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Flannery O'Connor and Southern Racism

            Being from Canada and coming down to the South, I honestly didn't know what to expect. You hear stories about how bad racism is and the rich history the South has. As soon as I got down here I could already tell that it was going to be a lot different. Racism is everywhere I go down here and I can't begin to understand why people are still living in the past. Being from one of the most diverse countries in the world where there is hardly any racism, coming down here was a shock to the body. .
             I travelled down to Tuscaloosa, Alabama where my roommate was from last year. We went to go watch Alabama play LSU in football. The day after the game we went squirrel hunting and we had stopped at a gas station along the way. I walked into the gas station. There standing behind the counter was an old weathered man with thick glasses and an unkempt looking cat. I walk up to this battered looking fridge and grabbed a blue Gatorade and a can of snuff. I put it on the counter and the first words out of his mouth were, "You old enough to buy this son?" I said yes, he followed by saying "You old enough to go to a nigger whore house?" I was taken aback from the statement he had just said and I replied, "I guess." He then followed up by saying "you look old enough to go to a nigger whore house." This was my first encounter with racism in the South and I often wonder what it would be like to live in a time period when racism was acceptable. The racist behaviors that people exhibited in the post WW II South are looked at as wrong in today's age when in fact they were looked at as a normal way to behave in the "17th century to the 1960s"(PBS). Throughout O'Connor's work she explains and shows you as the reader what it was like to live in the post World War II South. Flannery O'Connor's characterization of racist characters in "The Geranium," "The Barber" and "Judgment Day," illustrate the existence of racism in the post World War II South.


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