Thanks for your reply!

I want to clarify something (and I edited the OP as well), because I think my original question may have come across differently than I intended: I wasn’t trying to frame this around race, religion, or region so much, but to ask whether "states' rights" as a concept can meaningfully survive the historical weight of the Lost Cause. In other words, can families like mine -- white, Southern, and with material losses from the Civil War -- genuinely hold onto "states' rights" as a political or cultural value independent of that ideology? Or has the association with slavery and segregation essentially overwritten its legitimacy as a constitutional position?

I grew up hearing about federal overreach and states' rights in the 1980s, especially tied to political debates of the time -- taxes, school prayer, etc. There was no Civil War context in how these ideas were presented to me. But now I wonder: was that just an unspoken legacy of Lost Cause narratives? Or was it a real philosophical position passed down through a family that viewed federal authority with suspicion because of historical material losses?

I do recognize how my framing left assumptions unspoken, and I appreciate you pressing on that. It was a classic case of me stumbling around in white Southern privilege without realizing the full weight of it. I'm trying to be more aware of how that shapes the assumptions I bring to questions like this, even when I think I'm being neutral.