And you really think people fearfully watch black men like hawks in stores in other parts of the country? Get out more. Maybe nobody even glances up here any more.
A lot depends on the store, though. Jewelry stores are different from K-Mart, probably wherever you go in the country.
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My adopted black children get followed around stores by the proprietors here in leftist New England.
Some places are behind the times, but I don't see that at the local mall or grocery store where I live.
Maybe part of it is that nobody really owns Stop & Shop or CVS. They're big companies who worry about lawsuits and bad publicity, and there's no proprietor on site to hassle customers. It's different with mom and pop stores.
What I was getting at, though, is that broad-brush comparisons between large sections of the country don't always account for what goes on. If you want to say that shopkeepers are more suspicious and hostile to African-Americans in small New England towns than in small Southern towns, you could be right, but most New Englanders live in or near big cities so the comparison may not apply to their experience.