VICELAND TODAY - 12/2006

Lit students like to claim it’s racist to say that Chinatowns and other enclaves of Asian immigrants are full of secret doings that skirt the notice of white society, but we recently spent some time down in a part of New York where you can go days at a time without seeing a round eye and discovered it’s actually true. By the end of hour two we’d already seen three extremely seedy-looking cash exchanges around the corners of buildings and watched one of our hosts attempt to palm off what looked like a business card to several older men then each time try to pretend that he hadn’t. And this was all on the semi-legal side of the street–click here to read about what the situation’s like where there are still active criminal circles around to stir up the mix.

The Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University in Michigan is one of the country’s foremost non-ironic storehouses of creepy racist ephemera from the past few centuries. (Ironically enough, its website is one of the only places online you can gawk at old minstrel masks and Coon Chicken menus without feeling like a Stormfront regular.)

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