If you didn't meet those people, then either you're ignorant yourself -(with all due respect), or you are not looking closely.
I'm from the south. I went to high school there, I got my college degree from there. I live there from the time I was born until my mid-20s. The south is full of racist, horrible people, it was common in my youth to hear people talk badly about Jewish people, people dropped the n word. I heard people talking about non-Christians shouldn't get to vote. I heard plenty of sexist words about women for men. It just beggars belief that you would never hear this kind of speech.
I just don't commonly hear this on the west coast in the US like I did in my years in the south. And unfortunately I still hear it when I go to visit.
Not everyone is like that! But enough people are that, so that you're going to encounter it over and over again.
As someone living in the South, I would really appreciate it if you stopped tarring everyone who lives in a Southern state as a "racist horrible person". There are many millions of people who live in the South.
Some of them are racist, millions of them are not.
When I was a kid in the south my barber constantly talked about the problems of black people and that he saw crosses being burned and that he didn't want his daughter to like black boys. I'm not making this up! They literally burned crosses in the town I grew up in.
In my very first comment I said that not all people are like that. Yet sadly, to this day, I constantly do meet people making casual racist comments when I go to the south. And when I say the south, I include the state where I was born which is one of the states that fought against the US government in the civil war.
Not all people are like that but there is an issue that a lot of people are like that.
Alabama had a ban on interracial marriage in its state constitution. Struck down in the 60s by SCOTUS but still on the books after that. When they put it to a referendum to repeal it from the text of the law - the vote was surprisingly close:
> The amendment was approved with 59.5% voting yes, a 19 percentage point margin, though 25 of Alabama's 67 counties voted against it.
And Oregon didn't repeal its black exclusion laws until 2002.
And just over 20 years before that there were riots in Boston over desegregation of schools.
It's so funny, this romantic notion that many from the north have of how supposedly enlightened they are, while the south is a bunch of backwater hicks. I know, I used to have it too, as did my wife then, who was Canadian. People thought we were crazy when we moved to Texas.
I really had my eyes opened. I encountered far more tolerance in Texas than anything I'd ever experienced up north.
Try being black in some communities in Vermont. See how well you do. Compare it with New Orleans.
Of course you can find racism and racist enclaves anywhere, but this asinine idea that "the south" is some sort of backwater racist hole while the north is a pristine liberal utopia is nonsense.
Also, I hate to disabuse you further, but I should also point out that the population of the capital of Alabama, Montgomery, is 60% black and 30% white. Whites are firmly a minority in the capital.
As a Canadian I was tempted to use my own experiences of people spouting stuff that made me think I had fallen in a time warp to the 1950s. But that's subjective. And the above thread was about the southern USA.
I was not trying to pile on the south bashing so much as to simply point out that pockets most people would consider remarkably regressive persist, not specifically in the south per se, as just in North America at all. I was particularly interested in the last bit: 60% majority in favour, yet 25 counties majority against. Localized, varies by community. It's like that in Ontario too.
As someone who's lived all over, the primary difference in the south is that there are large African American populations.
Try being black in South Dakota or Maine.
Racism and othering exists everywhere, but physical proximity and interaction with the class in question moderates it heavily. It's harder to hate someone you know personally: that's why segregationists were such staunch opponents of any social integration.
I'm from the south. I went to high school there, I got my college degree from there. I live there from the time I was born until my mid-20s. The south is full of racist, horrible people, it was common in my youth to hear people talk badly about Jewish people, people dropped the n word. I heard people talking about non-Christians shouldn't get to vote. I heard plenty of sexist words about women for men. It just beggars belief that you would never hear this kind of speech.
I just don't commonly hear this on the west coast in the US like I did in my years in the south. And unfortunately I still hear it when I go to visit.
Not everyone is like that! But enough people are that, so that you're going to encounter it over and over again.