I’m not sure I would respond well to someone criticizing my hometown of New York by throwing the 1863 Draft Riots in my face, or the viral video of a Muslim woman being verbally tormented on a NYC bus, or Eric Garner’s death in Staten Island, where almost 60% of the borough voted for Trump. I had nothing to do with those heart-breaking and infuriating incidents, and would feel I was being unfairly judged for terrible things committed by others who happened to live in the same area. Which is why I’m baffled when I see that exact tactic used to unilaterally criticize the South and spew self-righteousness instead of encouraging progress.
A moral high ground turns to sand when one says, “We don’t stereotype”, and then follows it with, “All of you think/act this way”.
As an Hispanic native of NYC, my friends and I learned and witnessed racism in the Big Apple, not the Deep South. It’s become far too easy (and intellectually lazy) to vilify all things Southern, and the people with it. We can’t truly bridge cultures until we replace the “us v. them” mentality with “we” action.
13
I lived in Birmingham for about one year and I will admit that nature-wise it was a beautiful area but with a climate horrible for a born New Englander. The people were nice and I thought the Baptist/Jewish tabernacle under one roof was a positive sign. However conversations had with numerous clearly evangelical people left wondering how they were educated. Then I saw the t-shirt in a shop with the sentence across the front. "Why finish high school when you can live in Alabama?" if that was how education was valued then....
1
It's true many liberals are prejudiced toward the South. As a liberal, this chagrins me because I tend to think "liberals should know better." But it's the one prejudice which liberals consider acceptable.
A real shame.
Perhaps they should stop to consider that rock 'n' roll music is a Southern creation. All its pioneers were Southerners:
Elvis Presley (Mississippi and Tennessee)
Little Richard (Georgia)
Buddy Holly (Texas)
Fats Domino (Louisiana)
Chuck Berry (Missouri)
Jerry Lee Lewis (Louisiana)
Everly Brothers (Kentucky)
Johnny Cash (Arkansas)
Rock 'n' roll's origins -- from black (rhythm and blues) and white (country-western) music forms -- testify to its value as a force for integration.
Maybe it's time more liberals realized any prejudice (including against Southerners) is wrong.
6
Wonderful piece by Ms. Renkl. I have no doubt about the rich fauna as well as ecology of the South, rich culture, gastronomic food, civility and politeness. There is apparent transformation to a New South. Then, why did they vote for Donald? It seems schizophrenic.
4
I'm from the South, I left the South. I returned five years ago, and left again 3 years ago. In the South, there is more exposed poverty, and more exposed ignorance. It is exposed because of population density, and lack of opportunity. A ig influx in the big cities in the South of people fleeing home prices in other parts of the US. A big group of retirees, liking heat, and cheap real estate. A lot of stupid people in he South. That's true everywhere.
1
I’m a white Southerner who went to good college and graduate school up North, but the best education I ever got about race, I learned from a neighbor of mine in New Orleans, a black man named Clarence who is getting up in his years. He told me this:
“In the North, they don’t care how high you get, as long as you don’t get too close. Down South, they don’t care how close you get, as long as you don’t get too high.”
The deeper I get into my anti-racist community, the more convinced I become that we white folks will never be free of our dehumanizing conditioning into supremacy until we are willing to face our history honestly, and that includes history north of the tea line.
The habit of some Northerners to pin our nation’s unrelenting history of racism solely on the South conveniently lets them continue to have somebody to look down on, never having to get close enough to look at the supremacy of Cotton Mather, or how Boston and NYC built so many fortunes on those terrible ships, or at sundown towns, red-lining, de-industrialization of the cities, failed housing projects, those carefully planned suburbs that “just happen” to be lily-white.
Meanwhile, down here, many of us white folks have done our work, have faced our history and our present, and have found that the white supremacy our country was founded on is a giant con to keep y’all rich and all the rest of us poor. We’re working hard alongside the neighbors we love while you rest in your self-satisfaction. Wake up.
...just the fact that y'all actually have a magazine called "Garden & Gun" was enough for me. I want nothing to do with the South. New or Old, it all seems pretty much the same.
I ask you, Miz Renkl, other than German and Japanese automobile manufacturers bringing non-union jobs to the South, when has the South been interested in something other than sharecropper jobs, local construction, and Biloxi shipbuilding courtesy of Uncle Sam?
What patented invention of note came from the South? I am really sure there are some, but the cotton gin ain't one of them.
The cultural contribution of the South came from oppressed blacks (Jazz and R&B) and white trash (country and rockabilly).
When your cousins are waving their Confederate flag and drinking their sweet tea, you might remind them where B.B. King, Carl Perkins, and Mother Maybelle Carter came from. It was not from genteel neighborhoods where people read Faulkner on the porch after voting for George Wallace and Lester Maddox.
African Americans are have made some gains. But now Jeff Sessions and others want to round up legions of brown people who pick your crops and slaughter your hogs, making great contributions to the Southern economy.
Things have changed? The Georgia gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp in a campaign ad says he owns a truck "in case I need to up round criminal illegals."
But for SEC football and the need for Kentucky and North Carolina basketball to have African Americans, many aspects of the South would still be segregated.
1
The majority of these comments don't surprise me, because they are the same in every NYT article about the South. Haughty claims from people who have never lived in a place about people with whom they have never spent any significant time. Well I lived in NYC/NJ/PA/ME/MA for a total of almost 20 years. And I lived in the south for over 20 years. And I would never think of raising my children in the segregated north where in so many places the only POC white people see are the ones cleaning their houses or nannying their children. I had to hear the most absurd justifications of northern segregation "oh that's just coincidence - it's economic segregation!" Please. You can have your segregated schools, pools, working environments, and neighborhoods in the north. I will stay and raise my family here, in the south, where they actually share culture and daily life with people who don't look like them. I am so done with the hypocrisy of bigotry and ignorance coming from people claiming to be progressive and educated. And for those readers blaming the south for Trump, go educate yourselves about what a statistical confounder is, then go look at urban vs rural voting patterns and get back to us.
6
The South is fine if you're white, Christian and male. If you're a woman, well, stand by your man. Otherwise, prepare to be excluded and/or proselytized. No, thanks.
3
Dear Ms. Renkl,
As a former New Yorker who moved to Texas six years ago (please don't ask why) I was surprised by the absence of guns. My stereotype was shattered. But also, in comparing the two regions, it might go something like this:
New Yorkers are rude, aggressive, homicidal and smart. Texans are the opposite.
JD
2
Some obvious facts bear pointing out. Most Black people live in the South. The highest proportion of Black people relative to total population is in the South. And yet, Black people too often manage not to be considered Southerners. We are, and rather old ones at that. We have to tell the whole story.
4
What is so hilarious about ll these stories of that foreign-looking land south of St. Louis is the historical fact that the political party that freed black people from slavery is the Republican Party,
Slavery, Jim Crow, the lynchings, church bobings, etcetera were all the products of the same party that fire-bombs public cenues in today's America - the Democratic Party.
The Civil War was a victory of Republicans over Democrats.
While a (bare?) majority of today's progressive commenters already knew this, it just needed to be reset in print in this bastion of mob deninciations of free aspeech, free though, patriotism, capitalism, and religious thought one more time, since it is Constitution Day.
I’m a white Southerner who went to good college and graduate school up North, but the best education I ever got about race, I learned from a neighbor of mine in New Orleans, a black man named Clarence who is getting up in his years. He told me this:
“In the North, they don’t care how high you get, as long as you don’t get too close. Down South, they don’t care how close you get, as long as you don’t get too high.”
The deeper I get into my anti-racist community, the more convinced I become that we white folks will never be free of our dehumanizing conditioning into supremacy until we are willing to face our history honestly, and that includes history north of the tea line.
The habit of some Northerners to pin our nation’s unrelenting history of racism solely on the South conveniently lets them continue to have somebody to look down on, never having to get close enough to look at the supremacy of Cotton Mather, or how Boston and NYC built so many fortunes on those terrible ships, or at sundown towns, red-lining, de-industrialization of the cities, failed housing projects, those carefully planned suburbs that “just happen” to be lily-white.
Meanwhile, down here, many of us white folks have done our work, have faced our history and our present, and have found that the white supremacy our country was founded on is a giant con to keep y’all rich and all the rest of us poor. We’re working hard alongside the neighbors we love while you rest in your self-satisfaction. Wake up.
11
More than 50 years ago, my college adviser told me I wouldn't get the grades at Purdue that I got in Myrtle Beach, SC, because I was from the South. On a 6 point scale, I got a 5.96 that semester and graduated cum laude.
Years later, my son's guidance counselor told me not to expect him to get good grades in CT, despite his being in gifted classes in SC. Yet, he graduated near the top of his class, got two bachelor's degrees at the same time, pursued a master's degree and finally decided on a JD. He is a partner in a flourishing firm.
When I moved back to SC a few years ago, some wondered why I would want to live here. They are unaware of the beauty, the history (some of it dismal, to be sure), the wonderful climate and the friendliness of our people.
As soon as I moved "home," I felt anxiety melting away. I haven't regretted my choice at all.
Contrary to what others think, the South is growing in complexity and its citizens are returning in retirement to make it flourish.
2
I recently saw the Hallmark movie "In From the Night" (2006) about an overwhelmed teenager raised by incompetent and ill-equipped parents and a harebrained extended family completely oblivious to the problem, let alone the solution. Luckily, an aunt with a great capacity for patience, love, and resilience, offered him a light in the night that gave a lost soul a stability on which to deconstruct and reconstruct his life.
One could easily regard this movie as a metaphor for the plight of the entire black race that has "subsisted" in this country since its inception.
A 300-year old trauma is not going to be resolved until there is a plan of action, agreed upon by all parties, to bring back "blacks", and other minorities for that matter, into a more stable situation starting with nurturing schools and with families, in each hamlet, town, city, supporting needing families.
I am sure that this will not be done if the "bottom line" is what everyone will be worried about. Not doing anything will continue to degrade a divisive issue that will result in atrocities and paybacks. Truthfully solving this issue over two generations will be a Manhattan project.
Talk about nation-building!
Looking at the comments, it seems that people strongly disagreed with the author. Having travelled all over these great states, I have seen racism, entitlement, and a notion of superiority wherever I have been. I'm not sure why people think they only occur in the South (in the 1970's and 1980s CT had some of the highest numbers for KKK membership, and who can forget the Boston busing riots?). Also, check out the electoral maps from 2016, so much of NY and PA, and NH are red. Meanwhile, I am hard pressed to think of any state that did not participate in the genocide of First Americans - and through assorted laws - continue to discriminate against them today (f see the Dakota Access Pipeline). Hatred and discrimination are not limited to the South. Sadly, it is part of the fabric of all of the United States. However, here is what the author is trying to communicate - we are trying to improve, we are tying to right the wrongs of the past. As an aside, during the Civil War - over 31,000 Tennesseans fought for the Union.
3
Doubtless, all generalizations are wrong. :-)
There are many smart well-educated people in the South.
On the other hand, Roy Moore got 48% of the vote in Alabama's special senate election.
11
As a military family who have lived all over this country, my husband and I have seen and experienced bigotry and intolerance everywhere. I have NY relatives who sympathize with Southerners wanting to keep their statues of Civil War "heroes," and are proud of the fact that religious intolerance forced early Mormons to flee NY state. I grew up in a Western city that was infamous for requiring black entertainers to enter performance venues through the kitchens and forbidding them to use resort swimming pools. I've spent much of my life in towns and neighborhoods and cities and states with Spanish names where Spanish speakers are harassed and hated. My husband and I know and are related to immigrants who want immigration to be harder for the next guy. My alma mater is in a Northeast city recently written up as one of the most racist cities in the country. Now we live in a "progressive" Pacific Northwest city with the whitest population in the country and the most regressive tax structure, where progressive politics extends to getting rid of plastic straws but not to providing affordable housing. I've been sexually harassed in every region of this country, and witnessed intolerance of gay people in every state. And my Asian American husband has a litany of his own bad experiences in this country.
The American South is an easy scapegoat. Every corner of America harbors racists and bigots, sexists and homophobes. Many commenters here should check their glass houses for cracks.
40
Part of the charm and mystique of the South is that it is a very real place. As someone raised in the South who has lived in Los Angeles and currently in New York, I miss the down-to-Earth, honest quality of the South. I love it when native New Yorkers ask me why I'm not racist (as if that's a prerequisite to being Southern) and I tell them it's "because I was raised right and I had black neighbors growing up ... did you?"
I appreciate that the writer wants to celebrate Southerners blowing up stereotypes. That's a good thing. But young Southern writers shouldn't emulate what's happening in liberal enclaves or they will lose something very special ... their own voice. Rather people in liberal enclaves like NYC should take a cue from the South and be less politically correct, less concerned with image and actually realize that the substance of life is more complicated than those who rarely leave fashionable, overpopulated islands can imagine.
8
There's some irony in the efforts of several of these new journalistic efforts to uncover and interpret the South. They seem to be young, educated, idealistic, white and upper middle class (else they couldn't afford to do these start-ups). They are tackling some big issues without having a deep understanding of the small and medium-sized towns that comprise the South. To do that, they'd need to pay their journalistic dues by working at a local newspaper a few years and getting a good understanding of the power structure in the local chambers of commerce and the country clubs. Then they'd need to do some work at the state capitals. Only then will they be qualified to tackle the issues in the region.
In the meantime, they seem intent on being "hip and glib," as one reader noted, about a culture that sprang from a poverty and rural life they have, luckily, never experienced. Without a deeper, lived understanding, the attitude and writing seem a little too "precious."
9
As long as the South remains the capital of America’s Bible Belt, any New South will continue to resemble the Old in all the ways that matter. The strongest predictor of racism, anti-intellectualism, provincialism, divorce before 30, and obesity continues to be Christian religiosity:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/29/how-religious-is-your-st...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States
https://www.zippia.com/research/divorce-by-30-by-state/
So sure, enjoy the new mags, glad to meet you, and what church do you go to?
11
Oxford American is based in Little Rock, not Conway, AR.
3
Until the South changes it's voting patterns, it is still the South no matter all the hip literary mags, etc. It is still an enclave for racists of the white persuasion and people who do not value diversity, education, change, etc. I for one can't be convinced that the South isn't the South.
4
Many here scorn the south for it's born & bred racism which it duly earned. But many regions fail to recognize their own culpability. I've lived in the North, Mid-West and now the South and racism is an American sin. I have seen things change, but much work is still needed particularly by white americans...we are the ones who need to step up.
13
I'm from the South and don't live there anymore. Thanks for the wonderful reading recommendations.
You can leave the South, but it doesn't leave you.
1
Interesting piece - thank you. I wish I were surprised by all the blanket hatred here in the comments section, however.
I always wonder how many of those commenters actually know anybody who isn't white (or Christian) because the assumption that all Southerners are racist seems to suggest that all Southerners are white.
If that's not racist, I don't know what is.
13
I have been hearing about the New South since I was news director at UT Chattanooga from 1970-72 and did my PhD at Peabody and worked at Meharry Medical College for two years thereafter. The rumors, alas are greatly exaggerated.
There are indeed many pockets of liberal thinking and racial equality in the South, but the region as a whole is what it was and has been since the Carpetbaggers were ridden out in 1876.
11
Hopefully at least one of these new periodicals will seek to address the true root of the problem - slavery and the Civil War. Because the conspirators were never held accountable they’ve been allowed to be honored in many places in the south. Indeed, the nation’s capital rotunda has sculptures of confederates that took arms against their country. As long as we allow the south to honor the confederates as “freedom fighters” as opposed to “domestic terrorists”, their cause will also be honored and we’ll never turn the corner that was started at the end of that war.
15
you lost me in the story about your northern experience. I'm always asked "what part of the east coast do I come from" get over it!
Nuances are great. But they don't stop voter suppression, police mistreatment of people of color, and worst of all block Republican voting which allows Mitch McConnell to block CONSERVATIVE Supreme Court justices in favor of radical theocrats. I personally do not go along with the conventional wisdom -- Had Lincoln allowed them to secede, the whole world would have been a lot better off.
