"Far from seeing Georgia as a place held back by its Confederate and Jim Crow past, Savili said that he doesn’t regularly experience racism, although he acknowledged that incidents of racial discrimination do persist. But he emphasized that coming here had allowed immigrants like him to find relative tolerance and coexistence, compared to what he left at home in India. “You compare with India, Pakistan, any other country you see, hardly there is anything [happening] to anybody,” he said.
The thousands of Indian Americans who gathered at the base of Stone Mountain to celebrate diversity rather than supremacy represented the paradox that sits at the heart of modern Georgia.
It’s a state where it’s not unusual to see a Confederate flag on a pickup truck parked next to an electric car with a Kamala Harris bumper sticker. The governor is an anti-abortion Christian Republican, while both senators are liberal Democrats — one a Jewish millennial and the other a Black preacher who serves as senior pastor at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church.
The fulcrum of the social and political change that brought these men to power is metro Atlanta, the rapidly diversifying suburbs that border the state’s capital city, where white people and minorities, conservatives and liberals, retired suburbanites and young urbanists, transplants and natives are learning to build new types of communities together.
The evolving metro Atlanta area is not only helping to create a new Georgia, but its demographics increasingly resemble national trend lines — suggesting that if one wanted a road map for what the country might look like in the future, a close look at the Peach State might offer some clues."
https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/the-new-georgia-points-to-americas-future/