Y'know, @BenPike, I'm always thrown by the supposed difference of Northerners and Southerners when it comes to race. I was born in Pennsylvania, and my first serious boyfriend was black. It wasn't easy, and a lot of the time it was very hard to deal with the repercussions. There were violent incidents. A biracial boy who worked with me at my teen job committed suicide because of the abuse he took from both sides. The first burning cross I ever saw was on a lawn in an affluent suburb of Pittsburgh. I moved to the south at twenty. Well, kind of the south ... Florida. Different rules there. But still racism.

I guess my point is that we are among racial discrimination pretty much everywhere in the US. Different areas just dress it up prettier, and know when to talk around it.

Actually, I believe the real separation is not so much Northerners and Southerners as it is educated and uneducated. The North has a higher percentage who have not just graduated high school but who have also attended college. I believe that race relations is more about fear or the lack of it than any other specific item. The more educated one is the less there is to fear and therefore the less there is to hate. Also, religious practices enter the fray as well. The Catholic and Episcopalian churches tend to draw a more educated and intellectual audience and the fundamentalist and evangelical baptists (rampant in the southeast) are typically more poorly educated, ill-informed and therefore much less intellectual than northerners.

it is pretty hard to get out of the "birds of a feather" state of mind. most cruel racism is economical warfare

I think that progressives are for the most part unbiased as to race wherever they live. I do think that this is reinforced by experience. Face it, there are assholes in all races. There are good, kind people of all races. The more one learns, the more they know that stereotypes are all flawed.

Oh, yes. Most objective and unbiased people in both the north and south think alike about race relations. Irrational and bigoted people in both the north and south also think similarly. Unfortunately, bigotry is more dominantly imbedded in the southern culture.

Your last paragraph sums it up

I used to think that with time we'd see a reasoned approach to ending the majority of racism, until I spoke with a friend of mine from Alabama several months ago and she told me that slavery never existed. She said that the word didn't mean then what it means now, that black people weren't mistreated, that the arrangement was for the education of black people because education was expensive and black people had nowhere else to go, and that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. I provided articles of secession citing slavery as a primary reason, as well as laws that made educating black people (even if free) illegal with harsh penalties. She wouldn't accept it. When there's that degree of cognitive dissonance among white people in the south, I don't know how we can ever find common ground in regard to race relations.

Not currently, I would say.