Speak your mind. That's really it. If you do that, people will figure out really quickly that you're Southern and disturbingly unafraid to display that fact.

The South is, quite frankly, one of the last bastions of everything good about Western civilization, and "progressives" hate that. That's the entire reason they hate on the South so much. If they can associate the South with "racism and nothing else," then anything the South values is discarded automatically by emotion-driven idiots.

Think about it. The South is the last conservative Protestant culture on the planet. That alone makes it a target. Values like honor, hospitality, and personal independence are still fairly strong here, in stark contrast to the "progressive" portions of the country. One particular bit of Southern culture that progressives absolutely despise is that we still believe in the concept of justified violence by the common man - we applaud gun ownership, hunting, and self-defense. These things tie in to personal independence, as we aren't completely and utterly dependent on the government to save us.

Urban liberals want to consolidate their power. They worship centralization, central planning, stifling regulation, dependence on the government (and the urban liberals who run it), and collectivized anything. The South values the opposite of those things, so that should tell you all you need to know about why there's this war on the South.

This should also tell you why they feel the way they do about the Confederate flag. Whatever you may think about the flag, there's no disputing that anyone who flies it fundamentally believes that independence is a just cause and that states have the power to leave the Union. This idea, this concept of state sovereignty, outrages the urban liberal - they can't stand the thought that some people might simply choose to "opt out" of the idiotic laws they pass, so they do everything in their power to equivocate state sovereignty with racism.