Teased the South

[CheshireVal]

I haven't been following this thread, but from what I've seen on the last two pages, it seems that some are trying to argue that a minority - particularly a gay man - would not have any harder time living in a southern community than they would in other places, such as DC.

Um...is that a joke, or am I completely misreading this discussion? You honestly think that a gay couple would be left alone to live their lives as they wished if they were living in a rural community pretty much anywhere in the south? In New Orleans, sure...no problem. Probably even in larger cities like Birmingham and Atlanta. But in more rural communities? Not a chance.

The south has come a long way, but it still has a long way to go to catch up with the rest of the country in terms of how well it tolerates those that are different from the norm.

I completely agree with this. I've lived in Georgia all my life, and I can think of only a few places where a gay couple would be openly accepted: Atlanta and Athens. Maybe Savannah. It's sad, but true. While I don't think the majority of Southerners are bigoted or prejudiced, as I said before, there are just too many "good old boys" around and, unfortunately, sometimes their voices are the loudest heard (just look at our state government! )

 

[HomeSweetDisney]

I haven't been following this thread, but from what I've seen on the last two pages, it seems that some are trying to argue that a minority - particularly a gay man - would not have any harder time living in a southern community than they would in other places, such as DC.

Um...is that a joke, or am I completely misreading this discussion? You honestly think that a gay couple would be left alone to live their lives as they wished if they were living in a rural community pretty much anywhere in the south? In New Orleans, sure...no problem. Probably even in larger cities like Birmingham and Atlanta. But in more rural communities? Not a chance.

The south has come a long way, but it still has a long way to go to catch up with the rest of the country in terms of how well it tolerates those that are different from the norm.

I've gotta agree with you on this. I've lived in the south all my life. North Carolina, Louisiana, and now here in Texas. I have seen and EXPERIENCED racism first hand. (I am Mexican-American) Do I think that the majority of people who live in the south are racist or bigots? Nope. But I have seen enough of it to know that it's still there. And it happens a lot more than some people are willing to admit. Is it something that happens to me or my friends everyday? No. But it happens more often than I'd like. The fact of the matter is, there are some very deeply ingrained prejudices here in the south. Do they happen everywhere? Once again, yes they do. But in my, and my friends/family experience, it seems to be more prevalent in the south. The big southern cities may not see it so much simply because there has been such an influx of minority groups to those places. But the smaller more rural areas still have a long way to go.

 

[J.C.&ALI'SMOM]

I grew up in CA and never left the state until I was 18. I met my first true Southerner, a neighbor from AL, when I was ten. My mother remarked that people in the South had fine manners and hot tempers.

Isn't that a little like saying all Northerners talk too fast and are rude??? Quite the broad generalizing statement about a whole region of people.

My sixth grade teacher, a Democrat, said that she was embarrassed by Jimmy Carter because he sounded so stupid with his accent.

This ticks me off to no end!! There are endless Southern dialects/accents and they should all be appreciated. I don't necessarily think of a Brooklynite as ignorant because he says 'youse'.

When I called to tell them that I was going to visit AL, one said, "watch your back" and another said that she would "not put one toe in a Southern state."

What a shame for her. She is missing out on a lot due to nothing more than ignorance and stubborness.

Given all that I have heard about the South from authority figures, is it any wonder that I find it intimidating?

Authority figures? The information that they have been passing along doesn't exactly give them the right to be an authority on the entire modern South.

Many posters see the South as distinctive and separate, culturally and otherwise, from the rest of the United States.

I do and thank God for it! I would hate for the US to become completely homogenous.

I am particularly irritated by misconceptions of the South, but am totally aware that they persist. I was born and raised in the heart of Appalachia, an area that has been degraded by the rest of the US, the South included. Unless I am code switching, when I speak in my native accent most Northerners I have come in contact with automatically consider me ignorant, when in fact I am probably better educated than they are.

 

[LukenDC]

Isn't that a little like saying all Northerners talk too fast and are rude??? Quite the broad generalizing statement about a whole region of people.

I did find Northerners to be not nearly as friendly as people from CA. That was my biggest "culture shock moment" in my move from CA to CT.

This ticks me off to no end!! There are endless Southern dialects/accents and they should all be appreciated. I don't necessarily think of a Brooklynite as ignorant because he says 'youse'..

