I grew up in the South and there is a certain amount of propaganda about how it was the evil oppressors of the North who wanted to ruin our beautiful lifestyle,

I grew up in the South and there is a certain amount of propaganda about how it was the evil oppressors of the North who wanted to ruin our beautiful lifestyle, but when you get right down to it this beautiful Southern world was built on the backs of a whole lot of dirt-cheap labor in the form of slaves. All the human traffickers sipping mimosas on the verandah of their gorgeous, tree-lined work camps watching the people they thought of as sub-human animals laboring away wanted to be able to keep doing this, so they sent their kids and the poor people of the South off to die for this. White supremacy was, and still is, an important component in the systematic oppression of Black people in the south. But the Confederacy went to war to preserve an economy that would be completely ruined if they had to pay their workers a living wage and treat them like humans. Much of the Southern economy is still based on paying Black people shit wages. We throw a lot more of them into jail than we do white people, and so many of these jails are for-profit affairs designed to squeeze every penny possible out of their inmates and their families. We elect openly-racist sheriffs. We have literal KKK members get a hair's breadth from becoming governors. There is a case to be made that slavery never ended, it just changed shape.