A quick double-dip post, because a couple of my buddies from over at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s place responded in the Ringo post to a question I posed in TNC’s Open Thread, and I’m hoping to encourage more responses. Here’s the original comment (edited slightly for brevity):
I feel like, having lived up in the Midwest for all of my American life (save about 3 years in Syracuse, NY), I’ve always been surrounded by certain cultural tropes and understandings about What It’s Like In The South.
I’ve brought this up before, but I remain convinced that there’s something important that I don’t have access to because I’ve never lived anyplace south of Chicago, and our guiding narrative is so powerful. I BELIEVE ALL OF YOU when you tell me things like “no really, it’s as bad as the Texas Board of Education makes you think it is” — but at the same time – you’re there.
By which I mean: If you read and comment on this blog from someplace broadly considered “South” — you defy the stereotypes with which I have lived my entire life. UND ZO, here’s what I want to ask of you: Please point me to local papers, local blogs, local what-have-yous that express YOUR “South” — they people you would want to hang out with, the people with whom you cry in your beer when Texas or Alabama goes all doolalee again. If you are producing such a blog of which I’m unaware, please especially make me aware of it.
If you have any suggestions or thoughts you’d care to share, please do so! I’ll copy and paste the comments that were made in the Ringo post after the jump, and also add people’s replies from Ta-Nehisi’s place (I love you too much to make you find that comment all the way at the bottom of the Open Thread – The Atlantic’s use of the Disqus commenting system has a few serious drawbacks, and any thread with more than 80 comments demonstrates many of those problems at one and the same time…).
dave in texas sez:
The two of us have already discussed Ringo-love a bit at TNC’s place, but I’m actually replying to another of your comments over there because Disqus, which I dislike more and more on a daily basis, has eaten both of my replies (both with and without links) to your question about Southern papers and websites.
The Austin Chronicle is really good for local Austin politics and arts, especially music. Burnt Orange Report is one of the best left-leaning blogs on Texas politics, with a heavy emphasis on Democratic Party goings-on, not, as you might expect from the name, a blog on UT athletics.
Sorry to threadjack, but I’m always so happy when folks from elsewhere take the time to want to know stuff other than the stereotypes. Y’all come down and visit sometime.
dmf sez:
i’m piling on this threadjack so pls feel to erase, disqus is the work of the devil (mammon to be specific), while in memphis i relied on: http://www.memphisflyer.com/ ,but if you want to see all of the scary stereotypes in action just read some of the comments at the commercial appeal website or just watch the new cable show on women popo in memphis.
hey ee, when and why were you in syracuse? (ed: Ages 6 to 9, roughly, ’cause that’s where my mom moved us. The memories are dim! And decidedly non-Southern).
On TNC’s Open Thread, Andy_Hall sed:
Houston Press. Texas Monthly. Anything with an Austin postmark.
SWNC sed:
Oooh, happy to! The local blogs that I check daily are Ashvegas and Scrtutiny Hooligans. Both are focused primarily on western North Carolina news and culture, so I’m not sure how interesting they’ll be to an outsider. Mountain Xpress is our independent weekly paper and does great investigative reporting.
Emily L. Hauser - In My Head 
dave in texas
/ July 8, 2010Well, now I feel as if I’ve truly made it, with a post calling me a buddy. Here are some links for the Austin Chronicle and for Burnt Orange Report.
dave in texas
/ July 8, 2010hmmph. I’m a link-impaired technoramus, it seems. There’s always teh Google, I guess.
emilylhauser
/ July 8, 2010Through the magic of being the blog boss, I think I can help. I’m going to go behind the curtain and edit your comment to add in the links.
PS It’s what a buddy would do.
dave in texas
/ July 8, 2010Thank ya kindly. We can all use a buddy now and then, can’t we? I tried using the a href, etc., HTML tag but for whatever reason, likely my fumblefingeredness, it didn’t work.
dmf
/ July 8, 2010crack-age flashback
sympathyforthebasementcat
/ July 8, 2010I don’t have any good rec, but I’m glad you’re trying to learn beyond the stereotypes of the South. The South has a history full of racism, fear, poverty and stubbornness, which feed into each other, and hundreds of years of political and religious manipulation makes it hard to break free of all of that. And it’s such a shame because the culture of the region – food, literature, the sense of community – they’re all so rich that it’s hard not to love it and defend it. Luckily, Southern liberals and those who embrace thoughtfulness over intolerance have inherited some of that stubbornness from their ancestors, so they can stick it out. I’m maybe a bad example though since I moved to a royal blue enclave that’s barely the South.
SiubhanDuinne
/ July 8, 2010Well. What a provocative challenge you’ve set for us, ellaesther. I was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois, but at this point in my life I’ve actually lived more years in the South (specifically Atlanta) than in the North. I don’t think there’s any single explicator of the South, although the litany in the first comment (racism, fear, poverty, stubbornness) is a good start. None of them alone is sufficient to explain the “Southern temperament” (if there is such a monolithic thing) but each is an important — nay, essential — ingredient.
