KdS_22 said:
This has been a stereotype that I have always had to deal with, since I live in Alabama. A recent thread on a gubernatorial candidate in Alabama just brought it back to the front of my mind. Why does everyone bash the South as a racist breeding ground? I have known many people who are from different sections of the US who are just as bigoted as some of the people in the South. There are racists and intolerant people wherever you go, so why is much of the hate directed at us Southerners? The majority of the people I know here are kind and gracious. Your response doesn't have to necessarily apply to the South, but have you or your friends ever been stereotyped as a bigot simply because of where you live?
Look, I was born and raised in Florida, though my parents were both from Brooklyn, so I'm from one of the more northern-ish (if you will) Southern states. The reason why southerners are seen largely as stereotypical racist hicks is because, frankly, they are. Here in the rim section of Florida, we jokingly refer to the innerpart of Florida and the Deep South states to our North as the "South in the North". Now, not all Southerners are truly, openly racist, but there are several aspects that pervade southern society that perpetuate the stereotype:
Not once since the end of Reconstruction has there been a black man or woman elected to high state-wide office (Senator or Governor)in the South.
The Ku Klux Klan is still very, very alive in the South, though decidedly less openly violent than they were during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I can tell you, not from personal experience but by simply word of mouth, where the Klan meets in the central region of Florida on the weekends.
University of Mississippi, of the Deep South, had Rebbie the Rebel as its mascot until very, very recently, and the banning of the song "Dixie" - the anthem of the Confederate States of America, whose sole purpose in being was the perpetuation of slavery - at football games there set off an outcry across the South.
Steve Spurrier, the coach at the University of South Carolina, had to campaign a mere two years ago to get the Confederate flag removed from the statehouse of South Carolina.
Southerners love to talk up the Confederacy as if the rebels were heroes who severed ties with the North in the name of states' rights and freedom, when, in fact, their secession was the reaction to an anti-slavery President coming into office. The lack of ability to grasp that the Confederacy was merely a pro-slavery union is troubling and telling.
Drive around for 10 minutes here in the South - even in the northern trasnplant region that is Florida's rim region - and you will see at least one truck or care with a proud confederate flag on their bumper.
Finally - and most telling - most, if not all, of the state flags of the Southern states contain some variation of the Stars and Bars of the Confederate Flag, even though some of these states only adopted the flags after the rebellion. The confederate flag beign nothing more than a sign of racism, the incorporation of it in the current state flags shows an unwillingness to repent for the past.