I agree, it was outraegeous and ignorant. Especially shameful for a teacher.

What a shame for her. She is missing out on a lot due to nothing more than ignorance and stubborness...

Those two teachers were from the South and had troubled relationships with their home states.

I am particularly irritated by misconceptions of the South, but am totally aware that they persist. I was born and raised in the heart of Appalachia, an area that has been degraded by the rest of the US, the South included. Unless I am code switching, when I speak in my native accent most Northerners I have come in contact with automatically consider me ignorant, when in fact I am probably better educated than they are.

The North is not free from prejudice and I have said repeatedly that the South gets a bum rap from much of the USA. There is sill a lot of North/South animosity.

 

[dcentity2000]

Isn't it funny?

In the USA, the southerners are looked down on as being less intelligent, more yobbish and with odd accents, whilst in the UK, it's the opposite way round.



Rich::

 

[LukenDC]

Isn't it funny?

In the USA, the southerners are looked down on as being less intelligent, more yobbish and with odd accents, whilst in the UK, it's the opposite way round.



Rich::

What does "yobbish" mean?

 

[brerrabbit]

It's funny in a way that when considering what is South and what is not (the earlier example of Florida) everyone harkens back to the Civil War. What side were they on and if they were Southern they were the "bad guys". Prejudace and injustice persisted long after the war and that stigma lives on. Well, history is written by the victorious and that no doubt continues to be the case when things are said and written about the South today. Dispite our admitted terrible incidents throughout the 20th century in the area of race relations the reality is that those issues were brought to a boiling point first in the South because thats where the Civil Rights leaders focused. Studies show that during that time a mass exodus or migration if you will of Southern Blacks to the North occured. Blacks that stayed protested and the issues came to a head forcing integration faster in the South. Blacks who faced discrimination in the North just lived with it because from a historic perspective the North was a better place to be. Because of forced integration the South had to deal with these issues much sooner than the North. Look at the last cases of forced integration in Boston and the violence that ensued.

Is there still those who harbor feelings from the Civil War? Heck yes! Take for example the mighty insitute of Harvard. They have a memorial of all their former students who died in battle for their country. They list none of their graduates who died fighting for the Confederacy however they do list a graduate who died fighting for Nazi Germany! Now as a sixth generation Texan/ Southerner that tends to get me a little upset. I have no affiliation at all with Harvard but still the whole idea bothers me. We have been forced to live down the whole issue of slavery and the Civil War for 147 years. Dispite that a lot of the gains in the areas of race relations occured in the South but there is no credit given for that. Are there pockets of wild eyed hate filled rednecks in the South? Sure there are but, for everyone you can find here you will find one in another part of the country as well. Might there be a few more here? Again sure by virtue of the fact that we have a lot more rural area than the North by the virtue of our size.

I can assure you this though. The rural area that my family has lived in since 1834 has not and is not what you would consider the typical South. Yeah we can talk slow, we love our sweet tea and we tend to act like typical Southerners but guess what? The small schools that serve the area have been integrated since the 30's because there was not enough money to run two sets of schools. My Grandfather sold land to a good friend of his in 1931 and that friend was a Black Man. When my Grandfather was almost killed by a man who owed him $500 it was a Hispanic Man and a Black Man who saved his life by rushing him 20 miles to the hospital. While you hear about all the bad things that happened in the South, you never heard about the good things and I have no doubt that they happened all over the South not just in our little corner of the world.

The bottom line is Southerners have a bad reputation based on the History of Violence and the fact that as the defeated in the Civil War they got no say in the history writing of the day. Like it or not this trend has continued until today and has lead to a very negative stereotype of the South. Of course I am a Texan and therefore sometimes not really considered Southern because we have a whole other history of our own, but we did participate in the war and were part of the defeated so we are by the standards set forth previously part of "The South".

