I don't understand the South.

[Nay]

62. Thank you. That's one of the best explanations of the phenomenon I have ever read.

As a white person who was born and raised in Florida and has lived out West, in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Virginia, I can say that the Western racism is a bit different -- it's a more fascist/Nazi/master race type of racism, rather than a back-to-the-old-South culture type of racism. Western racists include pretty much all POC in their hatred, while many southerners don't hate American Indians, India Indians, Chinese, etc. Southerners really reserve their intense hatred for blacks. Only 15 years ago in VA, I started a new job at a large corporation where many nationalities worked. I put up an Amnesty International calendar for myself and was horrified one day by an older white woman who stood at my desk, pointing at the picture of two African women who'd been released from prison. She had a disgusted look on her face. I told her who the women were ('they're 2 African women released from prison by Amnesty Int; they were teaching kids to read and got arrested.') She just didn't know what to say, and I figured out that I was probably expected to apologize for having the gall to have a pic of Africans on my calendar. They weren't birds, kittens, or pretty white women, you know?

I soon found out that many of the local white people who worked there were quite caught up in the everyday racism of the deep South, even though it was the year 2000. As a white person I was expected to laugh at racist jokes, for example. I gave people the evil eye instead, so they stopped.

As you said, racism (and gun love) is now a tribal thing in the South and will be nearly impossible to eradicate. Joe Bageant's books are valuable reads, as is the book by Jim Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, which gives you an idea of how the tribal/fighting/stubbornness thing started. Webb has a much more benign view of that development; I don't. I think it means that reason, discussion, facts, etc., will never get through to people like that. And we should have occupied the South for 50 years after the Civil War.