I've lived in the South for 30 years. I, nor anyone else in my entire family, currently does, or ever has, owned a single slave. I can with certainty say the same thing about my friends and associates.
I can also say with certainty that there are lots of other people like myself who are a lot sick and tired of taking s**t from northern liberals like yourself, whose only knowledge of the people and culture of the South comes from New York Times opinion pieces that literally ooze hatred and condescension for anyone who chooses to live down here. Contrary to what your oracle of societal knowledge Maureen Dowd says, all Southerners are not toothless, illiterate troglodytes who obsess over "keeping the colored down," all the while banging our Bibles when we're not beating our wives.
I know we Southerners are totally offensive to your "refined" sense of aesthetics and culture (everything would be so much better if we were more like the French, right?). Too f**king bad - we're here, we're part of this nation and all your rantings about how everyone in the South is a racist slave owner wanna-be aren't going to change that one bit.
Second, I have no beef with the South today, or southern people as a whole. Never have. I was just in Tennessee and Mississippi in May, and had a great time. Excellent food, nice folks for the most part (though I did, certainly, encounter the "Lost Cause" types, too). In fact, I have to go there to find decent food - you can't get decent Chicken Fried Steak or Grits north of the Mason-Dixon, or West of the Mississippi (well, maybe Texas, but...).
Third, I never qualified all southerners as "toothless, illiterate, troglodytes who obsess over keeping the colored down".
Fourth, Southerners are not totally offensive to my refined (that comes with a guffaw...there's very little about me that's "refined") sense of aesthetics and culture.
Fifth, you'll notice my argument was with the "Lost Cause" adherents, those Southerners who look back, all weepy-eyed, at the "Moonlight & Magnolia" days of the South, and think they would be better off if those days returned. The one's who think the South was "right" and should have won the war. The system they "yearn" to return to, was one built upon enslavement of human beings. They think it was right to fight for that, or worse, to fight for "states rights" in disregard of the issue. Those people I have a problem with.
But I'm not one to mistake all Southerners as part of the "Lost Cause" crowd. But the "Lost Cause" mentality is pervasive among a certain subset of the population, and that's what I was talking about.
It's the South that held onto the war. I believe that's why in Civil War circles, 90% of the talk is about the Southern generals, the battles that resulted in Southern victories, and the "if only" scenarios.
As a Civil War addict, I get tired of the attention and focus placed on the South, and when I encounter "Lost Cause" adherents that seek to demean the Union side, I take them on, and I stand up for the side that won.