Atrios has a spot about a school in Cary, NC that's teaching from a booklet that apparently whitewashes southern slavery. I haven't seen the booklet, but he has some excerpts - and they aren't pretty. The school claims to be teaching the "southern perspective" of slavery. Doesn't look good. And to someone who's never been here, I can imagine the picture it paints. But I think it's an inaccurate one.
I'm an upstate NY transplant to NC (I live like 3 miles from Cary right now - a "town" with over 100K people, and named "the hottest town in the East" by Money Magazine, Jan 04. it's no small town). And, honestly, I have neither seen nor heard of any actual racism in the 8 years i've been down here - honestly, not any. There's certainly no institutionaliszed racism, and I can't say I've even see any personal racism here. Sure I'm a yuppie who hangs out mostly with urban liberal yuppies, hipsters and academics, so maybe I haven't been exposed to the entire range of opinions NC has to offer. But, compared to my former home of upstate NY, there are more nationalities, more skin colors and more cultures here - and nobody seems to have a problem with it. From my perspective, it's a balmy little melting pot.
To be fair, there was a Neo-Nazi rally in Raleigh this past summer. But, all the Nazis were from out of town, and the protesters outnumbered the Nazis by probably 100 to 1.
Just my perspective.
The problem with the protesters at the Neo-Nazi deal seems to be they were too law-abiding. You have to take those bastards and beat the shit out of ’em every time they show up until they get the message. I was a Harley-Davidson mechanic for several years and I told some pretty rough customers to take their bikes elswhere because they had a swastika on them. Fuck those people. A lot of good people died to save the world from the Nazis and it should very forcefully not be forgotten.