One suspects it's not so simple, and that Brother Camell knows it's not that simple. Given their biblical literacy, Southerners perhaps most of all Americans understand that slavery and racism are but outward symptoms of sin itself. For we are the one part of the country that has known The Fall - in the form of having lost The War, and with it the whole, antebellum myth and promise of The Garden. And defeated ones. Some of us have always thought we could somehow write or at least read ourselves out of sin or, if we couldn't, that literature would at least let us understand the fix we're in.
Anxiety is the health of literature.
The social, economic and political failures followed naturally from that original sin. The Southerner, who isn't convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. We have largely grown out of that irrational fear, but now and then we digress and are saved. It is only when, like Americans in general, Southerners come to think that the next invention, election or current social program of choice is going to fix us, that we are lost. Sometimes we even use religion itself as a fix.