The First Time Texas Killed One of My Clients
I&#x27;m not sure it would have mattered if this information had been admissible. Most of the Texans I have known had no sympathy for prisoners. I think this is at least partly because it&#x27;s easy to be naive when you don&#x27;t know people who are different from you, and the economic and cultural climate in Texas is highly self segregated.<p>My extended family is from Texas, but I grew up on the west coast, occasionally visiting relatives in Houston suburbs and other pleasant, relatively opulent areas. My aunts and uncles lived in nice neighborhoods and gated communities, and my grandparents house was on two acres next to a country club.<p>I moved to Texas as student and lived in Austin for a while, which was very enjoyable. However, I also traveled, and lived briefly in other parts of Texas, and was amazed at the degree to which people lived in different worlds from one another in the same state.<p>Outside of Austin and the nicer suburbs, a whole different picture started to emerge:<p>--I made friends who owed money to payday lenders and pawn shops, and friends that gave 5% of their income to check cashing stores because their credit wasn&#x27;t good enough for banks.<p>--I started noticing people at work wearing anklets. One of them lost his job because he wasn&#x27;t allowed to stay out past 9pm, and then couldn&#x27;t pay his probation fees; I never saw him again.<p>--After I left Austin, I interacted with the police a lot, although I was never charged with any crime.<p>--I got handcuffed and searched because my license plate marker lights were the wrong color (white).<p>--I got searched because my vehicle “looked stolen.”<p>--When regular police or State Troops pulled me over, other mysterious authority figures sometimes showed up. I was searched on several occasions, sometimes with drug dogs, once by a man in a suit with an unmarked car and no badge.<p>--Police stings and paid citizen informants seemed common, and were often reported. A person who seemed like an obvious paid informant tried to get me to buy heroin, purchase a prostitute, and finally, in apparent desperation, give alcohol to a minor.<p>--I started hearing the N-word a lot but only from the poor whites, and especially regarding the jobs and other resources “they” were taking away from white people.<p>--Neighborhoods were highly segregated, and apparently self segregated by race, but only lower class people talked about which neighborhoods were “black neighborhoods” or “Asian neighborhoods.” (My suburban family members didn&#x27;t bring this up.) When I made a delivery to the “Vietnamese  neighborhood” my boss said: “watch out, or they&#x27;ll eat your dog!” People said stuff like this all the time, and I got used to it.<p>--Every landlord used the same lease: a huge, crazy contract written by a state trade association. I was told that the terms of this lease couldn&#x27;t be negotiated, because &lt;something about state law??&gt;.<p>--Protectionism seemed rampant. My family seemed to favor the “pro business” climate, and when I asked people if there is a difference between “pro business” and “pro market” I got blank stares.<p>In other words, when I left the opulent suburbs I was continually surrounded by craven scams and rent seeking behavior, but only a fraction of the people ever seemed to see the negative effects first hand, because most don&#x27;t interact with people outside their class.<p>I guess you could say things like this about many places, but of all of the places I have been Texas seemed to me to be the most extreme. I have no idea if this is supported by evidence, or is merely an unrepresentative subjective impression (it would be interesting to figure that out somehow).<p>I think where people are less able to self segregate, people of different races and incomes sort of have to deal with each other, and have some face to face interaction that is beneficial to society. I live in NY at the moment, and local politics often involves acrimony over race and class. This may or may not be helpful, but at least it&#x27;s harder to be as totally naive about how other people live as I was before I lived in Texas.