Filed under: Southern Culture
By Steve Dillard (Email) @ 5:13 pm
I cannot recommend this post by Deep Thought highly enough. It is superb. Here’s a taste:
Are Southerners racist, or not?
Let’s start with the South. For some time now the FBI has been tracking hate crimes. These are broken down by state and type of offense. If we look at racially-motivated hate crimes, we see something, well, that goes against the conventional wisdom. According to the 2004 statistics, the top four states for race-based hate crimes are;
- New Jersey
- Michigan
- Montana
- Minnesota
That is a bit of a surprise, isn’t it? Let’s look at the bottom four states for race-based hate crimes. They are;
- Louisiana
- Georgia
- Mississippi
- Alabama
I must admit, I expected the results to be counter to the commonly held ideas, but this was a shock to me. Especially when I looked at the breakdown of numbers and realized that when you compare state to state, per capita, hate crimes are FIFTY TIMES more likely in Minnesota than in Alabama! Texas has 1/6th the race-based hate crime rate of Michigan, racial hate crimes are more than twice as likely in Massachusetts as opposed to West Virginia, and North Carolina has 1/3rd the incidence of racially-motivated hate crime of California.
On The Web: http://www.southernappeal.org/index.php/archives/1493
