bit of time in Bama and Louisiana), except for the past three years in which I lived in Chicago. People will be nice to your face, but there is a way of doing things. The black population is what, a third of the southern population, so there's more interaction between whites and blacks and you aren't going to get dirty looks. Like I said, the best way to put it is it's less confrontational down there [[part of that is that Midwesterners are way more frank than I'm used to)...but there's way more under the surface if you stay a while - part of that is, in my opinion, minorities as a whole are more submissive as a collective because things have just been a certain way for so long, way back to the antebellum days. It's just in our culture. It really irks my husband [[Michigander) when we go back to visit - especially for SEC games in Bama and Mississippi. He hates it. Shit, in Detroit, you bust up an after-hours bar and you get a four day riot that necessitates the National Guard. Down south, a hundred years of post-slavery oppression, blown up churches, and dogs & waterhoses eventually gets you sit-ins. ;)
I feel a million times more comfortable here in Michigan, as a whole, although I'm sure it has its bad parts. That's just my own personal experience.