9
Florida also has a quarterly: Flamingo Magazine Arts, Pursuits, Travel and Culture flamingomag.com
Sorry, but since old habits die hard and rarely are patients able to diagnose themselves objectively, I'm not so quick to think that the "New South" will be any different from the Old South.
6
The overwhelming Whiteness of these initiatives speaks for itself. I'm always glad to hear of good writing, but the overall effect will be one of sterility and denial until the South truly comes to terms with what it was. And still is.
7
As Southern ex-pat (New Orleans native) I'd really like to say "Right on"; but when I consider the Republican/conservative/reactionary majorities in the legislatures of the former CSA and border states, I say, "Not yet"...
As Southern ex-pat (New Orleans native) I'd really like to say "Right on", but when I consider the Republican/conservative/reactionary majorities in the legislatures of the former CSA and border states, I say, "Not yet"...
16
If you want to ameliorate political polarization, you may want to ask GOP politicians like Ted Cruz to stop sneering at other regions during their campaign rallies by stating things like "They want us to be just like California, right down to tofu and silicon and dyed hair." California is often used by GOP politicians, particularly in the South, as some sort of dystopian bogeyman and that's tiresome as well.
15
As a liberal resident of Utah I know what it feels like to be unfairly stereotyped. I think the worst thing the south could have done to combat unfair stereotypes about them was to elect Donald Trump as president. His behavior confirms to people every bias they have ever had against the south.
15
Unless and until the White South firmly places the American Civil War, and it’s still lingering, crippling, damaging psychological effects to the region firmly in its “rear-view mirror”, it will continue to be unable to fully transform. By its cultural inability to “let go” of that long ago fought conflict, particularly the fact of its humiliating defeat by the North, it seems doomed to forever wallow in a self-defeating whirlpool of anger, revenge, hostility, resentment, and insecurity. The recent antagonism, even violence, over Civil War monuments is but one stark example of the absurdity of the perpetual reliving of that conflict and its harmful myths.
21
Well--retired school teacher writing in again.
This time--about the sometime principal of my high school. (Private Christian school.)
And he comes from South Carolina. My school is in Philadelphia.
And most of the kids are black. So I'm afraid there were smiles when he started talking. "Who's that southern boy?"
Though from South Caroline, he attended Princeton University. Did I mention he was an extremely intelligent, hardworking man? No? Well--he was.
But I remember--we had a little contretemps with our then landlord. A church. That wanted us to come in by a particular door. In an alley. Next to some dumpsters.
"Is this," my principal demanded, "a return to the Jim Crow laws of the old south? Is this the Black People's entrance?"
I looked at him. His face was white--with anger. His voice was shaking. South Carolina may indeed be a "red state"--
--but he wasn't red. Not in a million years!
Nor was he pining to return to his roots. To the small town he was born and reared in. "I'd do it," he told me once, "out of a sense of duty. That's all."
I guess there are southerners. And there are southerners. We're all different. In Alabama. In Maine. Wherever.
And that southern accent? He tried to keep it. Especially at Princeton. "Out of defiance," he told us.
But it was wearing away. Slow but sure.
How about YOU, Ms. Renki? Have you kept your own? Well--maybe. Maybe not. In any case--
--fine piece. Thank you.
3
Beautiful
Southern states, once you stop forcing me and other northern liberals from using our tax dollars to support your odious choices, such as racial discrimination, voter suppression, white supremacy and disdain for so much learning, perhaps then we'll have a chance to understand more of what's good about the South. I'm sorry, but the northern liberals have many sound reasons to believe your part of the country is inferior. Your overwhelming support of an ill-informed thug like Donald Trump doesn't help. The fact that you are resentful of our economic prosperity (while taking our tax dollars), and our emphasis on things like education, civil rights and a broader view of the world, is your problem. With your politics and your stone-age views, you frankly drag the rest of the country down and prevent us from appreciating the positive aspects of Southern culture.
Sorry. Someone's got to say it.
15
My own experience has been that most enlightened and truly cosmopolitan persons know that one can find almost any kind of person anywhere and do not judge others on the accident of their geographical location. When I was in the process of moving to Birmingham, Alabama from midtown Manhattan thirty years ago in order to take advantage of a career opportunity, I heard no pejorative comments about Alabama. Everyone seemed to understand that I would live and work among enlightened persons, and many of my friends and colleagues had heard about Birmingham's emergence as a medical and banking center. Instead of disparaging the South, they congratulated me for finding a job about which I was so enthused. Far from being buried in a backwater, I have pursued a career in Alabama that has afforded me an opportunity to achieve various forms of national recognition that would have been impossible if I had remained in my job in New York. In Birmingham, I have lived and worked among persons who belie every imaginable stereotype about Southerners. One can find benighted Southerners, of course, but one can find backward and ignorant people anywhere. My only "culture shock" in moving here was having to drive a car again (ugh!), but that had nothing to do with the South because there are few places other than Manhattan in any section of the United States where one does not need a car.
15
Thanks for writing about this. As a liberal, I've witnessed and overheard far too many derogatory comments and beliefs from my liberal friends, with regards to (all/most) Republicans, conservative, Trumpers, Southerners, bible-belters, heartlanders, etc. as being 'this or that'. Without their knowing or trying to get to know anyone from the 'other side', many of my liberal friends assume to know people. They don't like when 'Trumpers' lump all liberals or Dems together, but yet they fail to understand they are doing the very same thing to folks on the other side.
Just as all liberals cannot be pigeon-holed, nor would they want to be, so should it be for those on the other side. Each of us is more nuanced than others may want to give us credit for.
10
For some reason when there is a NYT piece about The South, I always read the comments. It's like sniffing milk that you know is sour! Predictably there will be the same stinky comments either that: 1) "the south is terrible and how can it be better than (insert Northeast US city) and also they are uneducated, except for Austin" or "I am from the South and we're not so bad and people in the North are mean and they are racist too and also Austin is hip".
That being said, when people react to my being from the South and from Texas, it is usually pretty negative. I typically ask them "when you were there what did you not like about it?" I have yet to meet someone who is hypercritical about the south who has spent any actual time there.
11
I grew up in the South. My large extended racist family still lives there and are diehard Trump supporters. I am the pariah who betrayed my roots and went to live with the Yankees. I broke their hearts when I didn't come to my senses, come back home, move into a double-wide and marry a good old boy. Instead, I married a Connecticut Yankee and reared our son as a Yankee. They still make fun of his accent.
There may be pockets of enlightenment in areas where the rednecks are outnumbered by the per centage of the population who are non-natives, but as a whole the region is still sorry they lost the Civil War and yearns to go back to the good old days when "people" knew their place. They still don't like uppity women or people of color. Of course, I can only speak from my personal experience of growing up in the Jim Crow years.
19
The south, where I work in an energy related field, which is still almost exclusively staffed by exactly the dumb southerner red neck we all expect. Who don't believe women have any role outside the home, who are convinced liberals want to take their guns and who love trump because he wants to take America back to the 50's, when their private of growing up white was all that mattered, except they don't want 50's tax rates.
The people who watching football on a sunday rail against any one who takes a knee to protest as disrespecting the flag yet hold in adoration the flag that fought a war with the stars and stripes.
Is the south dumb? not all of them, but as usual they are behind the times and on the wrong side of history and as they have never been forced to face the wrongs of their pasts they will continue to be as they were.
14
@h13rma
At least the South integrated the schools sooner than Boston (Southie finally integrated in the late 1970s). Interesting comments.
I found your new journals really interesting and a good start to adjusting the cartoonish version of the South.
But can you also refrain from quoting a random "someone" who said dumb things about a beautiful spot in Alabama and attributing it wholesale to some political group?
Do you know who the person was and why their POV is representative of anything other than being a jerk? We are in the age of Consider the Source.
4
“And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the “progress” it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac; there are probably single square miles in America. If the whole of the late Confederacy were to be engulfed by a tidal wave tomorrow, the effect upon the civilized minority of men in the world would be but little greater than that of a flood on the Yang-tse-kiang. It would be impossible in all history to match so complete a drying-up of a civilization.”
H.L. Mencken writing on the American South in “The Sahara of the Bozart” in 1917.
True then and still overwhelmingly true today in much of its politics.
http://writing2.richmond.edu/jessid/eng423/restricted/mencken.pdf
6
@A. Stanton It always bugs me when Marylanders, south of the Mason-Dixon line and resolutely a slave state despite sloganeering to the contrary, attempt to extricate ourselves from the South. Mencken had some issues of his own. In point of fact, Mencken was a lifelong Baltimorean, a graduate of the same high school I was (before integration of course), and is therefore a Southerner. I don't have to like it or shout it from the rooftops, but Marylanders are Southerners.
2
Ah, Ms. Renkl, I share not your hope and anticipation of a renewed South. I dislike stereotypes because they’re a lie.
Bob Sewell (magnificently essayed by James Anderson) in 1963’s “To Kill A Mockingbird,” was never, to my mind, “the South.” The poor, uneducated racist “redneck” was an unfortunate portrayal of the day-to-day white South.
The Bob Ewells took the very public hit because the white planters and growers and professionals and politicians were cowards. They, like their fathers and grandfathers before them, used these folks to fight their Civil War and used them as soldiers in their white supremacy Armageddon of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, all the while hiding behind a laughable courtliness and exaggerated civility that they successfully foisted upon an indifferent North.
All the Senators and Congressmen (not women, mind) from below the George Mason Line voted lockstep against the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965). Examine the Southern politicians now in Washington and elsewhere (state legislatures) who consistently lobby against (black) voting rights in terms of ID’s; locations; days and hours. Affirmative Action, to these Southerners, means an attack upon white supremacy. They can’t have equality, can they?
Your dear South, for its baby-steps progress, remains in diapers, soiled by its past and present and unwilling or unable to cleanse itself of a disease it purposely bred and blessed.
See: Mitch McConnell and J. D. B. Sessions III.
18
I was born and raised in California having little to know exposure to the South until recent years found me vacationing in North Carolina every summer. I too have been guilty of the typical assumptions you've listed here that are often wrongly given Southerners and anyone coming from the South and I really appreciate your column. I look forward to exploring many of the literature gems you've directed us too, especially Southerly! Thank you for this. I always enjoy your columns.
5
I grew up in Louisville, KY to parents who grew up in Ruston Louisiana. So I grew up loving the South and its culture. But for the South to truly overcome the stereotype now, it has to quit acting like the stereotypes. When people like Roy Moore don't have a chance of state-wide service in Southern states, opinions will begin to change. When health indices, education and poverty measures are not tops in predominantly Southern states, things will change.
13
Northern liberals would stop their condescending attitudes toward the South when the opinion leaders like Margaret Renki address the reasons liberals hate the south....the calibers of Senators and Representatives the South sends to Washington (Strom Thurmond, Jeff Sessions, Lindsay Graham); their obsession with Christian values and guns; their political values, like their reverence of Confederate leaders, and of course, their food....nothing is food unless it's sugar, starch and fat....
6
Interesting that the sub-head calls these folks "forward-thinking." Sort of cements the stereotype that anybody who doesn't hew to NY values (Latinx poetry, and the Queer Pleasures of Tammy Wynette's Cooking, and drinks like "I'm not your Negroni), is backwards thinking.
2
The South is KKK-land and the "deplorbles", Trump voters. Southern cities still can't bear to tear down monuments to Civil War generals and collectively believe climate change is a hoax. Personally I think the South should have won the Civil War because we'd be two countries. Must be slow news day if the NY Times if dredging up a handful of people who say claim to be liberals when the vast majority of them vote Republican.
9
@Anne Those monuments are coming down all over the South. And there are more than a handful of Southern liberals; there are millions of us, whether you choose to believe it or not.
6
In the late sixties, on Christmas night, I started driving from nyc to Fort Lauderdale, Fl. A terrific snowstorm came on, that dumped mountains of snow from nyc all the way to South Caroline (I kid you not). I-95 was not completed yet, so south of Virginia I was on Route 1. I pulled into a small-town gas station with a hill leading up to the gas pumps. My car could not get up the hill because of the snow and ice. People came out of the office to help me push the car, but turned around and returned to the office when they saw my NY state license plates. I pushed my car up the hill myself, pumped my own gas, and paid a surly guy for it.
Damning all Southerners while driving on on Route 1, about then minutes later in the blizzard conditions I drove off the road and down a bank into a field. I couldn't get up the bank to the road. I was stuck. Figures approached my car out of the blinding snow. I heard Southern accents. Remembering the gas station incident, I got scared and reached for a crowbar for self-defense, but then realized there were too many of them and replaced it under my driver's seat. It turned out that they were a citizen's group out looking for people in trouble in the snow, were glad to meet me, assured me my experience of snow in South Carolina was exceptional, and made me promise to come back again to appreciate their climate. They pushed my car up the bank and onto the road. They were some of the nicest people I'd ever met.
16
For those of us who came of age in the sixties the images of the civil rights struggles in Montgomery, Selma and Birmingham are hard to eradicate. But the new green shoots in Alabama and even Mississippi are not only visible but seem remarkably vigorous. One of the many blessings of the Doug Jones campaign was that it brought to national attention an awareness that the progressive camp in Alabama had expanded beyond a few saintly African-American ministers and displaced college professors.
White working class Alabamans were historically strong supporters of FDR's New Deal -- so long as racial customs were not challenged. The harshly individualistic social Darwinism of Republicanism was not part of the original DNA but was adopted transactionally as the price to be paid to secure the party's unflinching fealty to racism. But if that racism is indeed weakening, it should quickly become obvious to most Alabamans that the Republican approach on the whole undercuts their economic position.
4
Hard to engage with this article seriously. I get the feeling this author knows precisely why the south has the reputation it does.
You can find good people and things to like just about anywhere on the planet. That said, if the south has a bad reputation, it's because it often presents itself poorly to the world. Does bigotry have borders? Of course not. Has bigotry burrowed particularly deeply into southern politics? Absolutely.
No one is questioning whether one can find talented, even enlightened writers in the southern states. Talent knows no borders either. That is most decidedly NOT a part of the south's image problem.
15
This article is nothing but a lot of hand-waving about supposed Southern concerns about equal rights, poverty and the environment. Regardless, the South's residents go right on electing far-right demagogues, supporting billionaire religious hucksters and worshiping guns.
7
Another word for "stereotypes" is prejudice. Every part of the country has its own set of problems. Some deal with it better than others. Every city in the South has its counterpart in the North.
7
Shameful but utterly typical of the media to stereotype and scapegoat the South. It's an "acceptable", utterly hypocritical bigotry propagated by Big Media, like that against Christians
2
And yet Southerners keep electing racist, misogynist politicians. Child molester Moore missed be elected by a very slim margin. That the margin was so slight speaks volumes.
16
So northerners blame southerners for supporting the worst president in U.S. history, who thinks the Justice Department and FBI should be his personal servants, that women are chattel for him to exploit, that some Nazis are fine people, and who made his money in part by discriminating against African-Americans in the housing market. Oh yeah, where is Trump from again?
9
@MAL
Oh yeah? Where are Trump voters from?
6
What does Trump home state have to do with the argument that the South represents some of, what we Americans believe to be, the worst of our history?
Trump might be from the NorthEast but the polls show that he was elected overwhelmingly by folks from the South (compared to the NorthEast) - he lost in his own home state.
What is your argument exactly?
6
Ah, a couple years ago, white Alabamans overwhelmingly (68%) indicated they'd rather have an alleged pedophile with multiple other character flaws, including what appeared to be a rosy view of slavery, than a Democrat. How did that not reinforce negative stereotypes?
17
I reject racists, and people who worship superstition and ignorance, wherever they live. When I see a cadre of Southern politicians who endlessly promote the things I despise most, I make a judgement.
