Breaking with Tradition: Women, Management, and the New Facts of Life.

• Author: Rose, Julie

Boy in the hood

Of course, Duke demise does not mean the end of the politics of race in this or any other year. Middle-class children of the Reagan years experienced overt racial tensions long before the Rodney King incident. In my youth, during the summer of 1980, a jury in Chattanooga acquitted three Klansmen in a drive-by shooting of five black women. Some of the city's black population rioted, burning buildings and threatening to spread the violence. From my house on Missionary Ridge, the Civil War battlefield that overlooks the city, I could hear gunfire and see smoke rising from the business districts. there were two reactions at home. First, my father put a shotgun by the back door and a rifle by the front; there were fears that hings could get out of hand. But there was also his astonishment at the verdict, a recongnition of the general pity of it all, and a lecture on the explicable rage of the people who thought the system had, once again, abandoned them. Still, the guns remained by the doors for a time.

As I grew older, it struck me that the ambiguity of those days was not uncomon. The story of the post-1954 South--and, for that matter, of the rest of the nation--is that of men and women of good intentions doing battle with their fears and habits. Fortunately, the good intentions have generally won out, an the kind of viciousness Duke represents has retreated from the center to the fringe. The guns at the door are not necessarily emblems of the Right: My father voted for Carter in 1980...