I grew up in a corner of Cobb County, Ga., as the son of two Pakistani Muslims who came to the United States in the 1970s.
The towns where I come from contained everything from white guys who proudly flew Confederate flags to proud descendants of American slaves to immigrants from India, Nigeria, Mexico and all over the globe. And despite the stereotypes you might hear about the South, we all more or less got along in a region that was in rapid transition in the 1990s and 2000s.
Yet during most of that time, Cobb was a G.O.P. stronghold; it was the backyard of conservative Republican giants like Newt Gingrich and Bob Barr.
In 2015 there was only one Democrat on the county commission, a Black woman named Lisa Cupid. Late one night she was tailed by a car. Terrified, she called the police — who informed her that she was actually calling the police on the police. The threatening vehicle was driven by an officer who later said he thought her car was being driven suspiciously. Her frightening encounter elicited no sympathy from her colleagues.
“I don’t call it profiling,” a fellow commissioner said. “I call it good police work.”
Back then, the political leadership in Cobb held the blue line, even when it was clearly in the wrong.
But in the past few elections, Cobb has turned blue, with voters there picking Joe Biden and Raphael Warnock.
