The Confederacy Were The Bad Guys

... and you're never wrong, except that you greatly over-simplify when you write of "the South," as if you see a block of the nation as a homogeneous whole where everyone is in lockstep with everyone else, vile, bigoted, toxic, despite the fact that a great number of counties throughout the "deep South" are majority African American. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Census-2000-Data-Top-US-Ancestries-by-County.svg

I'm not so stupid that I don't know that the southern states were the last to cling to slavery, though they weren't the first or the only states or territories to have slaves, and the Puritans that first settled up north felt that owning slaves was sanctioned by the Bible. I am also aware of the Civil War, or should I call it The War Between the States just to irritate you, though it is true that the country wasn't a union in the same way before the war as it was to be after the war. Unlike some idiotic unreconstructed Southerns, I am not stupid enough to posit that slavery had little to do with the war. The Southern upper class didn't care for industrialism and wanted to maintain the agrarian economy and lifestyle that sat like a boulder on the backs of Africans they somehow felt they had the right to purchase and work like animals, beasts of burden. Likewise, I am sure you are not so stupid as to think that the Civil War was solely an abolitionist fight to free and grant equal rights to the slaves. If you think this, you are wrong.

The North has much to be ashamed of concerning the so-called reconstruction after the war, and the carnage and atrocities perpetrated on the general populace in more urban areas, such as Atlanta, most of whom, as always with war, were not of the landed class and had no real stake in the politics and economics that brought the war about but were merely swept up by it, and even the fleeing slaves looking for protection only to find that hatred and cruelty wears blue as well as gray. Some of the Reconstruction tactics appear to be intended to fuel the flames of race hate. Booker T. Washington lamented some of these tactics and feared the inevitable results.

The South has much more reason to be ashamed of its treatment of blacks during the horrible years of Jim Crow and the lynch mob, and creating a new form of plantation and industrial slavery using petty law infractions and the prison system, after reconstruction was stopped and the U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, a Virginian and a Calvinist, who prior to his presidency was a professor working in the burnt ruins of Columbia, SC. showed the film, Birth of a Nation, at the White House, a film that shows a heroic Ku Klux Klan saving the chaste purity of white women from Reconstruction-empowered blacks who dared to forget they were only puppets in a twisted game. The original Ku Klux Klan lasted only a short time, but after this film, a second KKK was hatched that was nationwide and popular, and added all new immigrants and Catholics and Jews to the list of people to hate and terrorize.

Then came the shameful Fifties and Sixties, when the KKK aligned with law enforcement and the power elite in the South to squash the civil rights movement. Nor was it pretty in the Northern and MidWestern cities to where large numbers of blacks went looking for a better life, and the fight for civil rights was happening there too, with leaders wanting nothing to do with nonviolence. Average Joe was sitting in front of the television watching news or murder, church bombings, non-violent protesters being beaten in the South, rioting and blacks marching, looting and setting buildings ablaze in the cities of the North and Midwest... it must have looked to many like a race war was on the horizon. It's an ugly history.

Now, we have a black president, a man for whom I cast a vote, twice, despite many disappointments, but the huge inequality problem based on so-called "race" in the U.S. is still a serious problem because the game has been rigged for so long to keep things unequal. Aggressive affirmative action is the only way I can see to budge it, and that, like Reconstruction after the Civil War, will not go down smoothly because the whole system is, and has for a long time been, designed to make a certain class and color (and gender) of people "more qualified." Advancing the institutionally disadvantaged "less qualified" based on "race" will once again breed hate in those who are more qualified but stepped over, because self-interest trumps the greater good in the U.S.A. An "invisible hand" is supposed to sort it all out.

I am not proud of Southern bigots... it's just that, since my school days in a small rural town where ignorance and poverty were rampant, I haven't known any, despite having lived most of my adult life in the South, in three different Southern states, in areas where blacks and whites are integrated into each others lives much more so than anywhere else I've lived or visited. I was surrounded by a newer generation of people, much more educated than our elders, who wanted nothing to do with the ignorant attitudes of older generations concerning crap like race fear/hate, a new generation who wanted a Southern identity to be proud of that included inclusiveness of blacks and whites, and the contributions of each to great music, literature and art.

There are many wonderful people living in the South, including my family and friends (black and white). There is diversity, not only of ethnicity, but of ideas, same as most anywhere else in the U.S.

Your childhood experiences inform you about particular places at particular times, and you inflate them into big sweeping statements about many other people and other places within that geographical block we call the South, and that over-generalization is what I'm dismissing. You took the first swipe by dismissing my experiences with your smug, "I'm sorry. It's true."

Guess what! You are smart, but if you were a lot smarter you'd realize that you don't know everything. I can't believe you have the nerve to call me out on dismissing your childhood experiences after you'd just dismissed mine, and insulted me and everybody I love with your largely ignorant slamming of Southerners in general, as if the only reality is summed up by your personal experiences and you can simply generalize from that. I imagine a lot of racists make that same leap.

I also love how you claim I prove you right because I say I hope you never have to return to the South. Southerns don't want people who hate them being there talking about how much the South sucks. I guess that means we are racists and don't want any of them outside agitator types comin' down here tellin' us how to think. Seriously though, I don't want you down there because there are people I like there, and you are very irritating and possibly psychotic.

Now, if you must, respond with the typical faux internet argument (no one gives an inch, persuasion isn't possible)... pick this reply apart and feed it to the crows for all I care... I won't see your response. I've wasted too much time on you and this already and I have far better things to do than being rude to strangers on the internet, and far nicer things to look upon than a screen full of insults thrown at me. Bye.