This, but I must admit there is a grain of truth there. Coming from a West Virginia family, I can definitely say that there is a racist tinge among my older relatives. All of them, however, are "ethno-pluralists" more than they are actual supremacists. Basically, they are fine with black people in the sense that they are equally human in their eyes (and thus entitled to the same rights), but they sure as hell don't want them next store because they still can't get beyond archaic stereotypes and feel that the necessary reforms of the Civil Rights era were directed more to punish them (muh way of life) then to advance civil rights.
There also is a large Klan presence in the southern part of the state from what I've heard. My great-aunts still talk about all the trouble they use to cause well into the late 50s. Nothing serious (no lynchings or anything like that), but by the early 1960s they were just as much as a problem in their eyes as the "agitators" (they
still use that term to describe the Civil Rights activists).
Of course, this thread isn't about addressing the issues of racism and hatred in WV but rather to bash coal miners for voting in their economic interests. If West Virginia was such a racist and misogynistic state, why did they vote for a socialist Jew over the woman who won the state in a landslide last time? That seems like an odd choice to make over an otherwise popular pretend southern white woman? Especially in a state where both the Republican and Democratic Senate primaries were won by women in 2014, and where Helen Holt was the Secretary of State of West Virginia at a time when many families (including mine) literally were just getting electricity in their homes for the first time.
Are you going around provoking random West Virginians on the internet now? o.o
Though really, ...friendly? - non-hateful racism is probably one of the most condescending ideas I've ever heard in my whole life.
It's a real thing, though. Certainly not "friendly" but none the less, all of my older West Virginia relatives know well enough to hide their otherwise obvious racism.
Here's a fun fact: the
most racist member of my family is my grandmother's brother-in-law, a former KKK member and an unrepentant neo-Nazi who can't decide if the Holocaust was either the greatest project in history or a lie made up by the "anti-Christ Jews" was born and raised in the lovely state of
Pennsylvania.
Poll
