Mean, racist people - where art thou?

After 8 days in Washington D.C., I finally departed for Atlanta around 3:20 P.M. yesterday. I put in almost 9 hours on the road before finally checking-in to a Comfort Inn in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Aww, the good ol' south...

Four years ago, when I first traveled our extensive highway system by my lonesome in the southeastern region of the U.S. (driving from Houston to New York via Philadelphia), I remember being a little hesitant driving into what I perceived as the "deep south" - states like Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. Sure, I grew up in Texas, which has its own questionable reputation, but I was raised outside a major metropolitan city, Houston, and spent five years in hippy-haven, Austin. Like many other colored folk who grew up in Texas, I dealt with subtle racism here and there but still had way too many great experiences with people from all walks of life to ever be overly concerned with the color of my skin. With familiarity comes comfort, and I was definitely more than familiar with my homestate.

On the other hand, I wasn't sure what to expect in the aforementioned southeastern states. To keep things simple here, I'll just say that I'd read some very bad things involving "white power" in the states in question. Furthermore, I had little to no "real-life" experience in these parts and thus didn't have the same familiarity/comfort level that I had in Texas. In effect, I clearly recall having a strong sense of paranoia driving up the roughly 180 miles of nothing-but-forest highways of Mississippi in the pitch dark of the night. I worried about my car stalling or choosing a hotel located in a not-so-neighborly section of town.

With the clock approaching midnight and me tiring down from a long day of driving, I finally decided that it was time to face my fears and find a hotel to spend the night in. Timidly, I veered off the highway, pulled up to a dinky motel, and headed inside looking for a room. Upon entering, I was greeted from behind the counter by Mr. Himesh Patel. Never before had I been so happy to see an Indian guy. If he could make it in Mississippi, I knew I'd be fine as well.

During this trip back south, I have encountered similar situations - Indians running an Exxon in North Carolina, an Om sign on the back of a Honda in South Carolina, and friendly people left and right not thinking twice about my skin color. People reading this blog entry might think that I was just being over-paranoid in the first place, and maybe they're right. Nonetheless, I still think it speaks volumes about our own self-created impressions of the world around us and how wrong those impressions can be. We all read or see things on television and assume we know things about people and places across the country or world from us, but fact and fiction can easily be twisted in the crazy world of our brains.