I was an Air Force brat who attended 5th grade at Plantation Park Elementary School in Bossier City Louisiana. My teacher, whom I adored told us a story of how her black maid believed toads gave you warts, proving black people were less intelligent than whites. I had never heard anyone ever make a statement like that in my young life. My maternal grandmother, who was born in the 19th Century and grew up in a small town that is just cross lots from Seneca Falls NY, believed the very same thing.
How many Boomers got the same lesson in their elementary school in the South?
1
The audience in Philadelphia wasn't laughing at you, or thinking of you as a cracker. It was laughing at the idea of trusting environmental regulation to the state government of Alabama. They were anticipating exactly the point you were going to make, and they did that because you introduced it in exactly that way.
Then, as now, people from the North were perfectly capable at distinguishing the people and culture of the South from the politicians it elects. You were counting on just that point when your made yours. I liked reading about these new, more liberal Southern publications, but their goal is to fix Southern politics, not to fix other people who are just making correct critical judgments about that politics.
(And yes, I am from Philadelphia.)
6
Elect some people that reflect this attitude and we'll talk then. Elected officials reflect a region more than anything else and much of the ridicule the south gets is because of these people. That's who we see in the rest of the country and you continue to elect these out of touch, old, white men whose only priority is to preserve the white power structure of the region. They brag about it and are re-elected time after time.
So these odes to the natural beauty of the south and the really nice people that live there get real old real fast. Stop electing reactionary old white men who hold this country back at every level of government, are quite proud to do so and then have the gall to claim some sort of divine justification.
I wish you the best in doing so but it hasn't happened yet. Not even close.
11
I'm pretty sure that there are progressive people in the South. I've always wanted to visit Charleston for the architecture. But as a queer Black woman with a funny foreign accent (I'm West Indian), I can tell you honestly that I'm afraid to go. I've mentioned this to some Southerners of color, expressing that I have no idea why anyone of color would want to live there. One woman said to me, "That is where our land is." I took that to mean not just physical territory, but home, culture, family roots. That's certainly a good argument for them, and I get that the more open-minded white Southerners want to beat back the taint of Jim Crow. But listen, we're only 60-odd years down from those hoses and dogs. For strangers like me, definitely out of the common way, a few nice literary blogs and forward-looking shops aren't going to convince me that wider Mississippi & Alabama are now giving people of color a hearty welcome.
14
Just last Thanksgiving I had to leave the dinner table at our family home in the "New South." The level of racist rhetoric espoused by my own family members had reached a level where I was physically ill. I don't dare criticize them because that means I will lose the only family I have. And these people do not take kindly to being corrected. Nice try, "New South" revisionists. But, you still have a lot of work to do to convince me that there is any meaningful change in attitudes.
18
I'm curious as to the black and brown managers, founders, and editiors in theses publicationa and as to the content provided by these racial/ethnic groups.
1
Why does Ms. Renkl only identify her subjects by "race" if they happen to be African-American? Is this good journalism?
5
"Today we don't judge people by their accents anymore than we judge them by their skin color." "People know better now." Is the writer being sarcastic, joking, or only think all people are readers of the New York Times?!
5
There is one glaring omission in this piece: C-I-V-A-L-W-A-R. Ridicule and disgust with the South is understandable and justified. Until Southerners openly and uniformly acknowledge that all the officers in the Confederate Army were traitors trying to destroy the United States, there is no reason to think well of them. You want the hellishly hot and humid climate, the infestation of jacked-up pick-trucks with Confederate Flags, and worse their owners, the population in general that consistently votes for the majority of worst people in the US Congress? Please take it. But acknowledge that something as superficial as a non-viable publication is not a meaningful change. The South was and is hell.
8
Try starting with spelling “civil” correctly
7
I do have to wonder about the writings of Madam Renkl. Do you believe what you are writing, or are you bought and paid for by someone we do not know?
Yup, all the history about segregation, lynching, attack dogs, slavery must be completely wrong and misleading. Reading and writing scores in Alabama and Mississippi must all mask an otherwise genius population. The fact that 90% of all southern whites vote republicans must be inferred as evidence of tolerance. The unmitigated feeding at the federal teat by every southern state, its politicians devoted to taking pork home (as is every other politician) are - according to you - signs that the south is true to its beliefs about rugged individualism. The film was titled "Mississippi Burning," not "Connecticut Burning" - which according to you - must be a profound misunderstanding. I suspect your refrain will be that there are Nazis living in suburban Northeast as well. That makes me feel better.
There are indeed blue dots in an otherwise crimson landscape across the south. A lot has to do with northern transplants who did not succumb to the southern hatefulness (I guess you call it hospitality). But I will call your revisionism for what it is - unhinged southwashing. There are awesome Americans everywhere, and that includes the south. But it is impossible to listen to a person who is defending a southern way of life - which is inseparable from prejudice, segregation, and yes, slavery.
15
@Kalidan Nowhere in this article did Ms. Renkl state or even imply that slavery, lynching, and the rest of the sorry history of white supremacy and terrorism in the South should be downplayed. She pointed out the complexity and nuance of a region that the rest of the country too often sees in simple, dismissive stereotypes, as you seem to do.
3
@Kalidan
There are plenty of natives down here who never succumbed to “southern hatefulness” (and your equation of southern hospitality with hatred makes you sound like Donald Trump talking about Muslims or Mexicans.) And while it’s undoubtedly true that there are “awesome Americans everywhere,” there’s only one region – indeed one city – that tolerates if not lionizes a racial arsonist like Al Sharpton. Southerners are well versed in charlatans and demagogues so please clean up your own mess before lecturing us about “prejudice, segregation and … slavery.”
But I understand your frustration and anger as it must be tough seeing your neighbors bolting the tri-state area in droves, many of them heading south to escape corrupt politicians, thuggish municipal unions and a crushing tax burden. I guess our new arrivals from up north failed to get your memo about the odious "southern way of life."
2
I just hope these people can affect the fossilize minds of the south. Buried as they are in hundreds of years of fundamentalist religious fevor and racism.
7
I watched “Easy Rider” when it came out in 1969
My views of the south haven’t changed since then. Sorry !
2
Like most places in the USA, the South is divided along partisan lines very clearly now. I have family in many places down there, and they are all extremely progressive and liberal. They are also younger. I'm hoping all the remaining idiots are the ones I knew growing up and are now getting old, like me. Good news, we will die off soon and the younger generation will take over. I hope they've learned something.
4
The south is the same as in 1850.
Look who it elects and reelects.
Case closed.
5
It is the South, Dr. King observed, where (if I may paraphrase) racial progress would set in and succeed. The great journalist Marshall Frady described the South as "America's Ireland." Music, literature, art, storytelling juxtaposed with violence. The voices of today's South are led by the clever cerebral humorist Roy Blount, Jr., and the totally authentic Rick Bragg whose talks are spellbinding.
As a native Atlantan and liberal Democrat, I find some of the publications Ms. Renkl discuses too invested in being hip, glib and all too willing to ridicule traditions. When the South's accents, food, music and creative instincts are homogenized, America will not be a better country, just more boring.
I can still share a bottle of Jack Daniel's and a plate of my barbecue with folks no matter their color, country of origin, party preference, age or body shape. That's the South of Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Maybelle Carter, Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter, Reese Witherspoon and our army of chefs and cooks who can find something from the fields to cook for dinner anytime. Listen carefully to Tom Petty's "Southern Accent," and learn how to pray.
39
Those twin sons of Confederate Alabama Addison Mitchell McConnell, Jr. and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, III represent the Ronald Reagan / Donald Trump base that is stilll whistling Dixie while waving the Stars and Bars trying to permanently reverse the outcome of the Civil War that briefly basked in the humble humane empathetic light of the Reconstruction and Civil Rights eras.,
There is not nor will there ever be a new South unless and until the old white South loses their demographic struggle to an aging and shrinking population with a below replacement level birthrate along with a decreasing life expectancy due to alcoholism, drug addiction, depression and suicide.
Trump is Reagan without any of the political, governing and acting experience or talent or gift for rhetorical misogynist racist xenophobic euphemism.
MAGA!
42
@Blackmamba
I argue that the South was making progress long before Trump, slowly but surely, as new demographics poured in from other states for jobs and a lower cost of living. I know the Memphis of 1978 is not the same one I experienced in 2016. I no longer feared to walk into restaurants and shops with my POC husband for example. I found many of those places run by immigrants and doing very well.
Trump and those who supported him picked the old scab and said "Look, we're bleeding again and worse than ever!" And his "base," white people who had a myriad of problems, believed him and soon had the same historical target to blame: POCs, both foreign and domestic.
Trump supporters have become victims of a shell game. (And yes, Trump leaves many victims of all shapes and colors.) How do these white people suffer? They now have the toxic burden of hate and anger to carry, not a fun way to live, and a slow growing realization that they've been had.
20
@Blackmamba
More to the point, Reagan was Trump but with better speech writers.
2
@Blackmamba
Are we still stuck in the 1960's?
Everyone you dislike is a ra-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-cist?
This has to be the most meaning-emptied word in the english language.
Donald Trump, the Hero of black employment and the risng finances of the black American family is the man your parents and ancetors would thank and congratulate - unless you thing what is best about any country is its central government.
Black and Latino Americans are becoming FREE of dependency on government bureaucrats BECAUSE of Donald Trump. That is why his support among black America has doubled.
Let's face the fact that the South in our past was actually a police-state dictatorship for black people, that existed within the US democracy. It's "The American Dilemma" per Gunnar Myrdal's famous book. Escaped slaves had to be returned to their owners, as property, wherever found. That's tyranny.
After slavery ended, blacks were legally kept apart from whites in every aspect of life and this lasted into the lifetimes of many alive today. Blacks could be arrested on any charge locals could think up to keep blacks tyranized..
Many benefits of FDR's New Deal that saved the middle class did not apply to blacks who were mainly in farming or domestic occupations.
Whites could murder blacks and never be charged with a crime. It was total collusion by lawmakers, governors, and local police. It took a few brave journalists 20 years to track down white murderers of blacks from the 1960s and get a few finally prosecuted.
We lived with a schizophrenic contradiction of every ideal that America espoused. Blacks were simply defined as so innately inferior to whites, that our constitution simply didn't apply to them. And the white south could still pretend pride in American freedom before the world.
This was our great polarization. The after affects take various forms--- like police bias and brutality to minorities, and our extreme incarceration. Our unbalanced economic system allows racism from the past to be a factor in our politics. Enter Trump.
61
The South is an itch I love to scratch. As a Californian, I've held a love-hate relationship with it since as a mixed race couple, we first visited my brother-in-law in Memphis in 1978. Since then, I've visited eight southern states and will travel soon to my ninth.
Maybe others from more liberal parts of the country feel as I do in the South---like I'm in a time capsule where I can breathe in air that doesn't feel new but still contains particles of the past, both good and evil. Nothing seems to wash completely clean and no one seems to pay mind to that.
The South is a place of deep beauty, intransigence, generosity and cruelty, and a hypnotizing slow pace that cares nothing for hurry (except on an Atlanta freeway). People also have a keen perceptiveness. They know who they are and not much gets by them, no matter what color they might be. I don't know if many Californians can understand this since our state is always in flux and we often ignore our neighbors.
Recently, numerous nieces and nephews (most of mixed race) moved to Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. All love their new communities, both urban and rural alike. They see changes being made and more on the horizon. They've found what California couldn't give them--financial security, a sense of place and of upward movement. They feel what all young people need to feel: hope.
Next year, I have three southern weddings to attend. I can't wait.
10
A fine article, Ms. Renki, and thank you for reaching out to those of us in the North. I see a lot of comments pointing out weaknesses or deficiencies in how you are viewing things versus evidence to the contrary, and maybe they are justified. It's hard to speak for or represent the whole South in one NYT Opinion Piece! But you've piqued our interest... keep writing, you'll win us over. And if you win us over, you'll win more Southerners over. Works both ways. You have a tough row to hoe, but keep it up!
5
Don't forget ,minds do not change that easily.The South ,according to the Mason Dixon line extends to WV ,Pa ,MD and New Jersey.
Southern sentiments ,are as strong there ,as the battles fought at Gettysburg and the same run deep to Birmingham and Montgomery,even today.You may not have winter ,but the storms grow stronger when you near the gulf states.There's untold beauty ,no matter what ,in Spanish moss and Magnolia trees in bloom and the South is rising once again in manufacturing and growth as taxation and overpopulation takes over the NE. So the there's a resurrection of sustainability and across the board political climate which equals the North of the Mason Dixson and long may this continue,Amen.
1
Meanwhile, a librarian in WV tried to censor Woodward's new book in their library (before being overruled).
Even so, it is promising to learn more of the diverse and serious efforts available in the South today, while often keeping the amazing southern food in the mix, but it will likely remain a niche market. Richard Fausset also gave Times readers an interesting intro to southern mags and journals about a year ago if anyone cares to read his take as well:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/us/south-magazines-bitter-southerner-...
I've lived in 5 southern states, along with 3 other states, DC and France. All places were a mixed bag as one should naturally expect, so enough already of the stereotypical judgment, mockery, condescension, etc. Until others experience firsthand the various regions and get to know a range of local people while keeping an open mind, I'd suggest they kindly keep their ignorant opinions to themselves.
7
I have visited the South numerous times, albeit concentrated around Atlanta and Florida, for professional reasons and while I find the people I have encountered to be kind and friendly, I also think it's likely because of the type of places I frequent (e.g. universities, urban areas, bohemian coffeehouses, etc.) and the people I meet (many of whom are widely travelled, some mixed-race couples, etc).
I think it would be an entirely different matter had I travelled in more suburban, rural areas where people may be less used to seeing someone who is not white. Just within the last 2 years, I encountered 2 Asian-American peers in separate circumstances who did a stint of work in less populated areas of the South and both stated they faced more open prejudice there than anywhere else they had worked in the US.
It's good to know there are outliers in the South but a few excellent literary magazines aren't enough to protect people. It goes beyond just voting: I don't want to work in areas where at best, I have to deal with racial overtones regularly and at worst, might actually fear for my physical safety.
8
A 2002 Gallup Poll indicated that Southern Americans' ratings of race relations "are currently about average when compared with those in other parts of the country." Among the findings was that black Southerners' assessment of Southern race relations was about the same as that of blacks in both the West and the North.
By the turn of the century, blacks assessed racial relations in the South as being no better and no worse than anywhere else. The notion that Southerners must make amends before being accepted is way outdated. Blacks in the South believed that the South had caught up at least 16 years ago. And who could judge better? https://news.gallup.com/poll/7234/us-race-relations-region-south.aspx
1
The South has always had scalawags and occasional waves of carpetbaggers. Now it has, in addition, substantial areas of real Black control, but ultimate power still rests with the myths propagated by neoconfederates. These myths, propagated throughout the country, enabled the confederacy to pull real if partial victory from the ashes of its defeat. Without these assiduously propagated myths, blacks might be able to exist today with no more problems than Jews, Italians, Poles, Chinese, or Japanese.
Of course, the South itself remains the greatest victim of these myths, and they also fell on fertile ground in the rest of the country. But the blacks who made it to Canada did not have problems to the same extent as those who stopped in the North.
4
It's good to know that this is happening. But I don't think much in terms of north and south anymore. Just look at a political map. It seems to be more about urban vs. non-urban areas; the coasts and Chicago-Minneapolis vs. vast counties devoted to agriculture, fracking, mining, logging and mostly low wages, prompting youth flight. Drive across the country on I-70, stop at the rest stops, listen to people. The "south" runs through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and almost all of the west until you get to the Rockies.
3
Doesn't pretty much the entire GOP strategy for retaining the House this year depend on stereotypes of Californians and, specifically, people from San Francisco? They trot out the "Nancy Pelosi" card whenever possible, which is entirely about stereotypes of California. I sympathize with Southerners not particularly liking stereotypes (I'm from southern Missouri), but they do pretty much live by their own stereotypes of others. A little self-reflection all around might be a lovely thing.
