Again, Black people are an exception here, as basically anyone who stayed in the Jim Crow South has a living memory of living under what amounted to fascism, including the “always walking on eggshells/lack of social trust/long periods of boring endurance/randomized terrifying violence”
Pretty much. What it mostly boils down to is that most Americans really don’t have the faintest idea what living under modern authoritarian regimes actually looks like, and how it’s often at the same time way more boring and way more scary than they’d imagined.
Sometimes I think I'm utterly divorced from this history as a Midwesterner, and then I remember that my great-great grandmother (who lived long enough for me to meet her) fled here after her father was lynched
I think there was a conscious effort on the part of much of my family (and many Northern Black ppl) to leave tragedies like that "in the past" because they hoped younger generations would be free of the mental burden of that violence.
White people, of course, have different priorities!
