Frequently back then, as now, current events would bitch-slap the North into the realization that the South does not have a lockdown on any of the bad qualities for which Northerners make fun of it. The Southern-born yet Northern-college-educated and urbanized black people of my parents' generation had a particularly layered and somewhat cynical view of how self-congratulatory Northern white folks could be about their own supposed lack of racism. My mother became an investigative radio journalist when I was 9, and when, in 1980, the U.S. Department of Justice and the local NAACP sued the Yonkers school system for having segregated schools, she and her friends were privately quick to categorize this event as the kind of thing that happens "up South."

That lawsuit against the city (whose aftermath will soon be the subject of Show Me a Hero, a new TV series by David Simon, of The Wire fame) defined my grade school experience. For years my mother covered the story for radio station WFAS, so what normal people might call "repetitive sound bites from her tape-recorded interviews with city officials," I might call "lullabies." Before the feds called Yonkers out for 40 years of racist housing policy, the city frequently tried to re-draw the school district lines horizontally, perpendicular to the city's racial divides. This meant that I changed schools frequently, and in junior high school, practically everyone in my neighborhood got bussed from our centrally located area to the northeasternmost (read: whitest) corner of the city.

Then, as now, the New York metropolitan area at the time was, in some respects, no less highly charged in terms of racially motivated mayhem than say, Birmingham, Alabama. A white mob, 15 strong, murdered transit worker Willie Turks in Brooklyn in 1982; in 1984 police killed Eleanor Bumpurs in her Bronx apartment; and later that year Bernard Goetz shot four black kids in the subway. Yet another white mob chased Michael Griffith into traffic to his death in 1986. These killers all had vocal supporters. We really did live "up South." Recent events in New York City, like the murders of Eric Garner and Akai Gurley, have done nothing to contradict this sentiment.

When bias crimes happen in the North, Americans tend to think of them as isolated events, certainly not indicators of the region's character. It rattles our sense of ourselves as Northerners to think that half a million black folks fled racism in the South only to find different racism in the North. But my parents knew better. That conundrum was the subject of Claude Brown's memoir Manchild in the Promised Land, a book I remember devouring in high school. The distinction must have been even finer for my grandparents; their choice was really between a racist South with no chance for advancement and a racist North where you could get an OK job and your kids could attend slightly better schools — which is what made Yonkers' segregated housing practices and schools so appalling, I suppose. A whiff of Southern fried discrimination in the urban north? Well knock me down and steal my teeth!