Please, show me where I’m wrong. Surely I’ve missed the many progressive policies implemented by the Deep South over its history.
Come on y’all, just admit it. You know how racist we Southerners are. We would never vote for a black candidate.
You may have missed that my report of my non-lynching is meant to address what the South is CURRENTLY like. Orval Faubus left the Arkansas governor’s office forty-one years ago and is no longer involved in policy-making, having come down with an unfortunate case of death in '94.
We were discussing the history of opposition to progressive policies in those regions. I distinguished your cite from those in the South. Fair play to me.
Yes, but they were from South Boston. Seriously, though, that was a very bad period in Boston history.
lots of bigots in the cities and small towns around here too (Flint, MI)
there’s a creditable rumor that there’s a strong kkk presence a bit west of here in the farm lands (don’t remember who told me or when but I had no trouble believing them fwiw)
Now that’s not entirely true. The South doesn’t dislike MichaelQReilly. He gives us something to laugh at when Colbert’s in reruns.
Well, for starters, the post I quoted referred to the “South,” not the “Deep South.” So at the very least, you don’t even know what you’re talking about. That qualifies as ignorant in my book.
Furthermore, geographical regions don’t implement progressive policies. Or any policies at all, for that matter. For the most part, legislatures and local governments do. And if you believe that no such progressive policies have been implemented over the entire history of the region, again, you’re an idiot. Unless you still see slavery, Blacks denied voting rights, Jim Crow laws, school segregation, a complete lack of Blacks in government, lynchings and church bombings being ignored by law enforcement, and so on.
And painting an entire region with such a broad brush pretty much defines bigotry.
Yeah. Ignorant, bigoted, idiot. Seems about right.
No fair. Those three are all clean.
The University of Georgia at Athens was the first state sponsored University in the US.
Wesleyian College at Macon was the first college for women.
Georgia was the first state to give married women full property rights.
Hiram Revels of Mississippi was the first African American Senator
Mississippi was the first state to set up a Junior College system.
Mississippi was the first state to outlaw debtors prisons.
Mississippi was the first state to have a state college for women.
The first public museum was established in Charleston, SC
The first Reform Jewish congregation was in Charleston.
The first municipal college was in Charleston.
South Carolina had the first black state supreme court justice.
Charleston was the first city to have a historical preservation zoning office.
I’m just glad he didn’t link to Willie Herenton of Memphis. He’s like Fabulous Creature without the doomsday machines: pure, unblinking, ostrich-raping evil.
I will not argue this because I think you are right. It would be a terrible and ignorant reaction for me to pretend we are all sitting around singing “jesus loves the little children” during our fabulous racially integrated sunday dinners. Race was probably a bigger factor for more people than were willing to admit in polite company.
My offense was at being assumed to be stupid because of my neighbors, feeling like anything I do won’t matter anyway because I’m just a dumb redneck Southerner and being told I shouldn’t vote.
Look, we’re not there yet. But when we get there it will be in spite of people with attitudes like the OP, not because of them. You are not the one that is going to whip the dumb Southerners into shape. We work quietly, from the inside out, and your bull-headed, polarizing screed only serves to push us as a whole farther from progressive ideas. Simply, you are not helping.
Are you joking? Hiram Revels was indeed a Senator - during Reconstruction, when those evil Yankees forced the south to let black people vote. When Union troops pulled out after the 1876 compromise ending Reconstruction, tell me how many blacks got elected.
The Times article noted the particular counties being discussed. Obviously places like Atlanta aren’t part of this.
I’d have liked to see a breakdown by age, which would tell if things were improving.
You did notice that the three politicians to which I linked were all elected to statewide office in Georgia?
By healthy margins, too.
Starting with Alabama which went very strongly for McCain: 61% to 39%. Whites were 88% for McCain. Now that looks bad but of course African-American were 98% for Obama. In 2004 82% went for Bush and only 18% for Kerry.
I think this starts to lessen the charge of it strictly being white bigotry. The ignorant part might hold up though. 
I’ll grab Mississippias another state. In 2004 it was 60% for Bush and 40% for Kerry. Among Whites: 85% for Bush.
In 2008 McCain won 57% to Obama’s 43% but among Whites: 88% for McCain.
These are not huge differences among white voters. It works against the Op. I think I picked the two states with the worse reputations in the South. I could be wrong, but they are without question the ‘Deep South’ at least.
Jim
Last week California proved with Prop 8 that a rich and progressive and liberal state can be just as backward as Arkansas. In fact only 5% more Arkansans voted against gay marriage than did Californians. This evidently proves that-uh- all backwardness is in the South?
I echo (or parrot, or to be really southern I split tongue crow) the sentiments that if you were to judge blacks or Jews as broadly based on a tiny sample and demographics as you judge Southerners, you’d come across as a racist or antisemitic ass. And either way, Sammy Davis Jr. would never be your friend.
By an oddity of how elections work it very much looks like the extra large turnout of black voters was the margin that Prop 8 lost by in California. I think that is well covered in another thread. It did pretty well among white voters and especially younger white voters. Better to stick to available statistics, I think they argue the defense of the south better than Prop 8 in California.