12
That picture is of a wonderful shelf of books. It made me want to take them down and read them all.
"characterized by an almost cartoonish villainy"
We've got an awful lot of that. With the notable exception of Obama, we've had little else since Reagan swept in with Morning in America promising a bunch of lies to be effected with that same cartoonish villainy.
Fire all the air traffic controllers? Because they were right, conditions were unsafe? That is from a cartoon of Boris Badenov, and we don't have even a flying squirrel to save us. Could that be our new standard: Is this candidate as good as a flying squirrel? And few have been.
The things she writes about the South's troubles are actually national troubles too. It is in no way limited to the South, though the exact expression may be a bit different.
7
I have lived in the South for most of my life. Yes, there are normal people here. Yes, there are horrible people outside of the South. Let's not pretend that there is not a large group of people who are still fighting the Civil War. Let's not forget that while racists live everywhere, the Confederate statues that racists are trying to protect are in the South. Let's not forget that the racist Republican party has a stranglehold on the South. Let's not forget it took several women coming forward and bringing Roy Moore to account for his crimes (not really, though. He isn't in prison and he never will be) and the Democrat barely won. Racist Republicans can do no wrong in the South. Until that changes I'm not letting the South off so easy.
15
I went to college in the South, and I couldn't get out of there fast enough.
8
On the other hand, when Gone With The Wind plays in a theater, they all still stand and salute when they play "Dixie"
1
@Objectivist When and where, specifically, did you see this happen? Because I've attended lots of screenings of Gone With the Wind, I'm in my mid-fifties, and I'm a native southerner, and even the idea of this happening is bizarre.
8
Rad comment.
Throughout reading the article, I kept scratching my chin, thinking: "this is all good and well, but isn't there some glib put-down I can throw out to communicate to fellow readers that I will continue to maintain an aloof bearing when the dumb Southerners examine their experience."
Thank you for giving voice to my id!
1
@Susan
Knoxville.
Which struck me as really weird, because the mountain folk sided with the north against the flatlanders.
Go figure.
well if you'd put Lyndsey's picture at the beginning, I might have believed the rest of your story. Pleasures aside, having worked with people from Mississippi, Louisiana, and found an almost home in Arkansas I know the south has can stand shoulder to shoulder to any region in the country, and probably the world.
1
Thanks for your column. So many great writers came from the South like Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. I'm from Massachusetts but I appreciate the great breadth and range of people that make up this country. Your column is needed after the comment about Jeff Sessions being a"dumb southerner." But of course there is also the history of racism and the images I saw growing up of racial hatred in the south. It would be nice to get beyond regional stereotypes though and also acknowledge that racism unfortunately is prevalent still in all parts of this country.
2
Ms. Renkl is living in a liberal echo chamber. I would like to see a South that is a leader in making sure that gerrymandering is non-existent and that poor people including blacks have the same rights to vote as affluent white people.
Many Southerners are poor but sold a bill of goods by their politicians solely because the politicians are Republican. The support for education in the South is poor, the South overwhelmingly opposes the ACA when places like Kentucky lead the nation in Social Security disability payments. It is a region that, more than the majority of Americans doesn't grasp the idea of Separation of Church and State and the anguish and violence that is the result of forceful imposition of religious ideas on a majority. (The Senate is dominated by small, Red states, many being Southern.)
I'd truly love to believe the progressive aspirations of the author, but it needs to show in their actions -- not merely the beliefs of the population of a small bubble -- before it becomes credible.
10
You think Alabama has it bad? You should try growing up in New Jersey. Forget about it. You spend your entire life explaining to people how your childhood isn't characterized by Tony Soprano and Snooki. The insult "dirty-jerz" even predates our more recent notoriety. True story. My friend and I got sick of hearing the "What exit?" joke so we got our exits tattooed on our backs. You don't need to ask anymore.
To hear the south complain about cultural prejudice is absurd. Southerners are often the nicest mean people you'll ever meet. Depends on where you go and how you're introduced. Sometimes though, I have a hard time telling whether I'm getting insulted or I'm getting complimented. I'm serious. It's bizarre. I need a cousin to translate anytime I visit my aunt in Virginia. I do not understand what her and her friends are trying to communicate. I hear the words but the meaning behind them is completely obscured to me.
They sure know how to act insulted though. What I'd say?
4
Willful ignorance is a national, not a regional problem. The racism I experienced growing up in Illinois probably tainted my subconscious for life, and I have to continuously guard against its instincts.
Time to end our Civil War or our country will fail, if it hasn't already. I suggest getting rid of any and all statues of Civil War generals, Union and Confederate alike, including U.S. Grant. We don't need reminders of who most efficiently killed their fellow Americans, from either side.
7
I left the Deep South thirty years ago. I returned twice every year, and I have yet to witness any significant change since MLK was murdered in my hometown, an event that I did not learn about or understand until high school. Every visit, I watched as good people turned a blind eye to open racism, homophobia, sexism, fill in the blank. With an “Oh,he’s just a good ole boy” or a “well, at least they’re patriotic” defense of the KKK selling American flags at the local WalMart, the winks and nods and dog whistle phrases have not waned since the Civil War. For years, I described my hometown as the city with a church on every corner and a peep show across the street, a true picture of a city unable to deal with its Christian hypocrisy. A few years ago, I changed my description to a city with a Church on every corner and a cardiac care unit across the street. Either because of their unresolved sexual issues that compete with wearing their religion on their sleeves (to this day, I watch high school classmates that never left the South and never came out, married, had kids, and live a miserable lie) or because of the fear of white folks losing their status in society, their emotional issues have become health issues with epidemic obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. These journals are nice, but Southerners are not reading them, or they wouldn’t fail time after time. Anything that does not validate their Trump approved views are simply ignored. Since Trump arrived, I no longer visit.
8
The South is not a monolith. There are beautiful things and horrible things. There are good people and bad. I can understand, with regret, why some may find it painful to live there. But, at the cultural and political level, it is unwise to dismiss it with quick stereotypes. Southerners and Northerners alike must ask ourselves hard questions about why the differences between us have become a source of weakness rather than strength for our country, and what preconceptions must be discarded for us to move forward with addressing the real problems.
6
Appreciated the article and the links to publications read by like-minded southerners and interested others.
Now, if only my Democratic vote in national elections could count. Maybe someday, but given what I hear among misinformed, fearful, socialism-fearing relatives and neighbors, I'll have a long wait, maybe cold and under grass.
2
@Sally. You vote counts just like mine. And everyone else. What a selfish wine that your vote should decide an election. No clue why liberals keep repeating such a vacuous slogan.
As a native Tennessean, I've lived in a couple rural counties and now in Davidson, in which Nashville is located. I'm no expert on the vast subjects touched upon by the author, but my achingly observation-based opinion is this: the overwhelming cruxes of the South's problem would be lack of devotion to education combined with the oddly inherent devotion to religious authority which seems unique to the Southeastern U.S.
I was often beaten by my parents when I asked of them questions such as: "Why do we go to church?" and "Why would God conceive a plan that ultimately kills his Son?" Simple questions, IMO. They didn't know (nor did they care), as they have not educated themselves to answer such questions, but they believed all of them to be 'sinful' questions nonetheless, as they had likely been beaten just the same. The fear of such questions is held within families and congregations, and the social structure of families and congregations doubly prevent these questions from mining true reflection. I've been ostracized from my family, if that helps.
I moved on from this upbringing and through education, was able to think through the stereotypes/opinions which I had stubbornly, then reluctantly, and now happily no longer hold on to. But how does this happen on a large scale but for education. I am at a loss. The path towards true progress in the South will not lead through a fruited plain, but through a stinking, treacherous mire.
9
As a native Southerner, long gone from the area, I have always known of forward-thinking culturally alive areas all over the Southeast. Unfortunately, the demise of the Southern Democrat and the Chokehold of the Conservative Republican Right and its current glut of anti-Science, anti-Evironment, Anti-Education, Pro-Trump voices drown out any vestiges of "Forward Thinking".
4
Sure, there individuals and organizations doing progressive, interesting work everywhere. This doesn't mean anything for any large-scale change in this region. When southern voters start voting for sane candidates and stop obsessing over a war they lost 150 years ago, I'll happily re-evaluate my opinion.
6
@Jemilah The whole point of the article is that the South is complex, and stereotypes don't do it justice.
1
I love the rich, cultural diversity of the American Deep South. It has a phenomenal self-preservation mechanism that automatically repulses those who are too closed-minded or simple-minded to see it. I do regret the development of the Internet though. There was always something adventurous about finding a Sunday New York Times, available on Monday if at all.
2
I have spent very little time in the South. A few years ago while driving to Richmond VA (which I guess qualifies as the South) we drove through some rural areas. The one thing I noticed was most everything needed a coat of paint.
I know that many of t rump's supporters feel some desperation because the future is uncertain, and they are unprepared for it. I also know that most of his supporters live in areas where republican politicians have set in stone the austerity policies they would like to inflict on all of US.
Why do they keep voting for politicians who are making their lives miserable?
Why not join a union and get union wages instead of making union organizing so difficult? Why try to force your neighbors to make the minimum wage you make, instead of joining them and doing better?
Civilization began in warmer climes like Greece, Egypt, India, Rome; but it really caught on when peoples moved North into colder climes. Most of the modern world evolved in colder temperatures like Scotland, Finland, England, Ireland, Sweden.
I think it's the heat that just effects people's minds.
Or maybe the humidity.
I look forward to the South finally surrendering the Civil War and rejoining that civilization. Until then I will spend only enough money in the South to get out of the South.
1
The south can't be painted with a broad brush just like the north, or west or any where else. Sure, the writer is aware of the problems of the south, but they are often the most talked about and obvious characteristics of the south. Her mission here is to inform us of another side of the south that is less talked about and less obvious and, might be growing. This isn't to say the south is new or different but evolving. It is no better or worse than the north. She accurately highlights the prejudice and stereotypes put upon the south as evidenced in reader comments for this article.
7
I read years ago a point that is still true:
the Southern white male is the last "ethnic group" it is considered OK to hate and despise.
5
@RLiss Agreed. It’s amazing how many people were never taught to stop before using a sentence with a racial, ethnic or religious group and substitute your group name and listen to how it sounds. This was drilled into me by my family and repeated at school. I often read a statement that literally stereotypes a group while complaining about being stereotyped. If you can’t say something about gays or Jews or Hindus, etc. don’t say it about any other group.
1
I'll always remember seeing a standup comic from New York here in Houston start telling a joke involving China Town and then stop mid-sentence to explain “you see, in some cities are there places with big Asian populations we call them China Towns”, as if no one in Houston, which is the 4th biggest city in the US and in which over 145 languages are spoken, could even imagine such a concept.
9
@Peter Actually some may be concerned that certain ethnic groups are segregated in housing. It’s a real issue. I read about segregated housing routinely in the Times.
@Peter
Yes as a native Houstonian I once had an insular new Englander ask me if we had a symphony "down there," not realizing that Houston has more of a vibrant arts scene than most new England towns
I think the remarkable thing about The South is not that it is changing but rather how slowly it is changing. Progress is inevitable, people evolve and new ideas take root. However, some people and places evolve more quickly than others. Alabama nearly elected a pedophile to the US Senate last year.
The American South is one of the most recalcitrant to change because of the infestation of language viruses that quell people’s critical thinking and reinforce their beliefs that everything around them is the will of God and not the result of their own doing. The result of this is the perception of backwardness that prevents companies from locating in states like Alabama which depresses local economies feeding back on the perception of backwardness, and so on and so forth.
I lived in Alabama for 6 years, the place has a lot of potential in terms of a vibrant economy and a rich art scene. However, while some regions change quickly, it’ll take generations for Alabama to realize this. (ask the NYTimes to release their per capita subscription rates, I bet Alabama is one of the lowest. Most people who live in Alabama have no idea we are talking about them.)
Lastly, the more apt regional comparison of the South is not the Northeast, it is the upper Midwest, a place filled with actual good people, not just people who act nice on Sundays. Bless your heart for writing this.
Prominently displayed in the photo of Lyndsey Gilpin's book collection is "The Literature of the South," by Thomas Young et al. This was the text for Professor Young's course of the same title which I took at Vanderbilt University in about 1966. Great stories, excerpts, and poems in this tome. They are best enjoyed in a rocking chair on the front porch of your cabin or plantation mansion, and with a glass of bourbon in your free hand.
2
This lifetime New Yorker has no problem with the South, just with the politicians that represent it.
4
You just now notice stereotypes of the South? I’ve read the awful stereotypes for 45 years in the Times and personally heard it when I lived in NYC. I’ve been complaining about it to the Times for 35 years and they always tell me it doesn’t exist. They claim they don’t stereotype. Incredible.
7
So who are the voters who continue their silence on abuse, racism, lies, corruption and gerrymandering?
2
I'm originally a yank but have lived in NC for the last 22 years (after about 5 years in Chicago and 10 years in Brooklyn). I too think the South doesn't really deserve its classic pigeonhole. Sure, life is slower here, and so is the adoption of new ideas, but that comes from contentment and the reluctance to change things that are already pretty good. Rather than racism I find the majority of the men are generally patient and enduring. The women have a wonderful mixture of being mild and magnanimous, without sacrificing strength. (And I've always loved that southern lilt.) Since the Trump victory and this national flood of hate we've had (at least according to the media) people have been particularly polite and helpful, as if they wanted to actively counteract it.
Just the other day I was wrestling some 90-lb bags of cement into my truck in the Lowes parking lot. This woman saw me and insisted to help despite my protest that, thanks, but I was completely able --but I couldn't stop her, and help she did with one end of the last bag, and the rub is that she looked to be about 7 months pregnant.
4
Nice try, Ms Renkl. I'm sure you're as sweet as summer tea, but sorry, stereotypes come from somewhere. I'm an interior westerner born and bred, so I've come across my share of conservatives, but in my sixty-six years none so ruthlessly bigoted and hateful as those I was forced to work with from the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. Just sayin'...
2
@Mark Merrill So you judge the entire region by a few people you happened to work with, who conveniently reinforced your existing prejudice?
4
A nice article that decries the typical southern stereotypes. And then you promptly photographed the author on her oh so southern porch swing. Cue Atticus. Cue Scout.
1
I plead guilty for making fun of Southerners. I know I'd should know better. I thank Margret Renkl for her article. The South has given the rest of the union a lot more than country music and Trisha Yearwood's cooking (and singing.)
Too bad I bear a grudge for giving us Evangelical Christianity, which is their revenge on the North for the Civil War. That's their negative contribution.
5
@Bobby from Jersey I believe the North was filled with evangelical Christians very early. Wasn't New Jersey settled (at least in part) by Puritans? Is not the old "Burnt Over District" in New York?
1
There seems to have been an enlightened South that has captivated us with language for the last 150 years. Nothing like losing a Civil War, being surrounded by poverty, and constant tragedy that a good brain can't put into descriptive prose. For the record, the most sincerely liberal people I know live in the South and they all own guns.
7
One of the greatest sales jobs in history was convincing the working man of the South that he had more in common with the godless slaver-traders and the soft-handed plantation owners than with his fellow working man in the North. And to this day there are too many who are convinced that they have more in common with the greedy Walton family than with a black NYC taxi driver. Fortunately there is also a sizable minority in the South who recognize differently, and understand that our commonalities far outnumber our differences.
8
You won’t find many “black cab drivers” in NYC
1
The insults get old. The complete lack of knowledge of history,awareness of the complexities in this history that are the warp and woof of the South and the ignorance of some of our most virulent critics. The mocking of our accents really is untenable. Most southerner’s ancestors have been in this country since the 17th century. We can speak English as proven by our production of some of the greatest American literature.
8
I'm from Massachusetts, now living in DC, and exploring the South is a joy. The architecture, the mountains, the beaches, the conflict - my boys and I go ever deeper, to strip away our bias, understand the past, and spread the word of lovely people, great food and much more. I, too, am tired of talking about my upcoming trip to Selma/Montgomery, with people agape and saying "Why?' Better they got in my VW and got educated themselves.
