Who said it wasn’t? Nobody in this conversation is defending “polite” Northern racism. I don’t know which is harder to engage with, the polite sort where they’ll talk to you but are so deep in denial that they don’t see it, or the vulgar sort where they don’t think they have to deny it. (But I do know which one is more likely to be armed and short-tempered.)
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This one’s totally fair. Even within the south there are an awful lot of states you’re not gonna end up in. If you’ve got a “professional” STEM-ey job in the south regardless of your views or orientations you’re gonna end up in North Carolina, Georgia, or Texas. Maybe Oklahoma if your field is petroleum.
I’m personally considering moving to Philadelphia, but that’s for unrelated reasons.
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I had a cousin who moved to Philly from a small town in NC when she was in her 20s. She worked very long hours to keep up with the cost of living, and frequently told us her plan was to move back for her retirement. We were skeptical that she would go through with it, because she never visited family there, just kept in touch by phone. After 50 years in the city, it probably would’ve been a big adjustment. Sadly, she passed away before making the move.
OTOH, my father moved to SC after a few years of retirement in NJ and DE. He’s in a small town near Summerville, and every time we talk his chief complaint is the slower pace of life. He was used to things like appointments and services following a set schedule. His new normal is cancellations, rescheduling, and maybe people show up or maybe they don’t. It seems like the key to a successful relocation is flexibility and testing the waters before jumping in.
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I’m not exactly in asmall town, thankfully c:
It’s part wanting to live somewhere bigger, part that I was born in a suburb of Philadelphia and moved here as a kid. It’s kind of interesting to explore the future that could’ve been. That and, you know, cool city…
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Or Huntsville, AL.
I’ve lived in Georgia, Alabama, and North Carolina as an adult. (Of the three, the only one I’d consider moving back to is NC, and only to the Triangle area.) I’ve also lived in Colorado, Minnesota, and Maine, and I’m currently in DC. I agree with the general point that racism is more likely to be open and proudly worn in much of the South.
But to some extent I think part of it is a rural/urban divide more than a North/South divide. And also it’s worth remembering that places like Northern New England did not, until relatively recently, get much of an opportunity to be openly, proudly racist because they were like 97% white. When a fairly large group of Somali refugees settled in Lewiston, Maine, though, much of the state certainly rushed to make up for lost time on the open, proud racism front.
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Damn, I knew I missed one. Important one too.
It’s a bit of both I think. It’s hard to say since I haven’t spent any significant time up north since I was a little kid so I’m stuck hearing what other people say, hard to map that out from talk 
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Yes, there is racism everywhere, it goes hand in hoof with ig’nance, which is of course endemic. While I’ve been to Louisiana as a tourist, I know essentially nothing of the actual culture apart from what I’ve been “taught” by pop culture. And of course the aforementioned urban/rural divide tends to amplify America’s inherent anti-intellectualism, regardless of where you are on the map.
But come on, it’s the fucking Confederacy down here. Like, literally, the actual fucking Confederacy.
Somebody once said “Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘Nice doggie’ until you can find a big enough rock.” Anybody who hears the Confederates saying “It’s okay, we’re not like that any more, we’ll play nice now.” and still believes them, this far into 2020… I hope they’re wearing a really good helmet.
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Three generations of my family spent summers with family in environments different from the ones where they grew up. Members of my grandparents generation who moved to cities in the north from southern states would return with their children every year. I’ve heard many stories my parents, aunts, and uncles would tell about their adventures visiting “the country.”
I grew up in the suburbs, and spent summers making shorter visits to southern states. We also took turns visiting family in Philly. I refused two chances to move away from home as a kid, but looking back now I’m glad I wasn’t persuaded to change my mind. Philly is a lot of fun, and even if I won the lottery something would always draw me back here.
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Not in all parts of the south, which is also the home to the major strains of resistance to racism.
Yes, but also true all over the country. It’s always been a national problem that’s been scapegoated as a southern, backwoods, redneck problem only.