Jim
One of my biggest problems with the way the OP thinks is that he automatically assumes that the basis for the support of conservative/non-progressive policies in the South has to do with those people being from or living in a particular region. It seems it would be much fairer to denigrate and generalize (if one is so flagrantly, ignorantly inclined to do so) based on economics and education. Is it that the South is naturally home to more racists? Or is it that Northern states have a smaller ratio of people living in rural/poor areas?
You will note, of course, that rural areas across the United States (be they in California, NY, OR Alabama) are generally associated with backwards, less progressive populations. That this association is made is arguably fair, but making a claim about people from a rural area is still just as ignorant as claiming that blacks are still stupid, loud, and uppity. Such a person claiming so could also cite statistical evidence purporting that black people do worse on tests and in school, are loud and rude in movie theaters, or abuse affirmative action policies to get into positions that they would otherwise not merit, but that person would still look like an ass whatever their point.
And, back to the original point, if it’s just a Southern culture thing, then how do you explain states outside of the South like Utah? How do you explain the attitude of people outside of the college towns in Wisconsin? How do you explain rural New York?
And you know what else? Racism still certainly exists in the South, but from anecdotal experience it’s much more of a problem in the North. Blacks, Hispanics, etc. are all poor down here, but most of the white folk are too. The South’s economy wasn’t exactly helped by the crusading Northerners during or even after the war, and that’s still where plenty of America’s minorities still live.
But economic equality is still far away even in the North. Look at Fortune 500 companies or white-shoe law firms for the past 50 years. Most of them are not Southern institutions nor are their partners and CEOs from the South (for the most part), but you don’t see African-Americans, Hispanics, or even Asian Americans populating their middle-management up. Several of the newest and most influential law firms in the country were formed specifically because of the impossibility of non-WASPs to advance.
So I wouldn’t argue that the South is still backward, ignorant and racist. I would argue that the country as a whole is still backward, ignorant and racist. Besides the above, I’m almost positive that in the North racism is still just as influential as ever, but it’s hidden behind the anonymity of urban life.
And on a personal note as a minority, I tend to find Northerners much more offensive and ignorant about the politics of race in general. No one I know in the South claims that racism is over or that racism isn’t an overt and practical problem to the everyday minority. The only people I know who say that are Northerners cloaked in their impenetrable blanket of progressive illusions.
You’re kidding, right?
The New York Draft Riots – “The largest civil insurrection in American history other than the Civil War itself” which “degraged into a virtual racial pogrom, with uncounted numbers of blacks murdered in the streets.”
The Springfield Race Riot of 1908 – “Anti-black race riots in northern cities were nothing new in the first decade of the twentieth century. White hostility towards blacks was just as strong in the North as the South in this period. Segregation of the races was frequent in the North, and in Springfield and elsewhere blacks were barred from many restaurants, hotels, parks, and other public facilities. Numerous race riots had occurred in the North as early as the first half of the 1800s.”
It must be nice to know so little about your own history that you can blithely claim a complete allegiance to progressivism, without violence or stridency. Don’t let a little thing like historical fact get in your way.
You are correct that, overall, white voters supported McCain by 12 percentage points over Obama. That’s the figure that CNN gives also. The question, though, is how that 12 percent was distributed.
I couldn’t find any convenient table for the state-by-state distribution of the white vote, so i went to CNN’s election results website and got the figures for myself. Here are the results, ordered from lowest to highest by percentage votes for Obama:
St. BO JM
AL 10 88
MS 11 88
LA 14 84
GA 23 76
SC 26 73
TX 26 73
OK 29 71
AR 30 68
UT 31 66
AK 32 65
WY 32 66
ID 33 65
TN 34 63
NC 35 64
KY 36 63
NE 39 59
VA 39 60
AZ 40 59
KS 40 59
SD 41 56
WV 41 57
FL 42 56
MO 42 57
NM 42 56
ND 42 55
IN 45 54
MT 45 52
NV 45 53
OH 46 52
MD 47 49
PA 48 51
NJ 49 50
CO 50 48
CT 51 46
IL 51 48
IA 51 47
MI 51 47
CA 52 46
NY 52 46
DE 53 45
MN 53 46
NH 54 44
WI 54 45
MA 57 42
WA 57 41
ME 58 40
RI 58 39
OR 59 41
VT 68 31
HI 70 27
DC 86 12
For those who find columns of numbers a bit overwhwelming, and prefer a visual representation, i also fired up Photoshop and made a map.
Now, do i think that these figures mean that white southerners are racist? No, i don’t. As What Exit? points out, whites in those southern states have tended to vote heavily Republican in recent elections, when the Democratic candidate was white. Also, i’ve argued in the past that the huge black vote FOR Obama is not an indicator of racism (for much the same reason), and i still believe that.
I simply want to point out that making the statistical observation that “McCain beat Obama by a 12 point margin…all white voters” is a rather simplistic and misleading assertion in the context of this thread, given that the figures show that:
(a) there were 17 states plus DC where the majority of whites supported Obama, and none of those states were part of the Confederacy. The only one that was part of the pre-Civil War South is Delaware.
(b) of the states where the majority of white supported McCain, the most overwhelming imbalances occurred in a line from Texas across to South Carolina.
Again, i don’t think this means what the OP asserts, but it also puts something of a damper on your implication that white support for McCain was somehow even balanced across the nation.