8
Feeling the love
I'm a lifelong Southerner. But we need a lot more change. Chiefly we need young people, decent people, educated people, to go into politics. Southern state houses are still full of good old boys. Change that and eliminate gerrymandering, and at least decency will have some sunlight in which to grow.
17
I've lived in California for 30 years, but most people will still hear my childhood in Mississippi when I speak. I've been asked: Why don't you get rid of that accent? This, in a place where almost everyone has an accent of some sort.
I have my reasons. First, if the fact that I'm from the South is a problem for you, we need to just move along from the outset (the get-go, you might say). Why waste time, I think, when someone already knows who I am after hearing me order coffee at Starbucks? Second, and a corollary to the first: Many Californians would be amazed at what some of their fellow citizens care to share with me when they hear my accent and see my skin color (Caucasian) and think they know my political leanings. I've had everyone from physicians to house painters be surprised to discover that they have not, in fact, found a fellow traveler.
Either way, my accent is like radar. It identifies people who judge on the basis of accent and skin color without knowing anything else. As for what I tell others about the South: It's everything that you've heard and nothing that you've heard. The new South has been coming for a long time, but I still like to be reminded that no place is one single thing. Thanks for this article.
24
Some of the most breathtaking racism I've encountered has been in California. That people who live in places with names starting with Los and La and El and San can be so hateful towards people who speak Spanish is endlessly baffling to me. Folks who don't like hearing a language that's been spoken in the region since the 1500s can go back to where THEY came from!
5
Another reassurance that "southern culture" isn't an oxymoron. Thanks. Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, Elvis Presley, William Faulkner and I remain grateful for the reminder.
6
I'm a bred and born Southerner who spent over 15 years living in California, Colorado, and New Hampshire. I always swore I would never return to the South, but with maturity came the realization that I had to leave the South in order to understand it by comparing it to the rest of the country. I have returned to my deep Southern roots where the people are kind and caring, the food is excellent, the rivers and air are cleaner than elsewhere in the US because we have lacked industrialization, and the arts are encouraged and celebrated. We deserve some of the stereotypes assigned to us but that is changing with new progressive political leadership and a growing disgust with Donald Trump and his swamp.
Thank you for standing up for the South. It is not a lost cause.
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@Mary Terry
You are 100% right. I've lived all over, but when I land back home in Ohio, the pace of life slows, traffic slows down, people smile, hold the door, and my family always welcomes us back.
One has to leave and travel and live around the country, if not the world, to really get a good perspective. I love the South.
It is something people who think life only exists in NYC and Los Angeles will never grasp. There are entire groups of people who enjoy a simpler life, not worried if the train will be late for their 90 minute commute. Once you're stuck in that hamster wheel for long enough, you move on.
@Mary Terry My experience of the South, and I will admit that I have not been south of Virginia, is that all you say is true IF you are white and Christian. "Kind and caring" as long as you are the sort of person they can care about. I know fellow Jews who have felt utterly out of place and unwelcome, with attempted conversions of their children in public schools and a lack of respect for our refusal to go to church on Sundays. And please do not be naïve about why you lacked industrialization. When you have a virtually limitless supply of enslaved human beings, why invest in machinery and unionized, expert laborers to work them? And then there are the hog farms...
1
@Ellen Tabor
"and I will admit that I have not been south of Virginia..." how would you feel if I wrote about the stereotypes of NYC while admitting that I've never been north of Philadelphia?
1
A native-born Virginian, I moved from California’s Napa Valley to Birmingham, Alabama, in early 1998, for a wonderful job with then-new COASTAL LIVING, a national magazine. My CA friends thought I would have to stop wearing shoes. But as they came to visit Birmingham, they fell in love with the wooded, hilly terrain; the extraordinary restaurants; the vibrant music scene; and my good fortune to live in one of the best medical cities in the world. Myriad trips to Alabama’s Eastern Shore and the Mobile-Tensaw Delta gave me a new “heart place” (and lifelong nostalgia, as I now live in the Southwest, in Santa Fe). My Birmingham-based magazine job kept me traveling to coastal areas across North and Central America and the Caribbean, but I always looked forward to landing at home—at the Birmingham, Alabama, airport. I led all my visitors to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, a destination for anyone who wants to see this human struggle laid bare. During my 17 years in Birmingham, I came to understand the bravery of a whole lotta black AND white people, who inched the movement many steps forward amid tragic chaos. And the literary culture of the city AND the state of Alabama is so rich and vibrant, with fine word palaces like the Alabama Booksmith Bookstore and The Hoover Library’s author-packed, annual writer’s conference. Thank you, Margaret Renkl, for your excellent guide to more Southern voices.
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@Susan Haynes
It has always been great to not have 1/32nd aka one drop of black African enslaved and separate and unequal ancestral blood in the old and new South of America. And that is also true of the old and the new North and East and West of America.
I have lived in NYC for over half my life but I spent my childhood in North Carolina. Many of relatives still live there, and while some are predictably Trump voters, many abhor him and are decidedly progressive. Unfortunately, the Voting Rights Act has been voided and the 2016 election was the first one since the 60's that didn't have those protections. Voter suppression and gerrymandering are realities, and without those pernicious maneuvers, the South would be far more blue.
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@Mal Stone sadly it seems the rest of the country has learned from the south how to disenfranchise voters.
First of all, I love Margaret Renkl’s columns. She brings something quite different, and very welcome, to this newspaper.
Next, thanks to Ms. Renkl for this informative and hopeful article. Of course, there are numerous beautiful, unique and precious things about the American South, and I hope those things never change. But there are also a few dark corners, which need light and some sweeping out. I'm heartened to see that is happening.
Not that the rest of the country doesn’t have problems. Sometimes I despair of the ugliness I occasionally see in some of the good people I live among.
Lastly I’ll mention another point Ms. Renkl raises: the extremely counterproductive habit of people in the Left to make sniggering, insulting remarks, and blanket assumptions, about whole groups of people they have decided to look down upon. Like Southerners. Of course, our President does that as well.
24
I found your criticism of a whole group of people, "the people of the Left" to be ironic. I am a native Mississippian. I am of "the people of the Left". Some southerners seem too proud of their ignorance but many are progressive minded. Being southern can be complicated.
4
Being a southerner who has lived along the Atlantic Shore and in Upstate New York, I have often wondered why others consider southerners economically distressed and uneducated. Only small pockets have these problems.
As to speech patterns, I find myself unable to understand the "drawl" of people from Michigan, Indiana, South Dakota, Texas, and several other areas, including rural parts of Mississippi. As for myself, many people believe I'm from PA or NY, and a woman in Toronto laughed incredulously when I convinced her that I really wasn't a native of her city.
Yes, I have seen dire poverty in MS and AL, but I'm convinced it was caused by the failure to deliver the "40 acres and a mule" to those to whom it was promised. And that was 150 years ago. Nothing has changed in some areas, but our urban cores are vibrant, wealthy, progressive, and growing in importance. One need only look to Charlotte, New Orleans, Atlanta, Houston, Biloxi-Gulfport.
The South is the place to be.......
11
@ultimateliberal - I have traveled all around the US and have only once heard an accent that I couldn't understand; thick cajun/creole. And I think it wasn't the accent that threw me, it was the unique vocabulary. Which I love. I've always been a big fan of regional accents and dialects, it makes us a more interesting country.
5
@Jim Mon chere, if you knew some French, you'd understand the other half of the words spoken in Cajun conversations. And English is spoken with a French accent, "tis" or "dis" for "this" There is no "th" sound in Cajun-speak. Does not exist in real French, as well. Hence, the garbled speech in South Louisiana. But you won't hear it in New Orleans. We sound like Philadelphians.
1
As a native Alabamian (Montgomery) who returns regularly, this is one of the constant cultural conversations of my life. First, I'm glad to see that there are so many active, intelligent people writing about the current state of the old confederacy. It's good to note where progress is occurs and to shine a bright light on it. The place is changing, but very slowly and only in certain locations. Note that a) most of these activists are located in relatively urban environments and b) much of the subject matter still has to do with old-South legacies like racism, toxic masculinity, the effects of poverty and the interactions of all of the above. I hope this apparent growth in real journalism reaches the disturbing number of people I encounter outside of the South that seem to think it's now a post-racial society. "It's not really like that anymore, is it?" is something I hear various versions of. Well, the fact is that, yes, it still is like that, especially if you go outside of cities into the countryside. There are bastions of open-mindedness in certain small towns (Waverly, AL pop 150 is a good example) but by and large that change hasn't manifested in the rest of the state or the region. It's still almost all about race and often by consensus. For example, Greensboro, AL (pop 2500) has active citizens whose efforts serve to unite people across color lines, yet still has two public high schools (black and white). These problems will persist for a long time.
24
Thank you for this informative article. I would add to your list of stellar publications Carolina Public Press. Carolina Public Press is an independent nonprofit news organization dedicated to nonpartisan, in-depth and investigative news built upon the facts and context North Carolinians need to know. While it started out focused on Western North Carolina, in 2018 it expanded to cover the entire state which is currently reeling from Hurricane Florence.
3
All very poetic and beautiful sounding sentiments about a changing south. Tell that to my 21 year old daughter who interned this summer in Atlanta. She said it was the first time in her 21 years that she felt so brown. The educated folks at her company were fantastic folks she loved, but far removed from the streets she walked out on to reach her home. She has been screamed at, been the only one to sit on a bus at one end while the rest of the white crowd clung to the other end, been refused service at a shop in the mall....there's more to this list. Needless to say, she is determined to come back to good old California, which may not be perfect, but seems eons ahead of the so called evolving south.
You can pretend that cool articles in magazines are an emblem of evolution. But till the ordinary southerner feels that they are a part of the UNITED states of America and not a cheated CONFEDERACY of states, no one is going to believe in any southern progress.
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@Meena
I am not sure the last time I read such a superb sentence - it conveys so much and rings so true no matter how folks try to deny it:
"But till the ordinary southerner feels that they are a part of the UNITED states of America and not a cheated CONFEDERACY of states, no one is going to believe in any southern progress."
12
@Meena
Gotta disagree with you on California. San Francisco is the first place I've seen people called racial slurs to their face. Racism is an American problem, not just a Southern problem. A bunch of virtue signaling liberals claiming otherwise in the Golden State doesn't make it less of a problem.
9
@Meena You just stereotyped people who live in the South as you complain about stereotyping. My wife’s family has 3 brothers who grew up in Minneapolis and Now live in SC. They are not racist. There are 2 masters degrees and a PhD among the three from Big Ten schools.
2
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
12
A true, lovely essay. BUT, I’ll believe in the new, new South when they start electing people other than southern fried racists and sexists. Just like here in Kansas ( NOT my native state ), the GOP has a noose around the necks of the Voters. And I use that phrasing very deliberately. The Civil War smolders on, but now it’s the GOP against the real, modern world. Seriously.
30
We wring our hands endlessly about Brooklyn gentrifiers turning Flatbush Ave from a black space into a hipster paradise (and far from the Jewish middle class "utopia" it was in the late 40s).
Yet the last truley unique American space is the south and our millennial children are doing what Reconstruction never could: turning Richmond, Chattanooga and Charlotte into a soulless carbon copy of any Midwestern city.
There is nothing quite so bitter as the slow, voluntary destruction of what once was so special into another street of identical "cool bars" frequented by identical Instagram-clamoring 25 year olds who in their desperation to be different have become just a new kind of conformist.
15
@Arturo
Charlotte has never been much to write home about, but I totally agree otherwise.
3
Let us be clear: a "Southerner" is one who was born and raised below Interstate 10.
@micheal Brousseau
What's your all-encompassing principles supporting this statement, Mr. Brousseau?
1
@micheal Brousseau You mean above I-10!
As a native Californian who lives in the Washington, DC metropolitan are you have my complete sympathy in regard to receiving incorrect, ignorant and overgeneralized stereotypical insults. I didn't grow up in LaLa land and I don't work with swamp creatures!
9
It is still acceptable to vilify the south as being the root of all evil in the U.S. I've read comment after comment from people outside the south who blame us for Trump, consider racism solely as a southern failing rather than a pandemic problem, and consider us all uneducated rednecks.
Culturally, the southern character on TV and in movies is almost always stupid and/or naive, or plays stupid so they can be amusingly underestimated, or is a brilliantly evil, bible-thumping, cruel criminal. When a southerner opens their mouths, we're assumed to be stupid and have to prove ourselves otherwise.
Look at a 2016 county-by-county election map and you'll see that like most of the country, it was cities and urban areas that voted against Trump, even in the south, and almost every other region in the U.S. voted for him. Pay attention to the incidences of violence against POC and gays, and you'll see that as much of it occurs outside the south as in it; it just doesn't fit the comfortable national narrative, "It's not us! It's the south!"
But yeah, we have nice magazines and good food, although I doubt either will go a long way toward disproving the negative stereotype.
Stupidity, violence, racism, bigotry and lack of education are not regional characteristics, they are overwhelmingly American as is our collective inability to read history and understand it. What publication do we have to combat that problem?
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@JL22
It's also common to hear the midwest (a.k.a. "flyover country" and "the heartland") labeled as a bunch of religious zealot republicans.
At every chance available I point out it's not much different than most states; rural citizens tend to vote republican, cities democrat, and suburbs a mix.
4
@JL22 "What publication do we have to combat that problem? " - the one you just posted in.
2
How appropriate that this article discusses the reality of racism in the north.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/27/opinion/jim-crow-north.html
1
I live north of the USA border. My wife was born in Nashville and has as good a science education as anyone. Our numbers with regard to things like evolution and the existence of the God of Abraham are reversed. Ninety percent of us consider global climate change established fact.
Our children are taught evolution over both long term and short term is the basis of all science from psychology to geology. Our teachers know religion other than its literary and historical components has no place in the classroom and has no place in the political arena. We still argue about how much open display of belief is unacceptable and whether hijabs and skullcaps in public should be tolerated. I understand the big debate right now is how big a crucifix can be before it is considered an outrage.
Like all societies our we consider beliefs, mores and customs the correct ones.
I grew up an Amerophile in an ultraconservative very religious Quebec and was taught to believe in the separation of church and state.
I am 70 years old and have lived many years in America. Everything on the other side of the border is the south and for me a nation that does not know its history or literature and is uninterested in knowing the truth is backwards. When I visit Nashville I know with whom I can discuss religion and politics but in upstate New York I know enough to keep my mouth shut until I understand the lay of the land.
2018 will be the year our government brought back the monarch butterflies.
1
Really enjoyed reading this. Thanks for the links!
Here's the disconnect I see here: Every literary magazine written by Southern, typically urban, progressives is written for just two audiences: other progressive Southerners and people outside the South who want to revise their attitudes about the region. They're not read by the average Southerner, being often linked to academia or arts councils that have little to do with the lives of the majority of people in the South. These journals may revise the image of the South for people who grew up in the region but have moved beyond it (typically through education), but they do little to speak to the reality of most lives in the South. Do they tell a different story than the one we're accustomed to hearing? Yes. But I'm not sure they speak to the experiences of most Southerners. Worse, I think the attempts to revise the image by emphasizing the lives and experiences of people "saved" from the ignorance of Southern life simply adds more resentment. People are being priced out of the cities in the South as progressives move in and "gentrify" the "redneck," "white-trash" areas, and the Hipster scenes of Nashville and Charleston and Savannah leave the impression that the South has changed. It hasn't. I've lived here all my life and attempts to intellectualize, gentrify, and "blue" up the region is part of the reason we have Trump and his followers. Well intentioned, but very unaware of its own privilege and the ripple effects of its own implied judgment.
11
This is great news. But it is state governments in the South that must change otherwise the region will remain the poorest in the country with the least educated population. For starters, get rid of those awful "right to work" laws that keep unions out of the political scene. Expand Medicaid. Responsibly fund pubic education. Publications addressing the intelligentsia of the South are nice. How about getting politicians to read them.
