But I agree, racist attitudes are widespread.
Lots of times.
Maybe I have poor taste in casual acquaintances or something.
Here is the SPLC's interactive map of 'hate groups' in operation. Though the density seems, to my eyes, correlate strongly with population, there are still a fair few assholes out here.
An interactive 'hate map' seems to encourage this form of stereotyping. It's all about the branding. It works because there's always a kernel of truth in stereotypes (I'm sure there are true hate groups in Indiana), but that raises larger questions about stereotyping regions or races or religions or anything for that matter.
The two things I take away from looking at the map are 1) it's not just a southern thing (which I think is a misconception they're explicitly trying to correct) and 2) the hate group density correlates with population centers pretty well (which is often the case for maps of people).
You should email them and tell them though, I'm sure they would want to correct anything they are wrong about. Smearing people incorrectly is something I imagine they would want to make right.
They seemed to have taken a "hockey stick" turn in the past several years.
Yeah, if they screwed up 2 things, that's not good and they should fix it.
There's more than just those two things.
You should email them and tell them though, I'm sure they would want to correct anything they are wrong about.
There's already a lawsuit.
Smearing people incorrectly is something I imagine they would want to make right.
I've had pretty much the same thought, but my conclusion is that their definition of "right" has become essentially tribal, and that they feel justified in using their reputation as a partisan weapon, because in their minds, their ends justify those means.
My spouse's family in Wisconsin is more racist than my family in Indiana, disguising it somewhat by talking about "the chodnies" (derived from the Polish czarny). And my sister-in-law's husband puts the most obnoxious crap out on Facebook and Twitter. It isn't exactly "we're glad that black kid is dead", but rather "we support the police; hero hero, protect and serve, rah rah rah!" which is implicitly the same thing, when the cops seem to hardly ever kill any white people while they're out gunning down members of the community and their dogs.
There's a reason why Wisconsin instituted citizen review boards. "We investigated ourselves and cleared ourselves of all wrongdoing" works great for the cops when everyone on the local force is racist, but not so much for minorities. The hand that Black Lives Matter claps against is racism in police forces, and racism-by-proxy by refusing to hold the cops accountable for it.
It isn't always orthodox color-based racism, either. It's more like identity-based tribalism. The different "black" cliques didn't always get along at my high school. For instance, one calls the other "stuck-up boujie", and the other responds "thugs and chickenheads". They would definitely use that unmentionable slur on each other. The Jews would often hang out together because they already knew each other from Saturday School, and anti-Semitism is still a thing in the Midwest. I'd occasionally hear about fights that started with racial slurs, but never actually saw one. One of my friends got called "chink" sometimes.
What I saw from where I sat was hostile enough, and I suspect it was probably worse in the places I was not.
Mainly, you hang out in your own groups, and avoid those that don't like you. That keeps your group somewhat homogenous, which may coincidentally make it look like your group is racist. And that might be true, but a lot of it is surrounding yourself with people who think and act like you, and not just people that look like you. In my groups, racism was not part of the group identity, and the racism that occurred elsewhere was simply ignored whenever possible. All that mattered was that it didn't happen among ourselves. If it happened to one of us elsewhere, that was awful and pitiable, but the best we could do was to not add to it. It's a sort of head-in-the-sand approach, which works for a lot of social problems in the Midwest. If you pretend it isn't happening, it's only a problem for the people it's happening to.