Like hate crimes, right? Yeah. But that has taken time too.

There's a fraternity (KA) on my campus which is the Southern fraternity. Honorary president is Jefferson Davis. Each year, their big party is the KA Ball, when the symbolically "secede" from the campus, and all the guys dress in Confederate uniforms and their girlfriends get Scarlet O'Hara dresses. A few years ago, they got in some trouble with the university because they paid some black kids a few dollars to pretend to pick cotton on the lawn of their house. The compromise reached after that was that they could continue to have the ball (the university didn't want to alienate alumni), but they're not allowed on campus in their uniforms. (They don't obey this at all.)

When my dad was at Ole Miss (as a coach), there was a huge fued between the mostly black football team and the KA's. It was a huge embarassment. My dad was a KA in College and managed to fix it while he was there. They still had their ball and did the confederate dress thing, but it was only for the ball and they tried to make it less about slavery and racism and more about history and heritage. For a while there Dad was pretty much able to get anyone into the school with a letter from him.

Not everywhere has hate crime laws, right? I aske because I remember Dallas or Texas trying to get one passed.

You're right, Heather. I think they are agreed on a by state-by-state basis or something.

The big empty spaces in the west freak me out.

Word. All that unincorporated land. I had to move to Oregon before I learned there was such a thing as unincorporated land.

Now I'm all "blah blah project site is in unincorporated eastern San Diego County".

Ranges and townships are where it's at. None of that mushy New England County thing, with town meetings and wiggly roads. Tom Jefferson knew how to lay out a country, by golly. 160 acres should be enough to raise a family on! (Unless you live on the reservation and have no tools, supplies, water, training in agriculture, or farm animals. Sigh. The Dawes Act was a Very Bad Idea.)

Yes, I know I'm being silly.

But are there really large numbers of people out there who seriously think we should go back to Jim Crow laws, or something??

I wouldn't say I've encountered quite that, but I have met quite a few people who pretty much think that it would be better if everyone just stayed with "their own kind." The will never say anything overtly racist, but they simply don't see why black people have to come into schools or neighborhoods that used to be all white, rather than staying in their own schools and neighborhoods. (School segregation is one of the places that this comes up a lot.)

What is unincorporated land?

Consuela, are you in Oregon?

What is unincorporated land?

Land that's not part of any town.

Land that doesn't count as part of a town. Virginia is organized into cities (8 of them) and counties, because there are parts of every county that just isn't part of a town, so it needs a county to govern it.

Whereas, every square inch of Massachusetts is a town, even though many parts of it are still woods.

When I imagine each state as like a separate country I can begin to imagine.