[ethbro]

As someone who's lived in Atlanta for 8 years there's a massive difference in mindset and culture between the city (often referred to as ITP/Inside-the-Perimeter, referencing the ring of I-285 circling the city) and the various suburbs surrounding it. There's no way I'd live OTP by choice, especially with a non-flex, non-remote gig.

Imho, Marietta/Cobb County (NW of Atlanta) and Alpharetta/North Fulton (N of Atlanta) especially tend to have... less than cosmopolitan perspectives. DeKalb (NE & E of Atlanta) can go various ways.

My rebuttal to Atlanta being casually racist is always "Have you lived in the NW/NE?" We're absolutely still racially stratified (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Atlanta ), but compared to the other places I've lived and visited you run into a wider variety of people in everyday life. Which is important to me.

Hell, when I was younger I once worked a service gig at a beach restaurant in CT and could count on two hands the number of non-white customers I served the entire summer.

[SwellJoe]

The more I think about it, the more I think it's less about Atlanta being more racist...there's just more opportunity for white people to be shitty and racist because they interact people of color much more often than in most of the other major cities I've lived in. So, I probably should soften my accusation of racism. I still see it, and it is still uncomfortable, but I also have to acknowledge that Atlanta seems to have proven itself to be a great place for black folks to build careers, build businesses, etc. So, race relations may be tense in Atlanta, but it is probably not because the people are inherently more shitty than people everywhere else. And, I also have to acknowledge that some of my favorite cities that are not overtly racist are seemingly racist on a systemic level in ways that I as a white person don't see very clearly; Austin, for example, has a rapidly shrinking black population. That's probably a useful measure of racism, as well.

[ynniv]

Atlanta's on the front lines, and that's a great thing. It's complicated and reveals how bad things are, but it's also the only way things improve.