[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by Crapshoot

I think you're right on that, but if you look at the numbers, MS was actually about the same as AL or LA for Obama in 2008 -10/11% of the vote. Now i'm no southerner, but I have heard friends from the south who've acquainted me with the phrase "Thank God for Mississippi" as a sort of rejoinder for anytime anything embarrassing happens; ie, their state is ranked 49.

My Daddy told me a story once about an ol' boy from Georgia who explained why Mississippi was so racist thusly...

"See in Georgia, we can look down on Alabama. In Alabama, they can look down on Mississippi, but Mississippi ain't got nobody to look down on, so they take it out on their niggers. That's why it's so much worse there than here."

Its interesting though about South Carolina; I'd say if you asked those of us in California (who tend to view it as one big nebulous South), that SC would be on par with Alabama or MS; surprised that it's not.

I don't know a ton about the state as a whole, but I'm quite sure those from outside the south would be absolutely shocked to see my neighborhood and church. It's a standard middle class suburb, populated by mostly college-educated working couples in the 35-45 age range. I just walked outside to check so I could get the numbers exactly right. There are 22 homes on my block. They are occupied by:

• 12 white families
• 6 black families
• 3 asian families
• 1 biracial family

While I was out there, four girls--two white, one black, one asian, all ages 8-10--came bounding out of my next-door neighbor's front door, giggling and laughing about something or the other. You very rarely will see a single-race group of kids if there are maybe four or more of 'em around here. Yes, I'm quite certain most of the whites in this neighborhood vote nearly exclusively Republican, but given where they live and who their kids play with, I seriously doubt they're voting on race. Ironically, as liberal as parts of metro Atlanta are, I suspect we've made a much better choice to raise our biracial daughter here than there. (Given how many effin' birthday parties we are going to these days, I might even welcome some racists deciding to exclude us. Our 3-year-old has quite the social calendar. )

PS, one interesting thing you said Ben - MS is also the state with the single largest African American population in the US (as a % of total), and by a substantial margin (ie, 6% more than the closest state).

List of U.S. states by African-American population - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Absolutely. It has been that way for quite some time, too. I've always assumed the voter registration stuff in particular there was so much more intense because the whites understood that the political scales there could be tipped fairly easily if the blacks voted with a relatively small number of white "turncoats." And it was much easier to intimidate the blacks into not voting than to try to identify the whites who might vote the "wrong" way.