batman10;

Your response and the cruder responses that followed make my point. There are many urban areas with concentrations of African Americans that match your statistics for the South. The question is -- what are the views and attitudes of the non-African Americans who live side by side them in the northern cities? By margins of 2-1 or more, these northerners with similar ethnic blends are more liberal, less willing to blame low income minorities for their problems, and less willing to ignore "facts" when unreliable sources such as Limbaugh, Beck, and Hannity preach hate.

My family is from the South although I now live in the North. My personal acquaintances from the South are generally very advanced in their thinking and willing to engage in intelligent discussions about current events. About half of them voted for Obama/ about half didn't. Race, as far I know, played no role in their decisions.

But these friends of mine are not representative of the typical white southerners. Were it not for the high African-American populations in the South, southern states would have voted 80-90% against Obama in 2008. Surveys show that John Edwards or Bill Clinton would have fared 20-30% better. What is your response? You say it is because the South has so many "blacks" and a northerner is "spewing ignorance" by pointing out that backward attitudes among whites in the South are the leading cause of intellectual gridlock. You claim that whites living among blacks is some kind of hardship that justifies ignorance!

So long as people make the kind of argument you have made and refuse to reject this kind of racism, the "lag" you mention will always exist. The ignorance that pervades the white South is not a new phenomenon -- it is the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the bible belt's grip on the "minds" of people who would paint a Hitler moustache on an Obama picture, or dress him up as an ape or a witchdoctor. Most white southers would never do such things -- but I ask you where is the outrage among southern fundamentalists who secretly enjoy seeing the African American president being put back in his place?

Like it or not -- these are your southern friends, and without them Fox News would be a failure.