"I see more genuine sociability between the races in Mississippi than I see in Michigan. No question"
About this Quote
Jim Harrison, the Michigan-born novelist and poet with a taste for blunt, contrarian observations, points to a paradox that unsettles easy regional stereotypes. Mississippi stands in the American imagination as a byword for racial oppression and violent resistance to civil rights, while Michigan wears the aura of Northern progressivism. Yet daily life rarely aligns neatly with reputation. Harrison emphasizes the texture of ordinary contact: greeting rituals, shared public spaces, small talk at diners, the ease or stiffness of meeting another gaze.
Genuine sociability is not the same as justice. Mississippi’s history of Jim Crow, voter suppression, and violence does not vanish because people chat across a counter. But Harrison highlights an everyday proximity that can breed familiarity, a kind of interpersonal recognition forged by long entanglement in work, worship, food, and town life. In many Southern places, Black and white residents are constantly in each other’s presence, which can create a conversational fluency, however fraught, that feels real.
Michigan’s story complicates its liberal image. After the 1967 Detroit uprising and decades of redlining, white flight, and school segregation, the state became one of the most segregated places in the country. The result is a colder civic ecology: suburbs and city sealed off from one another, gestures of tolerance without much contact, a polite distance that can pass for virtue while keeping lives apart. Harrison’s eye for the everyday suggests that a society can be legally more equitable yet socially more estranged, and the reverse can also be true.
His verdict, punctuated by No question, is less a ranking of moral worth than a jab at complacency. He urges attention to lived experience over pieties, to the paradox that interpersonal warmth can coexist with structural injustice, and that declarative egalitarianism can mask avoidance. The remark forces a harder look at where sociability actually occurs and whether it fosters anything deeper than comfort.
Genuine sociability is not the same as justice. Mississippi’s history of Jim Crow, voter suppression, and violence does not vanish because people chat across a counter. But Harrison highlights an everyday proximity that can breed familiarity, a kind of interpersonal recognition forged by long entanglement in work, worship, food, and town life. In many Southern places, Black and white residents are constantly in each other’s presence, which can create a conversational fluency, however fraught, that feels real.
Michigan’s story complicates its liberal image. After the 1967 Detroit uprising and decades of redlining, white flight, and school segregation, the state became one of the most segregated places in the country. The result is a colder civic ecology: suburbs and city sealed off from one another, gestures of tolerance without much contact, a polite distance that can pass for virtue while keeping lives apart. Harrison’s eye for the everyday suggests that a society can be legally more equitable yet socially more estranged, and the reverse can also be true.
His verdict, punctuated by No question, is less a ranking of moral worth than a jab at complacency. He urges attention to lived experience over pieties, to the paradox that interpersonal warmth can coexist with structural injustice, and that declarative egalitarianism can mask avoidance. The remark forces a harder look at where sociability actually occurs and whether it fosters anything deeper than comfort.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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