November 14, 2020
We Are All Southerners Now
By E.M. Cadwaladr

When I was growing up in Ohio, the South began at the banks of the Ohio river. Below that muddy line, everyone knew, there lived a different breed of backward and uneducated people with lazy minds and even lazier language skills. You could have contempt for them, a privilege I indulged from time to time. I personally learned this contempt from two main sources.

The first was from the television. Any discerning youngster could see that denigrating Southerners was the daily fare of the national news. Nothing very good was ever said about that corner of America. TV reporters were more polite then than they are now, but even back in the day, there was something both explicitly and implicitly New York–ish about the evening news. New York was where the networks lived. The South was a place reporters visited after they had prepared themselves by reporting from a war zone or a third-world country for a while. It was a land where police dogs were set loose on black children and liberal activists as a matter of course. Where obese and narrow-minded sheriffs refought the Civil War from their beat-up cruisers. Where nothing was ever produced to the country's general account but brutish oppression and inbred misery. This was the South I saw on television in the late sixties and early seventies. This was the South that television invented.

The second reinforcer of my anti-Southern bias was much closer to home. My mother was not a fan. The genesis of her resentment was that she grew up during World War Two — when a flood of white migrants from Kentucky and black migrants from places even farther over the horizon came north to take the factory jobs that were plentiful at that time. The local, mostly German Catholic population were appalled by the horde of Baptist newcomers and their rustic ways. It took a couple of generations to mend these fences. My mother never did entirely surrender her hostility. When I eventually looked into our family's genealogy, I found, to my surprised amusement, that about half of my mother's family landed in Virginia and became Northerners only after a multi-generational sojourn through what was then the wilderness of Kentucky. Hillbillies we were. Backwoods hicks. Rude farmers and deplorable pioneers.

In recent years, I have spoken with several people who believed Ohio to be part of the American South. These people were all from the east coast, California, or Western Europe. The Mason-Dixon line seems to have gradually crept north to encompass whatever land is under an airliner from the time it levels off after ascending from JFK in New York City until it noses down toward LAX outside Los Angeles. Especially since Trump won in 2016, the South seems to have expanded in the minds of our coastal elites to fill the whole of flyover country. Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Nathan Bedford Forrest must be laughing in their graves at this stunning and uncontested expansion of Southern territory. It is a conquest they never wanted, but it is still quite a remarkable achievement. No bloody battles or ear-splitting rebel yell required — just enough patience to let the natural snobbery of Northern elites blackball anybody and everybody who did not go to one of their top schools.

Over the last couple of decades, I've become less and less impressed by the unmerited sense of superiority that has grown up in the eastern and western coastal fringes. When San Franciscans rethink the civil necessity of flush toilets, it is a little hard to see their city as a pinnacle of human development. Likewise, I have soured to the out-of-hand loathing I have seen offered up to Southerners. Unless you are Bill Moyers or the lugubrious Jon Meacham, genuflecting before the gods of political correctness your whole life, you have been roundly and enthusiastically despised. Beto is not a Texan. He seems like one of the less engaging members of the weasel family to me, but whatever he is, there can be little doubt about what he isn't. At this point in our collective history, all of America that wants to be America finds itself despised, while those exalted residents of our country who want to be Europeans, third-worlders du jour, or fuchsia-haired banshees from an Irishman's nightmare have become all the rage. I have been to New York City, and I've been to rural Georgia — and frankly, I felt far safer and more at home in the latter. Reality has a way of breaking the magic spell that years of media propaganda has striven so insidiously to create. And sorry, Mom — I know who my friends are.


We Northerners have been slow to learn because, until now, we have not been the whipping boys of choice. We have been ignored rather than hated. In the massive wake of Trump, however, we have all been reclassified into one homogeneous body of deplorables — bigots, racists, xenophobes, imbeciles, and assorted throwback knuckle-draggers. They sneer at the Southerner with his peculiar sense of honor — but now we have all seen just what a society without a sense of honor looks like. It isn't pretty. It isn't a place where anyone in his right mind would want to live.