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@EMiller
Mr. Miller, I take issue with your harangue over "right to work" laws that purportedly (your take)"keep unions out of the political scene".
Are you suggesting that "unions" are not allowed to advertise in the South;or, possibly are not even allowed to operate in the South?
Right to work laws allows an individual to join, or not; and hold a job with out having to support political viewpoints the individual might not support (along with having money deducted by the union to pay for these ads).
Should you have money taken out of your check to support Mr. Trump's political point of view? Of course not, it is your money and YOU should decide what point of view you finance.
When one looks at the history of unions in America, many criminal elements are involved in unions, along with hard working individuals. Some of your money might be paying for some hood's 'no show' job. This is much the same as union 'fees' for political advertising one does not support, no?
Over broad statements are fool's fodder, and show a lack of intelligence. Unions ARE in the "political scene" in all the states.
1
@EMiller That's why I am working to elect Stacey Abrams Governor of Georgia.
1
@EMiller all of those issues are not only occurring in Southern states. Look across the midwest and some western states for other fine examples of state governments that are failing their people.
As a Northerner here’s what I see (and feel) day in and day out from the South: Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Paul Rand, Marco Rubio, James Lankford, John Cornyn, Bill Cassidy – and many other Southern members of Congress – led by the Darth Vader of American politics, yet another Southerner, Mitch McConnell, who together have unflinchingly supported the most corrupt president in the history of the country, and have tried to drag our nation back to the Jim Crow era. They have cut taxes for the rich, are dismantling our healthcare, destroying education, women’s rights, and the right to vote, and want to force the Bible down our throats. They deny climate change, but by god, are there with their hands out when the hurricane hits.
These Republican Trump sycophants, who have their collective heel on the nation’s throat, were overwhelmingly elected by Southern voters. If that is an indication of Southern “transformation,” and enlightenment we are in deep trouble.
It is going to take a lot more than a blossoming of Southern literature (which I love) to change the South. Ironically, it was the ultimate expression of Southern literature, Wm. Faulkner, who described the problem of the South in his famous phrase "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
The South is America’s problem. But America doesn’t need a past, it needs a future.
59
@Michael: As a liberal Southerner, here's what I see day in and day out: Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan, Duncan Hunter, Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Rob Portman, Chris Collins, and many other non-Southern members of Congress – led by the Darth Vader of American politics, yet another non-Southerner, Paul Ryan, who together have unflinchingly supported the most corrupt president in the history of the country, and have tried to drag our nation back to the Jim Crow era. They have cut taxes for the rich, are dismantling our healthcare, destroying education, women’s rights, and the right to vote, and want to force the Bible down our throats. They deny climate change, but by god, are there with their hands out when the hurricane hits
2
After the Supreme Court decided that the former Confederate states no longer had to have their elections scrutinized by Federal oversight....it took less than 72 hours for a majority of the former Confederate states to pass legislation suppressing the black vote.
The American South...is still "Whistling Dixie".
25
I'm sure there are pockets of enlightenment in the South and it is clearly wrong to judge anyone just because they come from there. But look at how your region voted in 2016. A little saving grace was the election of a democrat to the Senate in the special election.
2
@CBH Should we judge everyone in Wisconsin by the election and re-election of Scott Walker?
2
Yes, there are a few points of light here in the South. But those points of light exist only in hipster towns such as Durham, liberal towns such as Austin, or the alternative press. You will be hard pressed to find a Southerner who votes Democratic or who will not insist that the Confederacy was about states' rights, not slavery. And many of my highly sophisticated, highly educated, high society friends went absolutely berserk when Obama became president and did everything in their power to tear him down. I thought this would change as we Baby Boomers passed away, but their children are mostly tea partiers and in many cases even more willfully ignorant and belligerent than their parents. Sadly, the Old South still exists in most places.
130
@JCR - No, you would not be hard pressed to find a southerner who votes Democratic. In 2012 Barack Obama won nearly 40% of the vote in Alabama and in Tennessee, and nearly 50% in North Carolina. Don't be thrown off by those all-red maps. They understate the size of the political minority.
7
@JCR I am a southerner- just as you are and I vote democractic. The civil war was about slavery. You and I live in the same city but even here we seem to live in separate worlds...the south I live in is home to Fortune 500 companies, the world's busiest airport, a thriving gay community, diverse neighborhoods and good public schools.
8
@ JCR Wrong. I am a white Southerner. I am a Democrat. I have ancestors who died in the Civil War, which was fought over slavery. I do not live in a "hipster liberal" town - not sure there are any in South Carolina. I voted for Barak Obama, who was a pretty good President. (How I wish he were in the White House now!)
1
The South needs to re-imagine itself away from being anti-North & the ex-Confederacy. That is happening way too slowly, but it is happening. In-migration is probably the biggest factor, especially in Virginia and N. Carolia. Economic development in all the Southern states is most likely the next largest factor.
7
Thanks for all the terrific links.
5
Faulkner, the best argument for recuperating Southern culture, tried very hard until the end of his life to be identified as something other and more than just a southern writer.
Indisputably guilty and arguably reactionary, the South is afflicted by an acute version of the dangerous insecurity and subsequent defensiveness that afflicts the nation as a whole--America's America.
5
@Prof: As a sixth-generation (at least) Southerner I cop to the bitter, misguided history of my region — though I think it's quaint that you think it's primarily the South that is 'indisputably guilty and arguably reactionary.'
I've lived in Pennsylvania in the past — trust me, you've got a lot of the same problems and prejudices up there as you claim we Southerners have, and no less acutely (as proven by your post).
Plus I'll take our music and food any day!
9
What an excellent, resource-filled column, Ms. Renkl ~ Thank you!
I was born in Tennessee and raised in Alabama, lived elsewhere for some 30 years (although I did come back at least once a year, away long enough that the South looked exotic when I visited) and moved to Tennessee when I retired in 2011. It's good to be 'home'.
Paul Theroux, definitely not a Southerner, a renowned global travel author and novelist, wrote a fascinating book, "DEEP SOUTH Four Seasons on Back Roads," whose outside eyes and voice opened my own eyes to so much I had missed in the South. (But, like a Southerner, he can ramble a bit and sometimes bites). It added to my resolve to 'discover' my own unknown South.
Thank you again, for all your Opinions. It's great to have a fellow Tennessean's voice -- specially because it's a needed voice, one I can whole-heartedly agree with -- in the NYT.
10
The south is the front line of the political and culture wars of our times.
You can easily see the worst of us on display in Congress and other corridors of power. Apathy and poor turnout in 2010 has helped to further cement a legacy of gerrymandering and voter suppression. (And now Republicans have advanced southern-style gerrymandering and suppression across the nation.)
But thanks to Margaret Renkl for calling attention to the best. If you are a liberal in the south, you don't have the comfort of any "liberal bubble,", and it can be exhausting to work for change and stand up against a culture where Fox News has authority.
Many are working hard to turn the tide of ignorance and reaction in the south, and any and all support is appreciated.
56
I spent the first ten and a half years of my life in the South (Florida, Georgia, Kentucky and Virginia) when segregation and bigotry were rampant. My family then moved north, to Chicago suburbs and Long Island. My experience in the north was quite a contrast, especially on Long Island where the minority students in my high school were totally accepted, serving as officers of student government and succeeding academically. My Seven Sisters college has students from all over the world just as it idid in the late 50s and early 60s but with even greater numbers. My experience in Seattle was similar, with more and more diversity and less and less bigotry. Our biggest mistake was moving back to the Southeast for retirement. There were a few liberal minded people, but an amazing amount of bigotry even among the northerners who had moved there. I didn't like living where my vote didn't count in Federal elections and too many people still waved their Confederate flags. Being called a very offensive name by a supposed friend when I tried to disagree with a statement that HRC was a total crook was the final straw. I miss my citrus trees and Camellias but none of the people. And I don't miss the snakes and alligators either. As to diversity of population, there is a lot more of it up here than most people realize, especially in the educational and medical fields.
63
@Julie Carter: Sorry for your experiences; as a Southern liberal I know of what you speak, but you are painting with a broad brush. The South is not a monolith. An experience in Nashville, Atlanta or Charlotte is quite different from those in small towns or rural areas, though you might be surprised as the breadth of opinions in those places as well.
I guess moving to a state that's almost 95% white is a solution for some.
4
Readers of another publication with a similar bent, the High Country News, know Ms. Gilpin well. Nice to see her taking her talents back to where she was born and raised. There's definitely a need for them there.
It's easy to dismiss whole places as beyond hope, but even so, there's natural beauty worth saving everywhere, along with people who want to save it, and other people who also want to save it, but just don't realize it yet. Successful movements have been built on less than this.
7
There is still a deep vein of bigotry and racism here in the South. It might not be printed in the journals you quote. But it is here
23
@MrC are you saying that it is absent from the North, Midwest, Southwest, West Coast, and Pacific Northwest? If so, you are mistaken. The point isn't that the South isn't still flawed, only that there is more to it than simply racism.
10
@MrC, and there is still a deeper vein of bigotry in the North that is aimed at the South.
6
I don't think that Southerners' views of "east coast elites", etc are any more flattering that northern stereotypes of Southerners, so the stereotype doors swing both ways. The South has much to answer for. Its inability to get past slavery until at least the late twentieth century is one elephant. Also, the political right's turn against democracy, as exemplified especially by Newt Gingrich, rascally Georgian, and Mitch McConnell, Kentuckian through and through. Their political movement believes any trickery that can pass legal muster is justified regardless of how warped it leaves the electorate (one man, one vote be damned). Ethics simply doesn't enter into their thinking, which makes for a very fragile democracy. Voter suppression, extreme gerrymandering, who cares so long as it wins elections? Is it unfair to lay this at the feet of the entire South? Yes, this is admittedly a gross generalization, but I don't think it's a mischaracterization at the 10,000 foot view. Yes, Trump is most definitely NOT a southerner, but his base is, and so his political success springs from this region (I'd say Trump is a throwback to Tammany Hall, but the north does not publicly condone this kind of behavior, which matters).
The South also has made some very healthy and welcome contributions to American society and culture, but I won't get past some of the very destructive elephants until the South confronts them head on.
77
Trump's base is also solidly Midwestern. Don't blame it all on the South. Both the urban county I live in in Georgia and the coastal county I grew up in went for Hillary. We've got a super-qualified African-American woman running for governor here - and Florida has an impressive African-American man running for their governor. Roy Moore lost. Confederate statues are coming down right and left. There are no Confederate flags waving anywhere even close to my neighborhood, although I've seen one on I-16. There's some horrible history here, horrible. But there are some terrific souls, great universities and research centers, and churches endeavoring mightily to serve the poor. Diversity is a rich way of life for us. I spent part of my summer in Maine and I felt I was in a time warp, it was so lily white. Narrow minds exist on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line and both sides of the Mississippi. And we need to do all we can to enhance our American educational system, to elect politicians with a vision for it--and commitment to it.
26
@Contrary Mary Newt Gingrich was born in and grew up in Pennsylvania. He hasn't lived in Georgia in more than two decades; he's not a Georgian. And if Trump's support were limited to the South, you'd have a stronger argument, but he couldn't have won without the Midwest and many Western states. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, to name just two, were located well outside the South the last time I checked. All the evils you mentioned, including the demonization of elites, should be laid at the feet of the Republican Party, which is strongest in rural areas throughout the country, not just in the South.
1
You’re from the south you say and times have changed. But I don’t read a word about ray Moore or monuments to confederate slavers. Just a nod to a few black concerns like the white sabotage of reconstruction and the white supremacist decision to leave (largely black) prisoners in Florence’s path. Maybe that makes you enlightened in Alabama. And more’s the pity....
3
“Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?
‘I don’t hate it’ Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; ‘I don’t hate it,’ he said. I don’t hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the cold New England dark; I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!”
William Faulkner
absalom, absalom!
Everything has changed about the South; nothing has changed about the South.
7
We need a wall alright. Put it between me and the descendants of the vanquished who will never give up their hideous ideology.
27
@Revengeful Northerner
Yes, I agree we need a wall to protect us from the new wave of democratic socialists who lost out in the 1960s and are now trying to make a comeback...those are the "hideous vanquished" to whom you were referring, right?
Well I've been to Alabama, ain't a whole lot to see;
Skynyrd says it's a real sweet home but it ain't nothing to me.
Molly Hatchet -
Gator Country
3
@winthropo muchacho
Try Montgomery's Legacy Museum and Lynching Memorial...or Muscle Shoals and Florence. Take the bitter with the sweet.
@winthropo muchacho: Ironically Mr. Van Zant was from Jacksonville, FL, i.e. 'Gator Country.'
This is all very well and good -- truly. For the sake of the union, however, we're waiting for the voter suppression to end and some Southern electoral votes to go Democratic.
52
@David in Toledo Didn't ohio just purge thousands from the voter rolls without any due cause?
7
The South has produced some of this country's finest writers as this opinion piece attest, but until it denounces once and for all its hideous history of slavery and racism including taking down all statutes of "heroes" of the Civil War era, it is going to encourage detrimental comments about its ugly history and ongoing defense of what passes for culture but comes across as persistent social blindness. Many southerners I have met and the large number who hold positions of national power, including evangelical leaders, loudly find little to appreciate about the north and its "liberal elites," whatever that means.
A look at hard facts about the bottom rung educational ranking of public education throughout the south and its high percentage of sucking up federally funds to keep many regions' basic infrastructures afloat only serves to reinforce stereotypes.
15
Unfortunately true, the North hears the Southern accent as that of the primitives. To add to this is the origin of the anti-tobacco movement in the North that is still bent on the post-bellum revenge and desire to break the spine of the South's agricultural economy, it's cultivation of tobacco.
Really? That makes zero sense. Work on your knowledge of American history.
4
Yes the South is beautiful and home to a wide range of individuals, evidently including a number of articulate journalists who seek to upend the old stereotypes long associated with the region. In the real estate world there is a phrase denoting cosmetic change to a property to make it more appealing but implying no substantive change underneath: "put some lipstick on that pig." With respect to these journalists all you're doing is applying some lipstick to the South. Sorry, as long as the stereotypical Confederate flag waving, tiki-torch mob, slavery apologist, white supremacists hold sway the South will be stuck with them and there is no amount of lipstick that can cover them up.
34
In the spring of 2001 while visiting in Memphis, TN, I was invited by my host to attend Easter Sunday service at a local Presbyterian church. Following the integrated service, we walked my friends kids to their Sunday school classes at the very church. All the classrooms had the subject of the class on the classroom door for adults & kids to find their place. Among the classroom signs in the hallway, one caught my attention for the subject of the Sunday classroom lesson on the door read: "Islam & other cults."
13
I'm a fan of southern authors, while appalled with the south's collective neglect of public education. Please read "American Nations" by Colin Woodard to understand the south's cultural orientation to withhold proper education for all children.
7
I am thrilled to read this article! As a fan of Bitter Southerner, I have poked around the web looking for additional southern sites - and you did all the leg work for me.
I grew up in Indiana and Michigan, and have lived in Georgia and Tennessee - permanently in Tennessee, I believe. Just as I resent some southerners who decry anyone who grew up above the Mason Dixon as Yankees, I also bristle at northerners who assume anyone born below it as uneducated bigots.
My favorite Southerner is one who embraces the heritage - warts and all - with open eyes. Thanks for giving us additional sites to learn more about ourselves, both Yanks and Grits!
17
As a North Carolina transplant from the NY metro region, I can assure you the "hick-South" as I viewed it from NY is anything but. To be sure, you have your pockets of Snuffy Smith Appalachia, but comparable insularity exists in many of NYC's inner city areas. NC's Triangle region, i.e., the area delineated by Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, is a hotbed of progressive politics with world-class educational institutions like Duke, UNC and NC State. And, as I've come to appreciate, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, etc., all have similar stories.
