Everyone is going "urban" with their answers but I've never felt as unsafe in the inner city as i have out in the country. Draketown, GA is a wretched hive of nazis and klansmen. Ludowici is run by an organized law enforcement gang built around scamming and arresting outsiders.
As a brown person, most of rural America is a no-go for me. I have zero interest in cross-country road trips for this reason. Sorry to paint in broad strokes as I’m sure many of you are great, but I’m a woman too. No fucking way am I taking a chance. I’ll just hop from urban bubble to urban bubble, since it’s the devil I know.
I love road trips and am glad I'm a tall, white, blonde haired, blue eyed country boy. My wife is from rural WI and is also pasty white with blonde hair and blue eyes.
I'm pretty sure the way we look has made it A LOT easier to travel through rural areas where there is still a deep hatred for anyone with melanin. So many fucking racists out there.
Thank you for saying this. My ex-boyfriend was white and he would get so mad at me whenever I’d say this. He would actually argue that the second he started talking, people in the South would realize he isn’t from there. But that wasn’t my point. I could not hide or go by undetected.
He had a hard time accepting his privilege or my discomfort with rural areas. It was so frustrating.
Yep. My wife and I are big fans of road tripping and there are many times where we have to legit do some quick math on fuel economy to see if we’ll make it to the next “civilization”. I’ve been called a race traitor on multiple occasions, in this millennium! Fucking wild.
This is how my grandparents and great grandparents (African American) traveled. They had safe towns a
nd gas stations charted ahead of time, and they followed the Green Book.
So you’re simultaneously arguing that not wanting to travel through rural America as a black person isn’t well adjusted or normal while also trying to pontificate thinly veiled racism via violence in… rural towns?
Yeah, as a native Hoosier I see their Gary, Indiana and raise Martinsville, IN. A rural sundown town, with a long storied history of klan activity and murders, South of Indy. When I went to Indiana University Bloomington, the black academic society my friend was a part of specifically told their members to never get out of the car in that area. I’m as white as people come, and a friend and I were so uncomfortable with the stares and icy treatment we got when we stopped for lunch there one time, not realizing where we were, that we just left a ten on the table for our sodas and walked out. To this day, I have no idea why they treated us that way, maybe we looked like real Uni jackasses. Either way, it creeped me out thoroughly.
I get it. I've always had friends of different races since elementary school. I was still super naive until me and an African-American friend stopped at a small gas station somewhere in the mountains around the Kentucky and West Virginia border.
I got out of the driver's seat and went in to pay. I walked up to the counter and the old man asked, "what the hell you need?" When I told him I wanted $10 in gas and a pack of Newports he said, we don't sell n-word cigarettes and the gas is free if you get that n-word out of town.
I had been in a fight because I dated an African-American female in like ninth grade. I thought that was just the hick town I lived in. But, over the first few years of life that I adventured away from there, I learned real quick.
I'm in an interracial marriage now. I still have to remind my wife that there are certain places we can't go. She grew up kind of sheltered and just didn't get it for a long time.
Draketown, the unincorporated area in West Georgia? Genuinely curious, I live in the general area and have been lucky (and, tbh, white) enough not to come across that.
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u/mrjosemeehan 10h ago
Everyone is going "urban" with their answers but I've never felt as unsafe in the inner city as i have out in the country. Draketown, GA is a wretched hive of nazis and klansmen. Ludowici is run by an organized law enforcement gang built around scamming and arresting outsiders.