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I appreciate your comments and I hear you. However, I think you make a common error when you ID the problem as southerners and the south. It is certainly the most obvious example of what's been wrong with us as a nation since its inception, but hardly the inately knowingly evil region. There have been racial and other sorts of "differentness-related" atrocities committed all over our fair nation. As a southerner I am inclined to think of people such as Morris Dees and Wendell Berry as beacons of heroic rightness. Perhaps even Wm. J. Clinton would qualify. The late William Bradford Huey. Faulkner. Willie Morris (with whom I particularly identified because of his childhood). These are not a rare breed, and they have all taken to task Mr. Helms and others like him in their respective times.
By the same token, one of the most egregious lynchings in the history of this country took place in Pennsylvania. One can't very well lay the Black Wreath upon a single region, as fashionable as it may seem. To be fair, racism and simple bigotry have been pretty evenly distributed, and the south has evolved, generally, much faster than the rest of the country, given the handicap under which it has worked.
As the apocryphal bumper sticker spoken of by Brother Dave Gardner read, "I might be slow, but I'm ahead of you."
If the south is "our crazy uncle in the basement", then consider that most at large child molesters are relatives, even if they live in the midwest, California, Boston, New Jersey, etc. They're all over the place, and none is worse than the others, except that the more subtle the racism and bigotry (as in Boston as a grand example), the more difficult it is to uncover and undo.
I'm not saying you're wrong about the south: I just think you left out a lot of other territory that's got its own human stains to deal with.