With all due respect to those among my ancestors who fought and even died for the Union, I hereby raise my glass to my long-suffering brethren from the lands below the languid river at the bottom of my state. You have always been on target about states' rights, individual freedom, and resistance to becoming the minions of people who neither knew nor cared about you in Washington, D.C. You are people of a sort I understand. People after my own heart. I am proud and honored to call you my countrymen. Please accept my genuine, if a little belated, apologies. Let us bury the hatchet for good and ever. Long live our country and the nation of our birth. We are all Southerners now.

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+++THE AMERICAN THINKER+++

As someone born and raised in Barrineau Park, FL I say welcome all of ya's.

Except you SOB's that put sugar on ya grits. I don't trust you for nothin.

I grew up in the Upper Midwest and I love living in Texas. This is nearly my 11th year living in Texas and I consider it home.

I do remember a snobbiness towards the South growing up. I lived in SoCal for 3 years and it opened my eyes that they had equal contempt for all of middle America regardless of which side of the Mason-Dixon line the state fell. The best part was while I lived there a ranking came out on high school education and California was 48th which put them behind nearly every state they held in contempt (I may have poured buckets of salt on that wound).

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Beto is not a Texan. He seems like one of the less engaging members of the weasel family to me, but whatever he is, there can be little doubt about what he isn't.

Amen!

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Originally posted by Fla. Jim:
You could have contempt for them ....

Yes, I remember it well.
A perfect example was Tom Lehrer’s song I Wanna Go Back to Dixie*, first recorded in the 1950s.

In some ways, though, I miss the days when it was possible to express bigotry in public without a lynch mob showing up at one’s door.

* https://tomlehrersongs.com/i-wanna-go-back-to-dixie/

In my short time in Texas, I consider myself a Southerner, a Texan, and my upbringing in CA will not change that. We have made quick friends here with guys who are born and raised in West Texas, and they heard about me through extended family, heard about the Californian who just might be more conservative than they. We are now good friends, and part of our family. They told me they would take me over a born and raised "Texan" like Beto O'Rourke, any day of the week.

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Originally posted by tatortodd:
I lived in SoCal for 3 years and it opened my eyes that they had equal contempt for all of middle America regardless of which side of the Mason-Dixon line the state fell.

Most of the people I know in CA have a contempt for Texas. Very few people congratulated us on our move, most had the same response to our news- "Why the hell Texas??!!?"

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Beto O'Rourke

His name is Robert Francis. Don't allow him the use of Beto.

I am Southerner by Association, my mother was born in Green Forest, Arkansas and we took many a family vacation down there, we had a number of relatives that lived there and I have fond memories of all of them.

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Originally posted by sigfreund:
Tom Lehrer

Big fan of his, but several songs are prime example of the attitudes highlighted by this article.

Another example: "Who's Next?" ends with - ....Try to remain serene and calm...

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Originally posted by joel9507:
Try to remain serene and calm...

"Who's Next?"

Ah, yes; I had forgotten that line.

But he didn’t limit his opinions. I still laugh every time I hear other lines from that one:
“Then France got the bomb, but don’t you grieve, ’cause they’re on our side—I believe.”

As a child of the 1960s and 70s, I can attest to Mr. Cadwaladr's piece from a very personal level.

I was born and raised in the South and live there through most of elementary school. Due to my father's work, we transferred to the urban northeast. From there, it wasn't just culture shock, I learned the backside of bigotry and prejudice firsthand and without warning; so many instances and almost daily reminders that I was "less". It wasn't just the kids, who obviously learned from their parents behind the closed front door of their homes, but teachers,and other adults who openly flaunted their narrow-minded attitudes toward me and my family. As southerners, we were lazy, dull-witted and backward. The irony is that I was better traveled and more learned outside the classroom than these kids who were looking down on me.

Some of the ignorance to which I was subjected was humorous, like kids asking me how I liked living in a house with a floor, as if this was something new and amazing to me. It seems as though some TV sitcoms, like the Beverly Hillbillies, were treated as documentaries in the North.

