I am a white native son of the deep South, but I am filled with rage over the violent racism of our culture and people, and by the role of that racism in our culture and politics even today. That racism corems the core of the Republican ideology of the deep south and has spread to infest much of the rest of the nation.

I grew up in the tiny town of Lee, Florida, in Madison County. For most of the time I was there, there were no Black people in the town or even on the farms nearby They were not there because of a violent, hate-filled man named Randall Rowe.
Rowe and a gang of affiliates took it upon themselves in the 1920s to force all Blacks out of the vicinity. They threatened all Black families, and if they did not leave, they were killed by Rowe and his mob. Everyone in the area knew about it, but no one had the moral backbone to do a thing about it. The irony was that Rowe was such a violent man that he used dynamite for fishing and actually blinded himself and lost one hand to a premature explosion while fishing.
I could not ever live in Madison County today. It is still a hypocritical southern bible belt culture filled with rampant racism and associated right-wing extremism. Yet, outwardly, they are such warm, pleasant, and polite people -- to others like themselves. WE CANNOT let a culture like this dominate our country and ruin our democracy.