Having spent part of my childhood and adolescence in Alabama, having moved down from Ohio with my Baptist pastor father and family, I'm not the least bit surprised that so many people romanticize plantations and the Confederacy.

I don't like it, and I didn't like moving to Alabama in the 1970s and meeting so much overt, unapologetic racism, including liberal use of the N word to describe Black people. The first time a white boy my age used the N word in front of me I almost fell over. His mother was standing right there listening, and she just kept smiling like nothing had happened.

Things have changed culturally a bit since then, but a large population of Americans romanticize and yearn for the days of the Confederacy. I don't know how we can begin to heal from our racist past while people in the present still praise it and even say that it shall one day Rise Again.