First thoughts about Louisville

My dad and I went to Joe’s Crab Shack August July 3rd to eat. It is a nice restaurant on the Ohio River. All around the restaurant there were interracial couples openly out. I’ve noticed during my few days in Louisville the openness in which interracial couples are together in public places. Across the river in Indiana, much is the same. And what’s interesting is that the composition of the couples are black men and white women. That is significant because the history of this country has been to prevent black men and white women from getting together because it would disrespect the white male dominant social structure. It reminds me of the movie “Rosewood” where a white woman committed adultery with another white male and blamed it on a “nigger” to avoid being accountable (something that weak white people do all the time—blame their own character flaws on a socially stigmatized population to take advantage of the prejudices and biases against that population). The whole town rose up against the black section of the community with a slogan to protect women sanctity. However we have seen from Ida B. Wells in her writings referring to the constant lynching of black men for supposedly raping white women. She gave facts using white news papers refuting the justifications for the lynchings and made the conclusion that the white women were loose and actively pursued the black men. It is interesting that Louisville seems more open to this phenomena than Richmond, VA, and everyone from Richmond thinks of Kentucky in general as a country, backward state.

So we were waiting to sit down at our table outside where a white family with three children were sitting across from us. The father looked at us for a while and asked “Are you all from around here.” We said that we were from VA and he asked what we were doing here. I told him that ill be a first year medical student over at UL. He was like wow… I thought it was interesting how he was curious as to our origin, as if we acted differently from other blacks he has seen. I was wearing a UVA BME shirt, but the symbol on the front was quite small. I’m trying to learn if there are differences in the behaviors of blacks around here.