I would add to this list: CLIMATE. The heat and humidity in the South leads to torpor and indolence. I don’t mean that as a pejorative. It’s 11:00 pm as I write this and the temperature is still near 90. It’s enervating. I don’t in any possible way support, condone or defend the institution of slavery, but by god I can understand why the South had a slave-based agrarian economy for centuries. If I didn’t have fans and air conditioning and cool running water at the touch of a tap and a nice big refrigerator, I expect I’d be all too happy to have someone else do the work and moving around, and I’d just lie still and have someone wave a fan at me all day long. And — again, not to condone — I can understand why my Southern ancestors so often dehumanized the people they owned, because you really wouldn’t wish these conditions on a fellow human being. Thinking of slaves as “less-than” may have been a way to assuage guilt. I don’t know, I’m speculating like mad, but it makes sense to me.
Now. Take that unrelenting heat and humidity and the fierce sun and the fetid disease-ridden swamps and the bugs, and mix in a white population not many generations removed from the notoriously hot-tempered, stubborn Scotch-Irish, and you’ve a good recipe for war and the Klan and Jim Crow and superstition and all those stereotypes.
And they do exist, but in my personal experience, they are changing. For the better. In some cases, it’s a matter of attrition. They’re dying off, and their toxic beliefs and behaviours with them. But also, people — individuals — change. They grow, they evolve, and (like the late Senator Byrd) they come to realise that the old beliefs and attitudes simply don’t serve their core values.
Then you have rapidly shifting demographics. I don’t have the numbers at hand, but something like 9 out of the 10 fastest-growing counties in the US are in the South (I live in one of them). It’s almost all in-migration, which implies new attitudes and approaches becoming part of the mix and further diluting the old beliefs.
I lived in Atlanta from 1961-65, the heyday of the Civil Rights movement. The jobs I had then and the apartments I lived in and the places where I shopped and ate were all segregated. When I moved back to Atlanta barely two decades after I left, I found I had black neighbours and colleagues and fellow consumers (also, I should add, Asian and Latino/Hispanic). Rejoice!
Sure, there are still Deliverance types who wave the Confederate flag in your face, and no, it’s not always easy to be a tree-hugging granola-eating Birkenstock-wearing Kumbaya-singing DFH in these parts. But it’s shifting. It really is. And it’s fascinating to be both participant and observer.
SWNC
/ July 9, 2010One thing that really, really bothers me is when people assume that the South = white and rural–which is a tendency shared both by liberals and conservatives. Since its inception in colonial times, the South has always been a tri-racial society (European, African, Native American). Martin Luther King is as much as Southerner as William Faulkner or Thomas Jefferson. And within the past 25 years, there’s been a huge influx of Latino and Asian cultures as well. Charlotte, where I’m from, has a large and active Vietnamese community. There are a surprising number of Korean Baptist churches throughout North Carolina. And the Latino population is booming throughout the urban and rural South. These folks are part of the South and Southern culture now.
People often say that Asheville, where I live now, isn’t the real South. That makes my blood boil. Below the Mason-Dixon line? Check. Part of the Confederacy during the Late Unpleasantness? Check. What they mean is that because Asheville is LGBT-friendly, progressive politically (though not, to my mind, racially), supports a large artistic community, and has a lot of transplants from outside the region, it doesn’t fit their stereotype of what the South is. I’m a bleeding heart, advanced-degree-holding, Mother Jones reading, organic food eating, latte sipper, but don’t you dare tell me I’m not a real Southerner.
edianes
/ July 10, 2010Hi there– I’m a regular reader at Ta-Nehisi’s, but I don’t know if I qualified to respond here– I’m a very infrequent commenter, probably a little further right along the political spectrum than most of his comment community (though I’m a big fan of both his blog and the way he’s developed that comment community), and I’m not commenting from the South, I’m commenting from NYC, where I’ve lived for the past 6 years. That said, I lived in Georgia most of my 24 years before now, with the formative ones spent in the rural southwest part of the state, so I feel a somewhat defensive urge to speak up. It looks like most of your responses are pointing you to products of more urban enclaves, especially college towns– Charlotte, Austin, Atlanta. And if you are looking for “blue state” attitudes and styles in the South, you won’t have any trouble finding them in the more urban enclaves, especially college towns. But I don’t know if it’s useful to say that the Georgia I’m from totally defies your stereotypes, just check out Athens and Decatur!
To put it another way, my mom’s planning to come visit me in the fall, and she’s super-psyched about visiting Brooklyn Tablernacle (http://www.brooklyntabernacle.org/Church/Belief), because she’s heard really good things about their services from her pastor. And Brooklyn Tabernacle is a New York institution, a little piece of the city’s cultural fabric, and I’m sure there are facets of it that are uniquely of New York. But if you’re looking to understand what NYC’s about, why I’m happy living here… Brooklyn Tabernacle’s probably pretty low on the list of things to check out.
If you’re looking to get beyond in-group/out-group thinking about the South, you have to realize not only that there’s a sizable number of people there who strongly disagree with the attitudes of the Texas Board of Education, but that, yes, the majority of the people there, especially in the rural areas, strongly agree with the attitudes of the Texas Board of Education in ways that would likely make you cringe, and they’re still wonderful, intelligent people.
As a side note to SWNC, all of my dad’s-side large, extended family still lives in and around Candler, NC, where they’re from, and I’ve visited them at least twice a year all my life. I’d never, ever say that Asheville’s not the Real South. But then again, the side of Asheville that’s being put forward here– the artistic community, the LGBT-friendliness, the environmentalism, frankly, the wealth– looks nothing at all like the side I grew up visiting.