Reply #143: I've met tens of thousand of Southerners, many are good people but most

[billbuckhead]

are more racist oriented than Yankees or Hispanics or any other group I've met. Why won't some Southerners just admit that racism is one of most the defining features of Southern culture and let it go? The perfect metaphor for all this is the Confederate battle flag being promoted as part of the Southern heritage and not being recognized that the vast majority of minorities see it as equivalent as a Nazi swastika. Most Southerners will argue for days about this. Now the new meme is that slavery was actually good treatment of blacks.

I guess what I'm getting at, is that while the rest of America may be racist they aren't racist enough to consistantly vote against their own self interest on this basis of race like the Southern working class almost always does. Otherwise the rest of country would be red. Lyndon Johnson predicted this when he signed the Civil rights bills but I don't think could have predicted how pervasive it would be. I think he underestimated the role of religion in the South to keep the masses backward.