I’m not racist. I hate everyone equally. 
Paging Polycarp!
My understanding is that the bread and wine changes fundamentally into flesh and blood – quite literally. Its fundament changes, but the outside stays the same. Using any chemical test, no observable change has occurred, because it is the spirit of the substance that has become [del]organic[/del] err, human tissue.
I don’t know how long you’ve been gone (didn’t think it was so very long ago) but I take exception to this. Every generation is more progressive than the last - perhaps after you’ve lived a little longer you’ll realize that. (Not a slam of your age, just pointing out the fact). If Southerners hadn’t been changing all along, we’d still be going to segregated schools and electing only white officials.
As to the OP - certainly Mississippi and the rest of the South have a long row to hoe. Many of our problems stem from being a poor state and having had a pitiful education system for years. I used to get pissed that folks don’t give us credit for the hard work going on here, but I don’t really give a shit anymore. We are moving in the right direction and working together we’re gonna get there.
(my emphasis) Is that progressive enough for you? More AA officials than ANY other state?
From here.
Trivia:
A bit off-course and more MPSIMS, but somewhat apropos to the discussion and not worth it’s own thread isthis article by Peggy Wallace Kennedy, the daughter of Alabama governors George and Lurleen Wallace.
In response to a lady who told her (at her parents’ vandalized graves) that “your daddy must be spinning in his grave” over a black man in the White House, Ms. Kennedy (an Obama supporter) responds:
Though a red state, Alabama is divided down the middle by a blue band that runs the state from West to East (or vice versa), and joined this time Jefferson County (Birmingham, the biggest city in the state) as well. You can see the blue strip on here even in 2000. That the state went to McCain was no surprise at all, but the most pleasant surprise was that District 2 in which I live went Democratic- by the skin of our teeth- (1,700 votes of 286,000+ cast) for the first time since MLK was alive, replacing the retiring Terry “I hope the Starr Report doesn’t go on the Internet cause it would violate Alabama’s pornography laws” Everett with Montgomery mayor Bobby Bright rather than his ULTRA conservative Christian Right Republican opponent Jay Love. Love was actually legally entitled to a recount but declined.
So, where we were 5 Republicans and 2 Democrats in our representation we are now 4 Reps to 3 Dems. We are gaining (and in Love’s defeat we avoided a Daily Show star).
One of our Democratic Reps is Artur Davis, the first Representative outside of Illinois to endorse Obama as president. Not surprising perhaps when one considers that Davis was friends with Obama at Harvard. His name receives a lot of whispers as a possible Cabinet appointee.
From the Times article:
The last Democrat President with an accent was Kennedy.
Sounds like you have a bad case of peanuts envy.
There are no average Southerners except for maybe Sampiro and Colbert
Oh. You mean like the two hundred years of instituionalized slavery in New York.
I live in a liberal environment in Tennessee. Metro Nashville-Davidson Country voted for Obama. We have approximately the same population as Denver.
MichaelQReilly and Merkwurdigliebel, what have you personally done to improve race relations and make life better for people of color?
Doubtless it was our racism that attracted them.
it’s more of a historical connection than a current one, if you’re talking about Howell. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/23/national/23klan.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
If you’d been there recently you would know that they had to move the klan out to make room for more outlet stores.
That’s a pretty damn offensive statement. I personally know about a dozen native white Southerners who are actively engaged in anti-racist work, either on a professional or volunteer level. I hang out with a crowd that trends very liberal and very Southern. Are race relations in the South exactly where they ought to be? Hell, no. But they’re not exactly where they ought to be in any part of the country.
Don’t forget Frank!! That is a serious nut, there.
Because they like the Republican platform? Want to date Sarah Palin? 
I think I’m missing your point here. What is disturbing about it? (Not snark, I’m actually trying to figure this out). Surely you don’t mean that a Republican vote automatically equals a racist vote? Can’t people vote Republican and not be racist? Some of my best friends are Republicans. 
Another thing about this kind of thread. What about the black folks? When you say Mississippians are racist and backwards you are labeling the almost-half-the-population who are black. Are they ignorant and backwards too? Guilt by association perhaps? That’s a pet peeve of mine.
What, was Clinton just pretending to be a Democratic President?
Well, we can do you racist and backward without the ignorant, and we can do you racist and ignorant without the backward, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can’t give you backward and ignorant without the racist. Racist is compulsory. They’re all racist, you see.
As a native Georgian on both sides of my family, I find I have very little problem with the OP’s statement. There are a lot of decent people in Georgia, but there are a hell of a lot more of the other kind.
Naked?
For about the tenth time, why was it only the South and Appalachia that voted the way they did?
My experience growing up in the Midwest leads me to conclude this is probably true. I think the racism of the Midwest is often underestimated. Sometimes I wonder if the vilification of the South for being racist is misplaced. I haven’t spent much time in the South, but they’d have to be pretty racist to top a state like Michigan or Ohio. The village I grew up in was notorious for its racism. In the 70s they burned a black family out of their home. Only as recently as last year someone burned a cross on the lawn of a family in Muncie, Indiana.
When I came to the East Coast, I asked a new friend, ‘‘Do you guys have a lot of racism here?’’ I only asked because I noticed people from all different cultures talking to one another and interacting as if it was no big thing. That kind of inclusiveness was common at my liberal University of Michigan, but certainly not in the little towns I grew up in over the years.
My friend seemed taken aback. ‘‘I don’t know how I could know that, since you wouldn’t notice racism unless you were a minority.’’
Um, yeah, you would. It’s pretty explicit where I came from.
I’m not deluded about the realities of racial and ethnic inequality here on the coast, particularly in the urban areas. All I’m saying is suburban New Jersey seems a whole hell of a lot different than suburban Michigan.
I agree with this and I grew up in suburban New Jersey and still live in it. I’m wondering though, have you seen what I was talking about yet with the way these same enlightened folk talk about Middle-Easterners and Indians?
It is not terrible, but people that truly have nearly no prejudice towards Blacks, Jews, Hispanics and far Eastern Asians seem casual in racist talk to Middle-Eastern and Indian immigrants.
I haven’t seen that yet. There’s a train stop about 20 minutes from here called Metropark and it seems like there are a LOT of Indians in that community who commute. I wonder if that might have a tempering effect on the anti-Indian attitude in this particular area of New Jersey.
ETA: I see Metropark is the name of the stop in Woodbridge Township, not actually a town in and of itself.
Sorry to have missed the previous ten times.
My first thought is: do we really expect the entire country to vote the same way? Why is it surprising that some places vote one way or the other? I must still be missing something. Are you saying that each county should have had a similar percentage to what the overall country had? So then the question is “why, in some areas of the country, do white voters overwhelmingly vote Republican”. Yes?
Well, let’s see now…Clinton, Carter, Johnson…nope, none of those guys had accents as far as I can tell.
That Kennedy, though, I could hardly understand what he was saying.
Now for my next dumb question: is this data (specifically thinking of mhendo’s post) from exit polls or what? I’m not doubting it, it seems reasonable to me. Just curious.