The Forrest thing is staggering. It’s as if the British (i.e. my) government decided to put up a 20ft golden statue of Oliver Cromwell with an Irishman’s head on a pike

Or trying to build a monument gloryfying the terrorist organisation OAS (a french terrorist group which organized attacks against everyone who did not like the idea of keeping Algeria under French control by killing as many algerians as possible) in a region where a lot of people of algerian ancestry live…

http://www.dzscoop.com/fr/3eme-oeil/5061-la-remise-en-place-dune-stele-glorifiant-loas-decriee-par-la-societe-civile-en-france.html

When you’re confronted by a real life example, it can feel a lot more statistically significant.

I spent a year in Atlanta, and was surprised at how many of my professional co-workers would spout off stuff like “it’s not discrimination for security to follow a black person in a store, since black people are statistically more likely to commit a crime”. Maybe ‘surprised’ isn’t the word.

Or how many people felt comfortable tossing around racial epithets when describing people.

This sort of racism is close to a majority nationally. Surely it is a majority in a place like Mississippi. It does not seem this way often because racists have to some extent learned to shut up.

I can’t claim that the crazy rednecks are a majority, but there are enough of them to elect a substantial faction in the state legislature, and that faction is powerful enough to be taken seriously.

Large parts of rural America (not exclusively the south, although it is most highly concentrated there) are quite racist. Add in the Jeffersonian “nation of small farmers” tradition (which may have been partly true in Jefferson’s day but is now almost entirely illusory) and you can get a rather toxic brew.

I’m sure white Americans in the South can’t be as racist as they seem. Surely it’s just a minority of crazy rednecks?