But the worst experiences came at the hands of "learned" adults. Even though I had been in advanced classes in a solid suburban environment in the South, the principal at my new school dismissed this fact, informing my mother that they would place me in the average classes and hope that I could "hang on". To his credit, he didn't make this statement in my presence. Within about 2 weeks, my teachers had me moved back to the advanced levels I had been in before. Further to his credit, the principal was a big enough person to call my mother, inform her of the change personally and to apologize. Unfortunately, the negative experiences didn't end there.

I had one teacher who made it plain that she hated me, yes I mean "hate", because I was Southern. She regularly made inflammatory statements about Southerners and would look right at me. It didn't matter to her that she was an adult who had authority over me, or that I was a lone, elementary school boy with no ability to harm her, and who was already made to feel like I was on public display. This was the early 1970s and some of the things she claimed were still happening in the South, like continued segregated drinking fountains and bathrooms, were a fiction, and things I had never seen in the suburban areas in which I had grown up. I made the mistake of challenging her on this statement and she then proceeded to make life worse for me. Fortunately, she was offset by two very wonderful teachers who treated me with great love and respect.

I could give countless examples, but this post could turn into a book. But there were also very good kids who treated me well, and were kind, and with whom I made very good friendships, even if they held initial pre-conceived notions about me. I hope that our time north of the Mason-Dixon was a positive for the people that we encountered. I know it was ultimately a positive for me. I cannot say for certain how I may have felt toward Black persons before the move north, but I can definitely say that my experience as a white "black person" in the North made me much more empathetic to negative stereotypes about blacks and all other racial, ethnic and religious minorities for my entire life, post "northern US".

BTW, I know firsthand this sort of thing still goes on today, and I find it amazing.



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Originally posted by tatortodd:
I grew up in the Upper Midwest and I love living in Texas. This is nearly my 11th year living in Texas and I consider it home.

I do remember a snobbiness towards the South growing up. I lived in SoCal for 3 years and it opened my eyes that they had equal contempt for all of middle America regardless of which side of the Mason-Dixon line the state fell. The best part was while I lived there a ranking came out on high school education and California was 48th which put them behind nearly every state they held in contempt (I may have poured buckets of salt on that wound).

I grew up in Detroit, Michigan and visited my grandparents in Missouri and Arkansas almost every year. Neither of those states was considered part of the Deep South, of course. I lived in Alabama, South Carolina, California, and Oregon during my 20 years in USAF. However, when I retired in 1980 I came to Texas and have just a few days ago completed 40 years as an adopted Texan. I love it here! My 4 years in SC were great, also! Very friendly folk, and down to Earth. I do conform to the Southern way and am proud to be an adopted Texan. (Can't confirm it works both ways, though.)

flashguy

We are all Southerners now.

NO we are NOT.

Let's stay in our geographical lanes.

I knew there would be pushback .

Ok, but I still don't want sugar in my tea.

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I can definitely say that my experience as a white "black person" in the North made me much more empathetic to negative stereotypes about blacks and all other racial, ethnic and religious minorities for my entire life

cne32507 was born and raised in "The Free State of Jones". I never understood the "systemic racism" claim being bandied about recently. Thank you for helping me to understand what they are yammering about.

Damn carpetbaggers...LOL

Good.

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Originally posted by mark123:
Ok, but I still don't want sugar in my tea.

I second that motion. Grew up here in Colorado, but my wife's family is out of Jackson, Tennessee.

I was stationed in Panama City, FL many moons ago. Our shop was 8-9 GI's & 10 civilians.

Being from Ohio I was a bit intimidated when being introduced to the guys the biggest & ugliest civilian asks "Hey boy, are you a Yankee?" (In their lexicon at the time, anyone born north of I10 was a Yankee)

Welcome to the shop.

I liked to tease them when they started talking about carpetbaggers and Damn Yankees - "You've got that all wrong, a Damn Yankee is a guy from the North who moves down here & marries your sister".