B&B History Lesson

Yesterday at the B&B in Derry I had an interesting conversation with the proprietor, Thomas. He spent a considerable amount of time in the U.S. working for Fruit of the Loom. He talked about being in training in a factory in Alabama in the 1970s where 90% of the workers were white and 10% were black. He spent one week working with a black technician learning about equipment. He got on well with the guy and respected him completely.

The white supervisor called him in and warned him about getting too friendly with the black workers (I doubt he put it that way). The supervisor spoke to him as if he, Thomas, were as rabidly racist as the supervisor. It was an old boys, you're one of us, kind of talk, with an underlying threat.

Thomas said that experience created an epiphany about the Troubles in Derry. He saw that the hatred and fears that govern adults' lives were learned from birth and seemed as inescapable as DNA. The black technician was no more deserving of the white man's wrath than Thomas's protestant neighbors in Derry were of his own hostility. Funny how he had to go to Alabama to figure that out. And yet when you travel through Derry's tightly circumscribed neighborhoods--the protestant Fountain, the Catholic bogside--you can see how emotionally barricaded and tribally reinforced each side is.
7/10