That too. Any settler colony from europe has this racist mentality built into our structures, because most of them were built on the expropriation of land and the sale of human beings for building large-scale industrial plantations (even if slavery was eventually abolished).
That’s basically saying that the only legitimate southern culture is the racist one, which leaves out millions of people and some of our core American culture. You’re basically saying that they are the ones who get to define the south and that the rest of us aren’t really southerners, which is what they say too. As someone who lives here, I don’t find that acceptable. I’m a person and I exist here, so I get a say in how we’re understood, just as much as those who wish to turn back the clock to the 1950s or before. You tossing me and the millions of others here who oppose racism in our institutions isn’t particularly helpful.
Asheville is great, too. Reminds me of this song…
It’s a cultivated ideology meant to divide people and better control them. It’s not just born out of ignorance.
Not in ATL it’s not, no, as well as many other places across the south. Let’s not forget that even after the Great Migration, the largest number of African Americans are STILL down here. And many places in the south are seeing the rapid growth of Latino communities, too.
There were plenty of hotbeds of unionism during the war, which came of course from enslaved people themselves, but from some of the rural poor whites. The fact that the ideology of the lost cause has taken deep root since the 1870s is due to lack of educational funding and a constant steady drumbeat of historical re-writing by white elites.
“Blaming” the south for all of american racism is pretty much the rest of the country seeking to wash it’s hands of the problem that was and remains a national one. Kenosha Wisconsin isn’t exactly in the deep south.
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No, for that you have to get a little bit farther from Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison. But not by much. 
My point is that this is, was, and will continue to be a national problem, or as @orenwolf indicates, a global one. There is even racism IN the city of Chicago (and other major metropolitan areas) itself. Just look at how the class and racial divisions are literally carved into the face of urban areas themselves.
People saying racism is just a southern or a rural problem are only trying to make it someone else’s problem. It’s all of white America’s problem. It won’t be fixed until white American can acknowledge that fact.
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Which is worse, urban cops blowing Those People away serving no-knock warrants, or rural vigilantes lynching them? Redlining the neighborhoods, or burning Those People out or running them out of town on a rail? The dog whistle or the vuvuzela?
Both are wicked. Both must be extirpated.
But they’re still different.
And in the Midwest, you don’t have to get very far out of town to cross from one evil to the other.
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They are still part of the same god damn fabric of american racism. Pinning all racism on the American south is very much ignoring the underlying problem of American racism.
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No, I’m not saying it’s the only legitimate one, just the most dominant in public life in the South. I actually agree with your points, but not your characterization of my statement. I have often pointed out to others that the disenfranchised people within the South are also Southerners, and that the civil rights movement, originating as it did within the South, is also a product of that culture, so “Southern culture” can’t be viewed as a monolith. I should probably have called the racist part the dominant SUBculture instead.
Except that is rapidly changing.
Then they get to define “southern” too.
That I can agree with, but it’s less dominant than it’s been in forever. It’s still there, but it’s losing it’s grip. People just conflating southern with racist isn’t helping us to move forward, though. It’s ignoring the larger American racism problem.
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And I’m not pinning racism on the American South, except in your imagination. I’m saying that the North is every bit as racist, while expressing it in a very different way.
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Then it’s not that different, then.
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The Confederacy was home to both slave owners and slaves, and to this day the south is where most of the black people in America live. I think that’s an important thing to remember. So for instance it’s where a lot of the civil rights leaders show up too.
You are not going to see the same type of racism in a state like Oregon, which was founded for whites only. That’s still extremely racist, and that still has a legacy today. You’re just not going to see it the same way.
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No, but it’s from the same cloth, though. White supremacy is baked into all of our institutions that have been built on explicitly anti-racist structures, and those are still pretty marginalized in our public life.
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I do see that when I go home to Birmingham every year. But when I set foot just a few miles outside of Jefferson County it might as well be 40 years ago.
