I was born and raised in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and when I was 13 my family moved to a smaller town outside of Fayetteville. When I was 18, I moved to Conway, Arkansas, attending Hendrix College. My parents are from Kansas and Oklahoma, but they've lived here for thirty years. Reading replies to Emory Walker's thread on the furor over Dean's confederate flag remarks, I started out a little puzzled by some responses, and I ended up just plain pissed off. Some northerners are clearly under the impression that the majority of us down here are fundamentalist gun nut racists. It just isn't so.
The vast majority of people I talk to in the south are moderates. I'm not living in a liberal bubble, either, since I'm the sort of person to end up talking politics and religion with complete strangers. I know lots of conservatives, sure, but I also know lots of people who aren't in the Bush camp, especially after his campaign as a moderate turned out to be utterly false. Even my most conservative friends look on some of Bush's policies with disgust.
And yet the characterization I saw from an alarming number of people on the DKos comment boards was that the nation would somehow be better off without us. Yes, there's overt racism down here. But it's not a belief held by anywhere near the majority of southerners, if you just talk to them. Even in rural areas where racial diversity's something they see almost entirely on TV, there are always people who don't succumb to a culture of prejudice and outright hostility toward minorities. And I know from experience that California and New York have their fair share of people who engage in racism just as sickening as what I've seen here at home.
If you insult us, tell us the country would be better off without us, and characterize us unfairly as being mostly ignorant, irrationally conservative, and bigoted, then we just aren't going to vote against Bush in 2004. It's that simple. I'm an atheist that's firmly pro-choice, pro-gun control, and all the rest of it, but every time I see condescension toward the south, it just makes me grit my teeth. I try to avoid characterizing northerners unfairly, and I'm telling everyone now that if they do the same for us, it'll make the Democrats' job here much, much easier.