 

[LukenDC]

It's funny in a way that when considering what is South and what is not (the earlier example of Florida) everyone harkens back to the Civil War. What side were they on and if they were Southern they were the "bad guys". Prejudace and injustice persisted long after the war and that stigma lives on. Well, history is written by the victorious and that no doubt continues to be the case when things are said and written about the South today. Dispite our admitted terrible incidents throughout the 20th century in the area of race relations the reality is that those issues were brought to a boiling point first in the South because thats where the Civil Rights leaders focused. Studies show that during that time a mass exodus or migration if you will of Southern Blacks to the North occured. Blacks that stayed protested and the issues came to a head forcing integration faster in the South. Blacks who faced discrimination in the North just lived with it because from a historic perspective the North was a better place to be. Because of forced integration the South had to deal with these issues much sooner than the North. Look at the last cases of forced integration in Boston and the violence that ensued.

Is there still those who harbor feelings from the Civil War? Heck yes! Take for example the mighty insitute of Harvard. They have a memorial of all their former students who died in battle for their country. They list none of their graduates who died fighting for the Confederacy however they do list a graduate who died fighting for Nazi Germany! Now as a sixth generation Texan/ Southerner that tends to get me a little upset. I have no affiliation at all with Harvard but still the whole idea bothers me. We have been forced to live down the whole issue of slavery and the Civil War for 147 years. Dispite that a lot of the gains in the areas of race relations occured in the South but there is no credit given for that. Are there pockets of wild eyed hate filled rednecks in the South? Sure there are but, for everyone you can find here you will find one in another part of the country as well. Might there be a few more here? Again sure by virtue of the fact that we have a lot more rural area than the North by the virtue of our size.

I can assure you this though. The rural area that my family has lived in since 1834 has not and is not what you would consider the typical South. Yeah we can talk slow, we love our sweet tea and we tend to act like typical Southerners but guess what? The small schools that serve the area have been integrated since the 30's because there was not enough money to run two sets of schools. My Grandfather sold land to a good friend of his in 1931 and that friend was a Black Man. When my Grandfather was almost killed by a man who owed him $500 it was a Hispanic Man and a Black Man who saved his life by rushing him 20 miles to the hospital. While you hear about all the bad things that happened in the South, you never heard about the good things and I have no doubt that they happened all over the South not just in our little corner of the world.

The bottom line is Southerners have a bad reputation based on the History of Violence and the fact that as the defeated in the Civil War they got no say in the history writing of the day. Like it or not this trend has continued until today and has lead to a very negative stereotype of the South. Of course I am a Texan and therefore sometimes not really considered Southern because we have a whole other history of our own, but we did participate in the war and were part of the defeated so we are by the standards set forth previously part of "The South".

Thank you for an interesting, heartfelt posting. You might be interested to know that Jefferson Davis Highway leads away from Washington DC into Virginia and that there is a statue of Jefferson Davis in the Capitol Building (each state selects two people to memorialize and MS selected Davis). Memorials to the Confederacy exist outside of the South. There was also a review of the National Park Service a few years ago that found a "pro-Confederacy" bias in their narratives at Civil War-related sites.

No one in the South should feel even a shiver of guilt about slavery unless they believe that it should be brought back. The slave holders are long dead and holding their descendants responsible is wrong. I do believe that slavery has left a legacy in this nation, but that is a topic for another thread.

There are cruel stereotypes about the South and I have been forthright in discussing those stereotypes. My original posting was about prejudice and violence and I have explained at length how I developed those thoughts and why I believe that they hold an element of truth. Some people with far more experience with the South than I have responded to agree with at least part of what I was saying while a greater number have denied it outright.

I never once said that Southerners are bad people, that they are all racist or discriminatory. I do not question their intellectual capacity and I like hearing an accent different from my own. Clearly there are people in my life from the South who are very dear to me.

It is remarkable how defensive some respondants became. I would bet that you would not find a similar defensiveness from people in other parts of the country. You could call my home state of California and my current home of Washington DC a cesspool of depravity and it would not faze me in the least. I am an American and I have no regional identity.

Perhaps it is this strong regional identity and strident definitions of who is or is not a Southerner---combined with the legacy of history--- that makes the South appear inhospitable and intimidating to outsiders. My oft referenced friend from AL once told me that she does not like it when non-Southerners write about the South, even if what they write is positive. In other words, the South is for Southerners. The South is not just a geographical region, it is also in many cases a shared cultural heritage and a mindset.

 

[Andy B]

What does "yobbish" mean?

Lout, uneducated ignorant person with tendancies to unsocial behaviour.