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Pax. Sorry about the threats to you and your family. In light of that, I'm sure it seems like weak tea for me to assert that this isn't really representative.
There's certainly plenty of racist history down here. Denying it would be foolish, just as it would be to deny that some people still hold those views, even if they know they can't say them in public (a phenom I know is not limited to the South). But things have been changing for a long time; where/when I grew up it was still common, but had already tipped the scale in the previous 20 years. Having recently returned to the South, the change in attitudes is phenomenal, and pleasing.
What has been slower to change are the stereotypes about this region, both the good ones and the bad ones. To me, the problem is the gulf that creates between like minded people who could otherwise talk, learn from one another, and cooperate to make things better. Or less grandiosely, just doing things like capturing Eric Rudolph, the abortion-clinic bomber who disappeared in the hills near my home town. The FBI and the media showed up, did their high-handed thing and started cracking wise about the dirt eaters and niggra-lynchers and surprise, the cooperation dried up. This among people who themselves had had abortions, or amenable opinions and no particular use for someone who would blow up a women's clinic.
Not speaking of you here, but oftimes well-meaning liberal folk are either high-handed or outright insulting when they deal with people like me (or the abstraction they take me to fit); Insulting me I can handle, but the lost opportunity for shared goals and actions, especially now when so many things are going to hell in a handbasket, is distressing.
And yeah (speaking to other people out there in the crowd) that includes any of you Obama supporters that call racism or race-baiting or hypocrisy anytime someone is insufficiently breathless and venerating toward your guy, even when the fact is I'll likely be voting for him in November just like you.
