Also, apparently this future South has anti-Catholic bias but not anti-black bias; I’m not saying that’s impossible, because people are strange, but I have questions about the worldbuilding.
I can't speak to the future disappearance of anti-black bias (except to note that, as you say, people are strange, and also that Southerners are sometimes stranger than most), but the anti-Catholic bias is entirely believable. The KKK in its heyday was anti-Catholic as well as anti-black (with a side order of anti-Semitism thrown in); even as recently as the late sixties, when my mother switched from being Southern Baptist to high-church Episcopalian (if you're a hard-shell Baptist, all of those bells-and-incense liturgy-centric denominations look alike), one of her relatives said to her, "Mildred, I never did see why you had to go and join that foreign church."
no subject
I can't speak to the future disappearance of anti-black bias (except to note that, as you say, people are strange, and also that Southerners are sometimes stranger than most), but the anti-Catholic bias is entirely believable. The KKK in its heyday was anti-Catholic as well as anti-black (with a side order of anti-Semitism thrown in); even as recently as the late sixties, when my mother switched from being Southern Baptist to high-church Episcopalian (if you're a hard-shell Baptist, all of those bells-and-incense liturgy-centric denominations look alike), one of her relatives said to her, "Mildred, I never did see why you had to go and join that foreign church."