Why are people in the south considered racist?

People who say that are the ignorant morons who have lived in one town their entire life and see America in a spectrum of black/white with no gray area. They believe what they see on TV because you know they don’t have any experience outside their own town.

@ Hey girl hey, you think the North was fully against slavery? The Northerners thought poorly of blacks just as the south did in that era. You must be naïve and utilizing that basic high school history education if you think the north was morally superior concerning race. There were many in the North who wanted slavery to remain because of their businesses dealing with product from the south.

Billy Blaze, you think you know what every school in Alabama does concerning prom? My, my you must be omnipotent.

You're obviously young, and hopefully not racist. And of COURSE you have large majority white areas: they are usually the affluent areas, while blacks have huge populations in your city's ghettos and poor rural areas.

The South's reputation for racism comes from slavery times; it comes from the mind-bending and cruel ways that white southerners developed to keep black people in hell after slavery ended. Research things like Jim Crow, sharecropping, Emmit Till's lynching and the KLAN. It also comes from southern politicians who talk about "welfare queens" to this day, without admitting or addressing the cause of our nation's DISGRACEFUL poverty level and horrible education system. There are thousands of other reasons, but that's enough for me. But being as my family is from Lousiana, I know not all Southerners are racist... you just need to speak out more and vote better. Racism is also tolerated in the south to a degree that shocks Yankees. My mother recently heard a black man addressed first as "boy" and then as "***---" in a public restaurant, and NO ONE shouted the offensive white guy down. Up here, he'd probably get either jumped, booed, or arrested.

And honey, of COURSE the war was about slaves. The folks who pushed the idea of secession were the rich slave owners-whom I am decended from, as well as being kin to General Beauregard-who could not operate their insanely profitable plantation system without slaves. The north had abolished slavery a generation earlier, turning instead to mechanized labor. Your rich southern politicians convinced the poor to fight by talking about "state's rights" much in the same way Bush talked us into fighting Iraq based on WMDs. You tell me ONE state's rights issue that was big that did not involve a racial issue! Rich men started the war, and poor men fought it. Once the Civil War was ended and slaves were freed, many plantation owners (including my family) took a SERIOUS financial hit. Slavery, point blank, was EVIL.

It has everything to do with the time period leading up to the Civil War (the issue of slavery and it's abolishment leading up to Lincoln's presidency and the time after). The south was for slavery, and the north was against it. So yeah, I'd say that it has a lot to do with that, as well as the fact that people are seriously closed minded.

AND WOW. relax. I was just bringing up a point! I said that the north was against slavery-- as in they were more into industry, but the south thought that slavery would stabilize society. You all have issues.

History shapes perception.

The South seceded from the Union (United STATES of America), the South elected its own Confederate President, amid that secession, the South, historically had industries requiring more grueling labor, and rather than work the land stolen from the Natives themselves, the South opted to import and employ free labor -free, to the white land owners, but forced by the imported-against-their-wills and beaten-into-submission blacks, who carried out that labor. During the time of slavery, black males were routinely beaten, mutilated, including amputations and castrations for disobedience, and females were taken, and raped at will. -There are numbers of light-skinned black people and families in this country trace their history to slave rape.

I mentioned males and females, rather than men and women, because, at that time in history, blacks were not viewed, by law, as human, they were treated and traded much in the way farm animals were.

So, that contributes to the general perception of a history of savagery.

The Civil War was mainly about quelling the South's secession, which came about due to their unhappiness with emancipation talks at the Federal level of our nation's government. Booth, assassin of President Lincoln was born in MD, and a Confederate sympathizer. Later,when President Kennedy considered the Voting Rights Act, being championed by human rights activists, he was assassinated in Southern mainstay Texas, with a lot of disturbing inconsistencies to how and why his murder came about and even oddities in the treatment of his body after -if I remember correctly, ot seems the Secret Service wasn't even allowed to retrieve the body until some authorities in Texas did their own version of an autopsy. Hmmmmm.....

You probably know that Kennedy had to send in the National Guard when Alabama's illustrious Gov. Wallace blocked a school house door, pledging his allegiance to segregation, and only encouraging groups committed to violence to preserve that status quo.

I do not know about all of the Southern states, but I do know that SC and GA both have some form of Confederate homage being paid on the state house grounds, an insult to ALL of our men and women in uniform, as, I believe, secession may have been an act of both sedition and treason.

And, to this day, acts of racial violence perpetrated against blacks in the South not only seem to receive minimal if any attention by the media in Southern states -and the national newscasters are reliant on someone to generate leads on stories, so that they can be brought to a wider light- there is still a distinct disparity in the observation and enforcement of the law, where such os concerned.

-For example there is a story just coming to light of a monstrous act committed against a black woman in South Carolina by a white man and white woman, the same night and possibly in the exact same hour as the infamous "O.J. Simpson murders." (Right, 16+ YEARS later, just coming to light, and that woman tried to get the media's help, and involvement.) And another horrific attack, years after that, where a black man was dragged to his death, in Tyler, Texas was somehow quickly quieted.

In each of these cases, the offenders received slaps on the wrist copared to what they did to their victims.

And that, Sir, is just some of what contributes, not only to the continued perception of white Southerners being racist, but also dangerous.

Let's see here.

They enslaved blacks for hundreds of years, and then fought a civil war to keep them enslaved.

They intimidated blacks into not voting, not being educated, not fighting for any rights for another 80 or 90 years after that, periodically killing blacks just to underscore the point.

They then fought every step of the way against school desegregation, voting rights, and every other form of equal rights legislation.

Your "integration" is a pathetic sham. Blacks and whites in YOUR STATE go to different proms, even when they attend the same schools.

I don't agree I live in western ny and there are a ton of racist ppl here /: