Kyle, come on, man. Food Lion is a known Klan hangout. You can’t get a lemon or tomato sauce without bumping into a grand dragon. You gotta get on down the road to Harris Teeter.
Stay away from the deli, though. Animal Liberation Front is everywhere.
ZZTops Master of Sparks is about Hwy 6 in Galveston County. Was told by someone who knows that they really did that shït (but it was with discarded ovens, not rebar cages) and it wasn’t white people in those things.
So relatives in the Virginia/West Virginia area and the white supremist folks with their Confederate flags and Nazi signs are clearly visible.
I used to work for a company that had a plant in Tuscaloosa and many at the plant every other word was N…That was not too many years ago. Shocking to me but normal language to them.
Confederate apologists (incl. the Klan) are just a bunch of stupid losers that can’t get over the fat L they took a century and a half ago. It’s more than a little pathetic. Tbh, I’ve found that most hateful doctrines in life are promoted by losers and idiots. People who are living lives that are worth a damn ain’t got time to hate.
I was raised on the edge of Pasadena ,Texas. There was KKK activity at the time. I was told as a boy that the Klan came to be after the Civil War when the government in the South broke down. In the beginning the Klan was law enforcement. I remember one story from back then of a white guy who was a wife beater. He was warned with a bundle of switches on his front porch to stop. He did not . He was visited again. The rest is history .
There will always be racism, as long as there are different races. There will always be antisemitism, anti-Italian, anti-Asian, anti-white, anti (pick an ethnic or nationality different from another). But, the numbers of such are getting smaller all the time, at least I hope so. The US melting pot is gradually reducing such feelings for most, but will never for all.
I think the best way to reduce that is to travel to other countries. For example, until I traveled to Germany in 1986, I had a dislike for Germans because of the holocaust. But when there, I found them to be good folks and nothing like my preconceived notions.
I think each generation becomes more accepting of other ethnicities. My dad hated Japanese because he fought them in WWII and lost many of his buddies in assaults on those islands like Tarawa, Saipan, Tulagi, etc. Many in his situation shared his viewpoint. The man I was named after nearly starved to death in a German POW camp and hated Germans.
I think people that had such experiences will be very reticent to change opinions. But they are mostly gone now.