@d942a7bf  I won’t argue about the southern pride thing, I don’t know, but that seems to have a ring of truth in it.  but is this statement reasonable?:  “No surprise, as usual the racists are the ones trying to pretend they are the heros vilifying the good ones.”

To an extent, if you get my mentality… Keep in mind I’ve been in deep with southern people, both black and white, and been debating this issue with them all day.. so im going from a fresh perspective here.

Generally the southerners are treated like stupid, ignorant, racist people to be dismissed by pretty much everyone else.. I mean its aweful… So here we have the “City folk” doing it again painting all the confederate flag wearing members as if they are KKK members and racist, and almost violently pushing that fact at times…

They are acting very racist towards them (white trash rednecks as they see them).. when in fact they are some of the nicest least racist people you could meet. so yea the supposid heros burning the confederate flag and calling them racist, ARE the racist ones,, and its nothing new to be racist against the deep south.. meanwhile the ones getting called the racists are actually the good guys in this scenario.  Ignoring the use of the word racist for a second, I would argue that you are running up against the difference in education backgrounds between the north and south.  When I first moved to the south, I was shocked to hear that most considered the civil war to be about states rights.  I had not heard that before despite my father being from the deep south.  I still think it’s a bit of a cop out, since they wanted the right to continue a vile tradition, but that is the education that southerners receive, so I have to accept that background.

Its only a cop out if they say they didnt care about slavery, then its a lie.. but otherwise its true. A war, and this war in particular, is not about a single thing. It was about state rights, it was about slavery, it was about a lot of things.

Lincoln for example didnt free the slaves during the emancipation proclmation… he freed only the southern slaves, all northern states were allowed to keep their slaves… Let that sink in, one of the first acts that kicked off the north is that the southern slaves were all freed and the north kept all their slaves (in the states that still had slavery, this isnt 100% of states)… Doesnt sound like it was as much about freeing the slaves as people make it seem… 

 @b05df304 Although the emancipation proclamation didn’t end slavery in the north, the 13th amendment was proposed shortly thereafter and ratified in 1865.  I am not much of a historian, but I suspect that Lincoln did not have the authority to end slavery universally without that amendment.  In any case Lincoln was a major force behind getting it ratified (it failed once).

On racism and bigotry. Although there is overlap, I think that as a concept bigotry is a broader concept than racism.  A racist is always a bigot, but not every bigot is a racist.  Despite the fact that people (in your example) are considering a group white trash rednecks, and this sounds racist since there is the word “white” in there, it seems more like bigotry to me.  I guess if you allow the concept of racism to include prejudice against any “other” group based on any thing whatsoever, then every such person is a racist.  I don’t happen to agree.  The result can be the same, but I don’t think the prejudice comes from the same place, and racism’s consequences are generally more persistent.

I understand the idea of southerners being dismissed,  I have personal stories in my own southern family about such prejudice, in particular with poor farmer kids being dismissed by the townies as stupid and ignorant.  I still don’t consider it racism.  They weren’t prejudiced against because of their whiteness or some other physical characteristic beyond their control, but because they looked and acted like poor farmer kids.   When he joined the military, the uniform and training erased all differences in background, and that effect lasted after the service.  The  blacks of the same era did not get the same benefit, after their military service they were still considered “other” because of their skin color.