Today, we spent the morning at the World of Coca Cola. Despite having come to Atlanta once for fun and countless times for work, somehow I’ve never made the time to come here and finally did today. I guess the main reason I wasn’t super enticed to come is that in general, I’m not a soda person, and I don’t particularly like Coke at all. I understand why people are obsessed with the flavor and kind of see why people prefer Coke over Pepsi, but overall, I’m not enthralled with the brand at all.

But then, they got brownie points with me when I saw that they not only donated land for what is now the National Institute of Civil Rights just across the park from them, but they also supposed anti-segregation back in the day. And, I guess I do quite like their old-school, original bottle design. I also prefer the taste of “real” coke with sugar, as opposed to the disgusting high fructose corn syrup that sweetens it here.

In the museum, the actual recipe/concoction/formula for Coca Cola is locked and sealed in The Vault. It’s very dramatic, and apparently only two people in the world know the formula, and only half of it, and therefore, they can never travel together at the same time if God forbid anything happens to them. The funny thing to me is that I am pretty convinced that given it was concocted in a lab way back in 1892, I am 100% convinced that it is fully made of artificial “natural flavors” and therefore probably has gut-busting, body-ruining, cancer-causing hideous ingredients in it, and that’s partly why they are being so secretive about their formula. If you actually spend time to think about it, what in real life that you eat actually tastes anything remotely like a can of Coke?! It just screams to me of artificial flavorings and therefore, yuck.

We caught up again with our friends in Atlanta today, first at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Birth Home and National Historic Site, then over dinner in Duluth, where the third largest Korean population in the U.S. resides (and evidently, has delicious and authentic restaurants). I feel like the more I listened to our friends talk about living in the South, being in the sciences as a person of color, the more disgusted I was becoming in these conversations. I never would have learned these things other than in random articles unless I spoke with them about these incidents they’d gone through.

She talked about being an intern and working with a white racist attending doctor, who basically determines whether you get to move on to fellowship and becoming a full fledged practicing doctor; they do all your write-ups and evaluations, they decide whether you can take the next step. If you don’t get along with your attending, you’re basically screwed, and the system is set up in such a way where it doesn’t matter if you have been discriminated against; no one wants to care or cares. A patient came in, black and poor without medical insurance, and the doctor says to her in the room that the patient is a “fat n*****.” Our friend raised her eyes at him because she felt powerless and could say or do nothing, and he retorts back to her, “Why are you annoyed? I didn’t say anything about your race.” In her very wealthy and white undergrad experience at LSU, she was surrounded in sciences by 5th, 6th, 7th generation white southern women, some of whom were wealthy because of their slave-owning ancestors pre-Civil War. And these are people who you could probably never have a conversation about civil rights with, as they lamented what a difficult time their relatives had back in the day when slavery ended, “how hard” it was for their families to get by and make themselves into what they now have today. To them, black people and other people of color don’t have it hard; they have it hard because we’re probably taking all their land, their jobs, their rights from them. When she worked in Birmingham for a temporary internship, she told her team openly that she wanted to visit the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the 16th Street Baptist Church where the bombing happened, and it was just crickets in response; no one else had any interest in going or cared. It was chilling for her to witness this… today, in the 21st century, in a time post our first African-American U.S. president.

I couldn’t really say anything because I was just so disgusted. But then I am reminded of the horror stories I’ve heard in California, in Long Island, of people who think just like this. And I realize that the stories our friend shared during this trip — they are not isolated. They are a lively and growing group of hatred-filled people being further fueled by President Dipshit.

Today, we drove to Birmingham for the day to explore this Alabama city famous for being one of the major hubs for civil rights movement activity. We discovered that it has a very fun and eclectic farmer’s market with many vendors selling everything from squash pickles, baby eggplants, to freshly baked wheat loaves and grandma’s handed down recipe for banana pudding. We visited the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, plus the 16th Street Baptist Church right across the street, where in 1963, four little black girls were murdered when the Ku Klux Klan bombed them in a racist attack. We learned in further detail what went down in Birmingham during the many decades of racial segregation, and got a relearning of the events that happened in cities across the south, from Greensboro with the sit-ins at “whites only” restaurants (which we saw at the International Civil Rights Museum in Greensboro last year) to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., when he was standing at the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel (which is now where the National Civil Rights Museum is located) in support of sanitation worker rights in 1968.

I can’t help but think about all the parallels between what happened in a segregated America and what happens today. Is it really that much different? Now, it’s just more disguised and nuanced. “States rights” is just code for anti-people of color, anti-woman, anti-immigrants, anti-progress. Shooting unarmed black men is defended as a police officer protecting his own life. Disagreeing with Muslims or brown people coming into this country is based on the lack of desire to allow people to “leech” off our system of benefits… which really isn’t that good to begin with when compared with that of other westernized countries. It’s hard for me to understand or empathize with that way of thinking. Aren’t we all just trying to do the best we can with what we have?

The worst part about visiting all these museums full of history that is supposed to teach us how we can learn from the past and not repeat it is that the people who need to visit these museums and read this history are just not doing it and will likely never do it. They will never be open to visiting a civil rights museum or exhibit or watching a movie about police brutality against black people. There’s no seeing the other side’s story to them. But it goes back to how poorly educated people are here because in everyday schools in the U.S., you aren’t fully taught the full brunt of slavery and the post-Civil War period. It’s not like when the Civil War ended, all white people widely opened their arms to black people; it was actually quite the opposite, hence the KKK. That’s why we had laws around segregation and no interracial marriages. But if you don’t know that or learn that, then you will never “get” it today.

For the long Labor Day weekend, Chris and I headed down to Atlanta for some Southern exploration, including visiting MLK’s National Historic Site and Birth Home, Jimmy Carter’s Presidential Library and Museum, and the National Center for Civil Rights in Atlanta. We’re also doing a day trip tomorrow to Birmingham for their Civil Rights Institute and historic site, particularly since it was one of the key cities of the Civil Rights Movement. As the start to our trip, we met up with two friends we met in Little Rock in October 2016, at an informal gathering that my friend organized. My friend and the female friend were in the same med school program, and at that time, this couple had just started dating after meeting online. Almost three years later, they’ve recently gotten married and are now working and living in Atlanta.

She is Bangladeshi and Muslim, born in Kuwait, and moved to Baton Rouge with her family when she was 10. He is a fifth or sixth generation Mexican American born and raised in San Antonio, having lived in Little Rock and now Atlanta. He’s also atheist, but he “ceremonially” converted to Islam in order to marry her, and they had a Muslim wedding. I remember having a lot of fun with them back in 2016 during our Little Rock visit and feeling very energized during our hours-long conversation. I think the thing that got me the most was that I was spending time around people in the sciences (she was studying to be a doctor at the time; he’s a microbiologist working for the FDA) and learning all kinds of things that I really had no idea about. And it dawned on me then that I rarely get much intellectually stimulating conversation. Work conversations are very occasionally interesting when colleagues are debating certain topics or discussing politics. With long-time friends, we’re usually just catching up on random goings-on in each other’s lives. I read a lot, but I don’t have a book club to discuss the books in. Overall, I don’t feel “sparked” much. But I loved hearing what these two had to say then. And it was also fun to see them nearly three years later and realize that this general sentiment hasn’t changed. They are just as fun and engaging as they were then.

My ears always turn on when people are discussing culture, race, politics, and how their lives relate to all of that from a day to day perspective. In general, I don’t think I spend enough time talking to anyone about these things, and maybe that’s what I am missing.