And the people down here are friendlier; if getting honked at, which happens the minute my wife and I pull into LaGuardia's surrounding traffic -- you all know what I'm talking about -- is any parameter, then the South has it over NY, hands down. We New Yorkers have a hubris when we compare ourselves to anyone else, and not necessarily well-earned.
37
I have lived in Boston, New York City and Atlanta, and I find the latter the least racist of the three and least ethnocentric of the three, despite its tortured racial history and that incendiary run-in with Gen. Sherman. I always blamed racism in the South on a lack of proper access to education. I was shocked when I lived in Boston and New York City to find well-heeled and well-educated peers more racist than their Southern counterparts. And there was a huge difference -- the Boston and New York folks seemed completely unaware of either their racism or ethnocentrism. Racism in their myopic view had been all boxed up some time back and sent south.
46
@John Jabo
I also lived in Boston, having moved there from Ohio. I moved to Louisiana and taught in the slums New Orleans after Katrina. Your insights into the racism and ethnocentrism of Northerners, particularly those in New England, and their refusal to acknowledge it are nearly exact replicas of mine.
7
@John Jabo is correct about Boston but you must have met the wrong folk in NYC, my home town. Moving to Boston after 25 years in Europe for family reasons I was and am absolutely astonished at race relations in this city and surround. The city could not be more segregated if it were under an apartheid law, the school system offers - as far as I can tell - no hope for families of color and the worst part is no one in government or academia seems to notice and/or care. So sad and so hypocritical.
2
I am reminded of a Marlette cartoon from the 70s which depicted a black child being stoned while heading to his school bus in Boston. He was whistling "Wish I was in the land of cotton." It's not just the South that can be very racist.
2
Simple minds want to simplify the world down to a level they can comprehend. Beautiful minds enjoy the diversity and complexity and never ending surprises of the actual world. I hope you will have made a few simple minds a little more beautiful.
21
@Ivan
I'll guess that you have a beautiful mind. But I grew up in the Midwest, was educated in New England and now live in the South. Through experience, I can relate to the pretentiousness of Boston, the rat race that is New York city and the insouciance of Mamou, Louisiana. And I have a very simple mind.
1
Perhaps it's time that we all accepted that those who disagree with us politically aren't necessarily unenlightened and downright dumb.
25
Hi Margaret - nice article - I do like the Bitter Southerner - they have some good stories. But the worlds view of the south is still related to it's war to maintain slavery over 150 years ago, and then 100 years later, the white southern fight against civil rights and voting rights. Your article doesn't touch on the root cause of the prejudice toward southerns. Heck - it seems like every bad guy on TV show has a southern accents - and that's not true. Even Victor Hugo Les Miserables ended with the antagonist going to America to be slave traders. That's how the world views us.
And when I went to college and worked in Alabama in the 1970's, I was amazed how the discussion of civil rights could not be breached. And definitely don't mention what is written on the Confederate Memorial in Montgomery - "the knightliness of the knightly race who since the days of old have kept the lamp of chivalry in heats of gold".
Crazy stuff - and it's still there. It would be nice to see an article by the Bitter Southern on that - they would skewer it.
4
@eet57 And while you're at it, how about an article on the brutal child labor practices in the north? Complete with pictures?
2
Having lived in South Carolina, as a teenager, way back in the late 1940s, I am astounded when I visit there now. Not only is the characteristic regional accent all but gone, particularly amongst urban young people, but the area is booming by comparison to the Mid-Atlantic where I now live. In reverse of the situation that I knew back then, many younger members of families whom I know here are now migrating south both to college and in search of better employment.
I also remember the days of mandated racial segregation. Those who are not old enough to remember that have absolutely no idea of how different things are today in Southern cities. Yes, we could do better, and I feel confident that we will. You have to witness the changes that I have witnessed to fully understand how far we have come since back then.
Let me put it this way. I also had some familiarty with South Africa in the times of Apartheid. It was less segregated than the South Carolina that I recall from my youth.
15
I am a native Southerner, a Christian, and a liberal - viewpoints which I do NOT find conflicting. I am proud to be from and of the South; it is a wondrous, full of gorgeous places and incredible history. It is a vital living place and its people have many stories to tell. Just ask Flannery and Eudora and William F and others...
Southerners are smart and frequently educated (certainly about their own region). Yes, there is racism and ignorance. But there is also welcoming and innovation and real grace.
Thank you for shedding some light on this.
24
Brilliant defense of the South, one of our most beautiful regions and full of (mostly) very good people.
Except that it comes from Alabama.
2
I was born in NC and now live in TN. Thank you for this insightful article which helps us to understand the nuance at play within the South. The resources you provided are very helpful too. Our region is one of rich history, culture, literature, and art. I appreciate the dedication to covering and understanding the South with humility, integrity, honesty, a justice-orientation, and empathy. We face both unique challenges and opportunities. An exciting time to be in the South.
8
Thank you for this article. We are part-time residents of Hilton Head Island. I intend to look at these publications you discuss. My knee jerk reaction had been to dismiss the South as hopeless in tackling the many problems we face today. I need some new perspectives.
8
I have suffered from North/South whiplash all my life. Born in Philadelphia, Pa., raised in Miami, educated in Tallahassee, I lived again in center city Philly and the Catskills in NY and then NY City. I camp throughout the South for over a month each year since my retirement. My dialect is all over the map, literally, and I am acutely sensitive to the attitudes and lifestyles I have experienced in my 70 years. I am no longer shocked by the perceived prejudices of Southerners or Northerners nor do I find any differences in the exclusionary attitudes that pervade folks of all locales. Self interest-survival-has always been the watchword no matter what area of the country you come from and those interests have been massaged and milked for all they are worth by the politicians and the wealthy. The internet has helped exacerbate the fears everywhere. There is no magic solution to the misunderstandings and myths that surround the perceptions of North&South. It is up to individuals to judge each person they meet, each situation they are given to deal with... People are people, and while I have little beyond my own hopes to lean on, I know in my heart we will either all sink or swim together. There is no New South.
5
I look forward to each of your columns eagerly and particularly enjoy the range and depth of your interests.
The journals you write of interest me in part because I am a displaced southerner but also because they provide hope for new avenues in journalistic inquiry.
Thank you for this excellent resource.
16
Interesting article, but I have often wondered why Kentucky is included in the category for southern. I live in Alabama and visit Louisville quite often and while I think very highly of that city is has a completely different culture from the South I know. It really reminds me more of St. Louis where I grew up.
I think Kentucky may simply be included in the South because of their wonderful song.
2
@a reader: I agree. I've actually lived in St. Louis and Louisville (when I was quite young) and now live back in my hometown of Nashville. I love Louisville but it doesn't feel like a Southern city (unlike, say, Lexington does) — it feels closer to Cincinnati or Indianapolis.
1
Southern literature may be new, but the south is as old and racist as ever.
Evangelical Christians are a unique blend of self righteousness and ignorance of the real world. They identify everyone else as 'other'.
Schools are segregated especially in the black belt of the deep south.
Yes, there may be more pockets of modernism in the south but the Battle Flag still waves on.
100
I recognize in myself a prejudicial reaction to certain varieties of Southern accent, especially what I think of as the more Appalachian, Mountaineer/Volunteer sounds--that they aren't scientifically literate. I wish some of my physics or math professors had come from that region. Just the sound in my head of a lecture on quantum mechanics from a person with that sort of accent seems humorous/ridiculous, when of course there's no Earthly reason it should be.
1
Have you ever heard of Oak Ridge, TN? It is located at the base of the Appalachian Mountains.
9
@Hugh Hansen
Have you ever heard of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)? It recently discovered gravitational waves. It's in Livingston, Louisiana.
2
@Hugh Hansen I hear they got them some rocket scientists down in Huntsville, Alabama.
Finally! Thank you for this article!
Many of us Southerners who protested against our peers being killed in Nam for nothing and who fought for Civil Rights in our youth have remained "subversives " all of our lives. For many of us, it cost us our families' acceptance. I left the South as soon as I turned 18! However, I came back. The lack of acceptance of the narrow-minded Southerner was much kinder than the lack of acceptance of those in the North and West toward someone with a Southern accent. Like how trump regards Southerners, I was regarded as if I was ignorant, backward and "slow."
I love the flora and fauna of the South and sure, there are ignorant, even willfully ignorant, people here. There are many poor people in the South who suffer from generations of malnutrition which affects DNA -a possibility of the poor who live anywhere in the USA.
What breaks my heart is to see people moving in who treat us as if any city or area of the South was nothing until they arrived. I avoid them just as I avoided loud Ugly American tourists who ridiculed the working Roman drainage system of a village where I lived in France.
27
Please ask those folks that you describe to move North. There are communities in Wisconsin. Michigan and Pennsylvania that can use them.
4
Thanks for this valuable overview. However, no review of southern progressive publications is complete without recognizing the grand-daddy of them all: The Texas Observer has been the stalwart standard of southern liberalism since 1954. At no time its 64-year existence has the TO done other than speak truth to power.
8
I love this article. Thank you.
2
Southerly is committed to teaching that the south "stands to bear the brunt and lose the most from the effects of climate change" to a citizenry that year in and year out sends - and returns - to Washington those who swear that climate change is a myth.
And, that's the plan? Really????
27
I can understand and sympathize with your feelings. I grew up in Atlanta during the 50's and the 60's. We've been waiting for the New South for a long time now, at least since Henry Grady raised this as a meme over a century and a half ago. For Grady it was a ploy to get northern investment while still promoting white supremacy. When I came to Atlanta in 1955, everything was segregated, segregated restrooms, water fountains, the sections of restaurants and public transport. Blacks couldn't even try on new clothes at Rich's without buying them first. But Atlanta had progressive Ivan Allen as mayor and the New South was coming. That's what I told myself even though they burned a cross in the front yard of a newly moved-in Black family. They had the audacity to buy a house was down the street from my high school. I believed in the New South even after the Atlanta Constitution, supposedly progressive, criticized the Nobel committee for giving Martin Luther King, an Atlantan, the Nobel prize. The editorial claimed King was too pushy about civil rights. I believed in the New South even though members of my cub scout troop openly approved of the bombing of a synagogue in Atlanta. I believed in the New South although we elected Lester Maddox and went for George Wallace for the presidency. For nearly seventy years I've waited for the New South. I still have hopes it will come., but I won't believe it any more until I see it.
104
@Jay Masters
I enjoyed your rant. Regarding the Nobel Prize, people say that Obama won the Nobel prize before he did something to deserve it. More perspicacious people think he achieved the Nobel by managing to get elected President. Nobody thought that could be done but he managed to slip through the cracks and over the hurdles to an incredible achievement.
On top of that, he was a good President, and the irrational opposition to him showed its face to all.
10
"Well, that was 1984, you’re probably thinking. Today we don’t judge people by their accents any more than we judge them by their skin color. People know better now.
Except they don’t. The political polarization of our own day means that a region like the South, a red voting bloc in national elections, is a source of continual liberal ridicule, no matter the subject."
It would be equally wonderful if Southerners would not look down their noses at "liberals" and position everything the liberals say as"ridicule".
161
@Laurel Hedges But it is not a "red voting bloc." Just like the rest of the country the voting divide is between rural/urban-college. The South has the same diversity of opinions that the rest of the country has.
17
@Laurel Hedges: This Southern liberal doesn't care if I'm looked down upon — there are intolerant people everywhere (I was viewed as suspect by a lot of conservatives when I lived in Pennsylvania too).
I'm guessing a lot of the comments from Oregon, Washington, Connecticut, etc., are from people who haven't lived in the South or visited recently (if ever).
We might move a little slower (it IS hot down here) and be unerringly polite, but we have a wide range of views and can be surprisingly open to things — even liberals!
2
@Laurel Hedges: It would also be wonderful if progressives stopped dichotomizing "liberals" and "southerners," as if the two terms must be antagonistic towards one another. One look at the 2016 electoral map will show you that Democratic strongholds exist in the South; in fact, they strongly resemble the national map as a whole. Unfortunately, gerrymandering and voter suppression have kept minorities and white liberals from exercising their full political power. Take a look at the gubernatorial platforms of Stacey Abrams in Georgia, or James Smith in South Carolina, or Andrew Gillum in Florida, and I think you'll find that progressive values exist nationwide. We're all in this together, northerners, westerners, and southerners, and we have a lot more in common than you might think.
3
Yeah, my roots in the Carolinas go way back. The South was once the focal point of Progressive thinking among the enlightened nobility, if you forget about that niggling bit of policy regarding their "Help"...
But beauty and ugliness lie side by side there. Hopefully less of the latter as the old ways die out.
5
My negativity towards the South stems from how poorly those in power treat the people, especially minorities and the poor. Republicans have so restricted voting rights so these same lousy leaders keep getting elected.
104
@Debbie I understand your negativity, and voter suppression and the restricting of voter rights should be challenged at every turn. However, the South is not unique in having lousy leaders. Case in point from just a few months ago in your home state.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/us/politics/supreme-court-upholds-ohi...
1
People express shared values in the selection of their elected representatives. A look at the behavior and temperament of the elected officials selected by Southerners and actively supported by Southerners may be the reason that Northerners express dismay, disbelief and disregard. It is especially galling to be on the receiving end of Southern dispersions and whining when it is Yankee tax dollars from CA, NY, NJ and PA that keep Southerners from losing their farms and starving.
30
@Moderate: You must add the Midwest and the Plains states to your equation — it's not just the South.
2
@Moderate You may want to revisit your prejudicial assumptions that CA, NY, NJ and PA are keeping us Southerners from "losing our farms and starving". Admittedly this article is from 2015, but per the Business Insider, the region that contributes the MOST to the economy is the Southeast at 21.3%. Sure, you can slice this data up a few different ways, but there's no denying what the South as well as all parts of the country contribute to the American economy.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-each-state-contributes-to-the-u...
Thank you Ms. Renkl! I have lived in the South all my life and have seethed while also seeing some validity in portrayals of Southerners. Yes we have our classic rednecks but we are also a diverse people. I never thought I would ever see a president of our great country disparage Southerners as Trump has done. Believe it or not but educated, liberal Southerner is NOT and oxymoron!
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@Sarah Robbins
Amen sister!
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This article and the highlighted publications are all well and good, although it is my surmise that the kinds of Southerners responsible for the caricatures associated with southern attitudes ("Backwardness, Bibles, Bigotry") do not subscribe to or read them. Behind all stereotypes and caricatures are at least some kernels of truth, even if they are covered by the pages of upscale, creative writing.
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@Jason Shapiro
"... the highlighted publications are all well and good, although the kinds of Southerners responsible for the caricatures associated with southern attitudes ("Backwardness, Bibles, Bigotry") do not subscribe to or read them. "
But they sure show up at the voting booth, don't they?
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@Jason Shapiro So, if stereotypes are based in truth, I can safely assume that every person in Queens, for example, is a modern-day Archie Bunker or (shudder) Donald Trump?
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If the south is worthy of the ridicule it receives why do so many northerners keep coming here to live? Its got to be more than the weather. Recently I’ve visited Boston, New York and cities across California. In these places you can go for extended periods of time without seeing or interacting with a black person. There is no real diversity in those places. In Atlanta we have lots of diversity. Basically we all live together in harmony. We are a melting pot in every way. And we are most certainly southern. If you want to see what diversity looks like come to Atlanta. Just don’t stay after you write your opinion piece—we’re running out of room.
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@BigG
Nope, it’s the warm weather. Want real diversity? Try the Washington, DC metro area. Moved from there to lovely Amelia Island, Florida, for the weather. Left because of the outright nastiness of Nassau County.
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@BigG "Recently I’ve visited Boston, New York and cities across California. In these places you can go for extended periods of time without seeing or interacting with a black person." Are you talking about cities or metro areas? Suburbs are often segregated everywhere, but if you're talking about cities, as someone who lived in New York for 16 years, I don't believe you.
