Photo by John Mark-Smith VIA Pexels
I would not say that I’ve always been proud of growing up in the South. In fact, for a long time, I regarded it as an unfortunate deficit in my childhood. My family moved from D.C. to a small town in North Carolina when I was around 5, and the transition from city life to Southern life was incredibly difficult. Even at the age of 5, I could tell that there was something very, very different about the people that lived in my new town versus where I used to live. As I grew up, I was able to put a name to what I was seeing among my classmates and their families: Staunch conservatism that bred various prejudices.
Escaping the South became an ongoing motivation. Too many bad encounters with the South’s inhabitants as a young Black woman had turned into a perpetual state of discomfort in most social settings. Due to this, I planned on going to college anywhere that was above the Mason-Dixon line, but unfortunately, the pandemic meant that I only ended up getting about two hours away from my hometown. Despite that, the area where I attend school is a lot more progressive than where I grew up, so I’ve been able to talk to people without fearing that a hate crime is around every corner.
During college, I developed a close friendship with a person who has never lived anywhere outside of New England. Within our first conversation, he made a reference to North Carolina being a “yee yee” state and thus less desirable to live in than anywhere else in the country. While I did not exactly disagree with the take, I did resent it being thrown out by a person who had no concept of what it meant to live in the South. A few months later, my friend revealed that before meeting me he was under the impression that all people from the South were dumb. When I mentioned to my roommate (who is from New Jersey) that I thought that was a weird thing to say, she cosigned his statement. She told me that one of the worries that she had had about moving to the South for college was that it would be difficult to interact with Southern people because they were so intellectually inferior.
Even though I do not necessarily like the South or the people who live in it, I never thought that they were blanket stupid (or at least stupider than people in other places). When I asked my friend what had shaped his opinion, he nonchalantly replied that I was the first Southern person he had ever met so everything he thought about them was based on what he had seen in the media. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. So many portrayals of Southern culture I have seen painted Southerners out to be backward, inbred, bumbling idiots incapable of separating themselves from the ideologies of their ancestors.
Since I had grown up as one of the few Black students in a predominantly white Baptist school, I had seen the problems of the South firsthand. But, even I can recognize that much of the Northern perception of the South is based upon classism.
The divide in the perception of the North versus the South is rooted in the differences in their industries. Following the War of 1812, the North started to rapidly industrialize at a rate that the South could not keep up with. While factories and mills cropped up in the North, the South maintained its agricultural economy. As the economic divide between the two regions grew, the introduction of terms like “redneck” started to appear in conversation and media. In today’s lexicon, a redneck is a term used to describe a caricature of a poor, uneducated, beer-drinking, Trump-voting, sister-kissing Southerner. While it is in no way a slur, it does reflect an incredibly classist attitude. Calling someone a redneck started as a reference to the burns that farmers in the South would have after working a long day in the field. The attitude that the agricultural background of the South is indicative of poverty and thus less valid than the industrialization of the North is not a valid reason to look down on the entire region because it reinforces the idea that value is inherently tied to capitalistic gain. The South has a rich and diverse economy that is maintained by many successful and capable Southern people. From personal experience, I know that all business deals are made better with a little twang.
Speaking of twang, the Southern accent and dialect are one of the most distinctive markers of a person’s regional origin. The accent is characterized by its twang and drawl and its use of double negatives (ex: “Can’t not”). For many people outside of the North, its deviation from the conceptualized standard American dialect is the root of the linguistic prejudice that a lot of Southerners face. Professor Raffaella Zanuttini of Yale defines linguistic prejudice as “a form of prejudice in which people hold implicit biases about others based on the way they speak.” The problem with assigning value to different linguistic variations is that there is no actual standard to weigh what is right or wrong. Many people see the way that Southerners speak as incorrect and intellectually inferior, but there is no basis for this assertion that is not rooted in elitism. In a study conducted by the University of New Mexico, Northerners were tasked with describing the Southern accent and its people. In reference to the way that Southerners speak slowly and drawl out their vowels, one of the participants stated that “It takes some of them so long to get their thoughts out, so sometimes you wonder if they have trouble keeping up with you.”
For many politically left-leaning Northerners, simply writing the South off as backward and idiotic creates a level of moral superiority that inhibits any personal reflection on their own political ideologies. The problems of the South (racism, poverty, sexism, etc.) are not uniquely Southern problems — they exist everywhere in America. This perception falsely dichotomizes the North and South into a state where the North equals “good” and the South equals “bad,” causing a disconnect from solving the issues at the systemic level. Reinforcing classist stereotypes about the South only exacerbates these issues and creates no room for improvement.
I’m not saying that the South is some super-amazing place and that we should turn a blind eye to the bad things about it. Truthfully, the South is not some super-amazing place: It is just a place with lots of different kinds of people — so many people that it does not make sense to let preconceived notions based on socioeconomic status influence one’s view of an entire group of people. I’m Southern (for better or worse), and I am proud of that (sometimes). Though it can be confusing to navigate that identity, the one thing that is not confusing is that Southern people are definitely not inherently stupid (or at least not stupider than people in other places), and saying that they are actually makes you look a little dumb. And you wouldn’t want that, right?