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@BigG
Well, you know, if Stacy Abrams wins the GA governorship, I just might believe you. But until then...
Bless your heart for trying to get these Yankees to educate themselves about our value and our complexities.
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We Northerners have rad about the “New South” for decades, but then we read about voter suppression of blacks, Roy Moore, fights over Confederate statues, low literacy rates, closing abortion clinics, and how our tax dollars subsidize their anti-government states. I’ll be interested in modern Southern literature when they stop fighting the Civil War.
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The urban South has become more diverse and progressive than it was 30 or so years ago when I moved here (and George Wallace was still governor). The rural South, no so much. Of course, you could say that about other regions of the country, too. For over a hundred years the New South has been a bit like Godot--it's expected, we keep waiting, but it never quite shows up. If Stacy Abrams gets elected governor in Georgia in November, maybe I'll finally become a believer.
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@Matthew You know Roy Moore lost right?
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@Matthew Just curious as to if you've recently spent any significant time "down here." I think we all need to travel more to other parts of the country to understand each other better--to undemonize each other. I also think someone needs to take Trump on a tour of the national parks. If he saw how beautiful and vast they are, perhaps he'd protect them better. Roy Moore lost. And in my friend and family community of thousands, I don't know one soul who is still "fighting the Civil War." That's just a stereotype.
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Thank you so much for mentioning Bitter Southerner. It is indeed in the “Atlanta area”...specifically located in Clarkston, Ga...the most diverse community in the South. I am so very proud that our young sees our future...and it is glorious...our past - thanks to them is getting smaller in our rear view mirror. Make no mistake...I am a South Georgia/North Florida Cracker...I just see the potential of this region to be so much more than its past. Don’t forget Janisse Ray...Ecology of a Cracker Childhood.
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The author of this article might enjoy taking a look at a precursor to these publications, Harry Golden's "Carolina Israelite." Published from 1942 to 1968, the newspaper promoted civil rights and other liberal causes, mainly in the form of essays by its publisher. Golden's book, Only in America, collects some of his favourites.
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"The only difference between the South and the North is, in the South they wear white bed sheets. In the North they wear gray flannel suits." -- Dick Gregory about 1965 in Albion MI.
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Dear Ms. Renkl,
I enjoy Gardens and Guns, having found it in my financial planner's office. She's a gun aficionado and I hate the things. But northerners, especially Black northerners and probably many who live in the south will continue to look down on the region because of its stubborn cling to the confederate flag, not to mention its apparent racism -- writ large, not individually, per se.
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@newyorkerva: This Southerner has no use for guns or the confederate flag — and many of my family, friends and neighbors feel the same way.
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Forgive me but history passed this hopeful process when Ralph McGill donated his famous Southern Literature collection to Emory University and not to Atlanta University. Writers, such as Robert Penn Warren and Flannery O'Connor, certainly painted the South as irredeemable and forever flawed making works by McGill (The South and the Southerner and The Flea comes with the Dog) seem Pollyanna. The Southern flaws seem especially evil today with MAGA redneck hats everywhere. Now, poor schools and opioid addiction and extraordinary numbers of sexual deviancy convictions in the South have delayed any hope of redemption. Guns, Christianity in name only and large numbers of Southern men on disability speaks to cultural issues of deep, everlasting flaws endemic to everything Southern. The South needs reconstruction and this time truly radical reconstruction. A new brain trust in Oxford, Mississippi or Durham, NC, will do nothing to cure Southern pathos. Ralph McGill could describe a dusty country road as something beautiful but in reality there was nothing there to note.
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@terry brady Not sure what your sense of authority is based on, especially since you are in New Jersey. Here, in southern Tennessee, I don't see that many MAGA hats. Sure, there are some, but probably just as many in NJ. Otherwise, the geography is beautiful, with lots of streams, rivers, lakes, and open land with 2d (and some1st) growth forests. I lived many decades in southern California and know that things everywhere can stand some improvement. Stereotyping a whole region is narrow-minded and ignorant.
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@terry brady
It’s easy to understand your antipathy and bitterness towards the South given the slow moving disaster of your demographics and economy. For six consecutive years, according to the Bergen Record, your state has had “the dubious distinction of ranking as the No. 1 state residents have left behind.” A lot of them have decamped to my home state fleeing exorbitant property taxes, corrupt local townships and entrenched municipal unions that have a stranglehold on public coffers. That’s why us Tar Heels are thrilled over your new governor, Phil Murphy, with $1.5 billion in new taxes proposed in his first budget (which will come on top of the third largest overall tax burden and the country’s highest property tax collections per capita.) Is it any wonder that in the decade ending in 2016 your state’s economic growth registered an anemic 0.1?
We can hear the revving of U-Haul trucks all the way down here.
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@John Jabo
John -- those in the Garden State spell it "Klassy."
We as Americans have far more in common than we don't.
When I travel around this country I encounter rednecks everywhere. They may not be called rednecks and they may have different accents but they are still equivalent to what non Southerners think of when they think of Southerner "rednecks".
Jethro Bodine and Gomer Pyle and Eb from Green Acres are all fictional characters and southerners laugh along just like everybody else. But the media and our popular culture has been making fun of those "redneck Southerners" (even though there are just as many if not more rednecks in Iowa or Ohio than say metropolitan Atlanta) for at least a century so we now have a cultural narrative has been created.
And if the south is supposed to be so backward then why are most of the great American writers from the south?
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@William - and why are so many people from "up north" moving South especially to metro Atlanta? The suburbs are full of transplants that voted Red not Blue - not necessarily the natives' fault that the federal election didn't turned out as planned.
Yep, there are some awesome people and organizations in the deep red south.
They are, however, a tiny minority. The reality is a hatred of the poor that simply isn't matched in America. The calculus of most voters is if it's good for them it's bad for me. We're decades from cancelling school to prevent integration and filling in pools, but we're smack in the middle of an era where our best elementary school has a third of kids in portables, we're a title 1 city -not a few schools, every school. Until recently our highways were unsafe at any speed, until you reached the city limits. Our white flight neighbors, Williamson County, have made public school extracurricular activities pay to play. There are many other problems. >90% of our parks budget goes to golf courses and we need bike lanes throughout the city. These are problems many cities face, but we are poor and choose to spend our meager resources on the well to do.
What is most disturbing is the fields where we truly are leaders: childhood poverty, obesity, diabetes, opioid prescriptions and addiction, churches, and Marsha Blackburn.
Latte drinking prius drivers are not the seeds of change. When we ship our kids off for college on the coasts, we know it's a one way trip. I meet transplants all the time who fled the deep south in the sixties and landed here. Their kids are fleeing Nashville. TN is falling further behind each year and headed for third world status.
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@Winston: Wow... you describe a Nashville I don't recognize and is truly dystopian.
'Their kids are fleeing Nashville?' No one is fleeing Nashville — they're coming in droves every day (too many, I feel - but that's 'progress'). There's a real shot at putting Phil Bredesen in the Senate — I don't think Tennessee is headed for 'third world status.'
I was born in Nashville and have lived here most of my life (though I've lived 'up north' and in Asia for a time) and the Nashville of today is - warts and all - light years ahead of the Nashville where I grew up.
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Another "New South'? How many New Souths will we have to have. To us Yankees, the South is one step forward and one step back.
The stark differences between the North and South were, in my opinion, depicted in the movie My Cousin Vinny, which I watch on TV whenever it is on. I always root for the real Americans -- Mona Lisa Vito, Vinny Gambini, Billy Gambini, and Stand Rothenstein -- the real Americans.
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“My Cousin Vinnie” is more nuanced than you suggest. The district attorney, the sheriff, and the judge (exquisitely portrayed by Fred Gwynne) manage to reach the right result despite a series of unlikely coincidences worthy of Shakespeare. It would have been all too easy to play the southern stereotype for cheap laughs.
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When my parents moved from upstate N.Y. To North Carolina in 1958 we went to the local high school football game. Before the start the teams marched onto the field with a confederate flag and with the band playing Dixie. No National Anthem! We felt like were in a foreign country.
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@Hank Hill
But Ms Vito, Vinny, Billy, and Stan spoke the King's English -- Kings County (Brooklyn), NY.
Remember, it was Mona Lisa Vito who broke the case with her knowledge of transmissions of different vehicle that even the State engineer had to concede she was right. In any case, I still enjoy the movie.
I was raised south of the M-D line, but I don't suppose Fairfax Co., Va really counts as the South. Most of my life I've lived in Illinois and now New Mexico. A few years ago I was job hunting, and a great opportunity came up. But when I mentioned to my wife that it was in Alabama, that ended the discussion. I really miss mockingbirds, though.
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@Jeremy Paine The Yellowhammer is our state bird. The mockingbird of book fame is really just a myth.
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The mockingbird is the state bird of Tennessee though!
Ms. Renkl, just a note to say I'm really glad you're now a regular contributor to NYT, and really appreciative of your generally positive, uplifting messages. Looking forward to reading you for years to come.
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Margaret, I enjoy your columns very much. Please keep them coming. As a Yankee who has lived in the South for 40 years, I can say that there is much to be learned and enjoyed from this region even though I disagree with the local political and religious beliefs. I feel that understanding and appreciating the South is critical to moving our country ahead to more compassionate and generous policies.
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"Reading the New South"
Faulkner, Lee, Wolfe, Twain, Mitchell, Grisham to name a few, are authors most Americans cherish. Books and authors transcend borders everywhere, North, South, East, and West. It's not the books that divide the North and South, heck they bring us closer together.
It's the politics and our history that continues the great divide along the Mason-dixon line. And today with our current President it only makes it worse. And until Trump leaves office it will not improve.
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@cherrylog754
Please put T.S. Stribling on your reading lists. He was a best seller in the 1930's and won the Pulitzer Prize. He doesn't fit in with the writers you mention, but is the go-to source for what it was like in the nineteenth century for the white people, whose relatives included black people. He lived in Tennessee.
@cherrylog754 And many of the best writers live now or have lived and are enshrined in Mississippi. MS has always been known for its famous and talented literary giants. Want to major in English with the career goal of becoming a famous novelist? Ole Miss is the school of choice.
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i'm from the east coast. We don't think you are dumb or hicks. and I cant speak for others but my problem when I am in the south is that I still hear from educated intelligent people notions that continue to terrify me (they just dont like to work for example about blacks many of whom hold down several jobs) and their willingness to shortchange their interests to vote in candidates that play the abortion card. My problem with the south is not southerners but with their politicians who certainly since 2016 have participated in the destruction of everything we thought we stood for, possibly irreparably (the supremes for example). One of my closest friends is from the south; I have lived in the south (of course that was when there were separate drinking foundtains) but my experience of their politicians is that not only do they not represent any interest of mine but that they actively seek to destroy those interests. I lived in Austin when the dirty 12 was in the state legislature. I remember Barbara Jordan and other Texas democrats, populists in the best sense of the word, with reverence. Those days are in the distant past and it is quite likely that the demographic changes in the US will impact the south a day for which we all fervent hope.
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How can you have no problem with southerners when it is they who elect the very politicians with whom you do have problems?
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Excellent redress of kneejerk stereotypes of the South or any region for that matter (the “socialist” Northeast for example). The question is impact: To what extent are the publications described subscribed compared to circulation of Beck’s “The Blaze” and other right wing publications?
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Interesting - thanks. Stereotypes tend to exist and last because of ignorance born out of lack of contact. And, yes, the stereotype of the south held by many in the north is that it is backward and filled with bigoted hicks. Of course, the stereotype of northerners heard from some in the south is often that we are elitist and not "real Americans."
Hopefully, both views are changing over time as folks travel more and move around more. I lived in South Carolina for a couple of years in the 1970s and found the local folk to be generally gracious and more like me than not (though I wasn't sure what to do with it when people said to me, "Oh, your a Yankee.")
It is extremely unfortunate that we currently have a "leader" whose inclination is to perpetuate rather than challenge stereotypes. My hope is that the country will continue to grow despite him.
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@Anne-Marie Hislop — “Stereotypes tend to exist and last because of ignorance born out of lack of contact.” This was certainly the case when I moved from Oregon to Georgia in 1987. When we first moved there, I (a white woman) feared that I’d be chastised by the authorities for socializing with African-Americans! (I’d seen a number of documentaries, including scenes of Bull Connor and his hosing down black people with high-power water hoses.) During my quarter-century in the South, I found many progressive white people, a huge number of politically savvy and active black citizens, and gracious and loving treatment by both races. When my husband and I retired back to Oregon, I found myself missing the gracious easy relations we’d found even among strangers passing by on the sidewalks.
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@Anne-Marie Hislop Stereotypes often persist because they are true. Lack of and open mind and lack of education make these particular stereotypes persist. Racist and Segregated., no matter how polite and gracious many southerns are.
Yes, those not from here are 'others' and the worst of the others are still Yankee.
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Stereotypes are excuses for many things. Their creation and dismissal (feigned or real) are an eternal business. It helps to have all of them at one table.
This is wonderful; thank you for this guide to good reads by and about the South. I, too, have been aware of the many publications about the area. The challenge of the glossy print pubs like Garden & Gun and Bitter Southerner is to take a frank look at what’s happening in the South while still maintaining a healthy base of advertisers and increasing circulation. Walking that thin line is a true challenge. Take a look also at “Good Grit,” a magazine out of Birmingham.
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Thank you for this! These are all great journals and valuable voices.
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Thank you for this article. Though I'm a northeast native, I lived in MO for 10 years and took advantage of the location to explore the border and southern states. There is a lot about the region that I miss, esp. the natural beauty, food, and the arts. While differing cultural values were often apparent, I hope I never looked down on the residents who always generously shared their communities and culture with my family.
I look forward to reading some of the publications you suggest.
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I grew up in Pennsylvania and now live in New York, but have always found the South a beautiful place and enjoy Southern literature. Thank you for this piece.
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My Southern roots grow over 3 centuries deep and I just returned from France a few days ago. There I was correctly identified as "conasse" or what is more vulgarly called "coonass" in eastern Texas and Louisiana, because I speak perfect but distinctly accented antique French, as my ancestors did when they arrived in Louisiana in the 17th through 19th centuries. Not every Southerner is an Anglo Baptist or Methodist, either. No other region of the USA polarises us as the South does because its inhabitants couldn't resist the challenge of taking on the established Federal government. There is hope in this for our current beleaguered situation as we question Federal sovereignty about the environment, economy, education...
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@Tournachonadar
Perhaps the problem is that Southerners "couldn't resist the challenge of taking on the established Federal government." As this column points out, some problems cannot be solved by the individual states. I'd add that the rights of citizens ought to be at least roughly equal no matter where a person lives.
You are correct to point out that there are many variations in regional experiences and stereotypes are harmful. Other stereotypes hurt our national unity as well. Using those stereotypes to "question Federal sovereignty" is also harmful.
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@Tournachonadar The south may not like the Federal government but it sure likes the dollars that the Federal government transfers from the North to the South.
Slavery - Jim Crow - Segregation ...is this 150 yrs of progress or just the Old South continuing?
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@Tournachonadar I agree that there are many fine people in the South and many who are not what one thinks of as stereotypical Southern Baptists or Methodists. When I talk to people in church and elsewhere it is often surprising at the diversity of views about politics and life in general. Unfortunately the majority of voters get their news, political views, and views of life from Fox news. On election day the typical Southern Baptists and Methodists will probably win.
You speak of the "challenge of taking on the …. Federal government." As I recall, we took on the Federal government in the 1860's because we wanted to maintain slavery, we took on the Feds in the 1960's to prevent Black people from voting and to maintain segregated schools, we are taking on the EPA now because corporations want to be free to pollute air and water. There are many Southerners now who want to suppress voting by dark-skinned people and make our schools more segregated.
You see "hope in this ….as we question Federal sovereignty." When we are fighting to hold other people back or allow more pollution, I don't see that as a sign of hope. When we start fighting the Federal Government so that we can do something good and uplifting for other people, then I will see hope.
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