No mention yet of The Dirty South?
For those who claim that other parts of the country don’t have a pride thing going on like “Southern Pride” you have forgotten a totally fanatic “Texas Pride” thing that is not actually an offshoot of southern pride but a branch of pride unto itself. Texas pride takes no back seat to Southern pride and for good reason, they fought for independence from Mexico and actively sought to join the United States. The fact that they joined the confederates just 16 years after joining is still held as a justifiable choice at the time since they felt that if they could choose to join the Union they could also choose to leave the Union. I’ll bet they don’t take down one of the six flags just to please popular opinion.
It is always much easier to fight downhill than uphill. Applied to SES, it works like this:
As long as there is an identifiable class beneath your own, stepping on their heads to climb upwards is easier than grabbing the more powerful people above and pulling yourself past them. The folks above are also better able to defend themselves from your attack than are the folks below.
If the classes in question also have nice obvious tribal markers like skin color, face shape, accent, etc., it gets very easy to know who to screw and who to kowtow to. And makes it that much easier to rationalize away any given degree of screwing. Which really means more screwing for whatever is the max rationalization people can bring themselves to make.
Another factor is the known human bias about (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion). Losing a nickel *feels* far worse than gaining a dime. As applied to SES, folks in the middle are far more concerned about avoiding sliding downwards than they are about moving up.
Which is a lot of why the US middle class’s economic stagnation backsliding of the last ~40 years is so neuralgic.
Debutante and cotillion culture speaks to this. Southerners who you wouldn’t think would be into this kind of stuff (like black folk) participate in it. I think for lots of black folks, it’s a “reclaiming a symbol of our oppression and making it our own” kind of thing (however, I do think there’s some class snobbery too, not gonna lie). But it is hard for me not to think that for most white folks, it’s a way to signal that one has a very specific kind of Southern heritage. Not the heritage of the hard-working small farmer or the shop owner. But the heritage of the very wealthy planter class.
The plantation-style balls that are popular with some southern fraternities and sororities also speak to this. Those things just aren’t about enjoying fancy dress. They are about fostering the appearance/feeling of a certain kind of eliteness. And it’s funny because it’s an eliteness that’s quite antithetical to the “hardworking, boot-strapping rugged individualist” mythos that Americans in general–including southerners–esteem.
This gives me an excuse to cite my favourite classic Onion article: Misremember The Alamo!
Texas pride is not as far removed from general “Southern Pride” as Texans would have you believe. The Texians were largely immigrants (to Mexico) from the southern US, and a sizable chunk of the displeasure was that Mexico had just banned slavery. It shouldn’t be too much of surprise that, come the civil war, they would find themselves to be kindred spirits with the Confederacy.
Virginia pride is definitely a thing too. In Richmond, there’s a certain set that make a big to-do over being a First Family. Virginians also take pride in not being “deep south”, despite being the home of the Confederacy. I’ve only been here for 13 years but I’m guilty of this too, despite having been born and raised in the Deep Dirty South.
Great article. But …
I wish you hadn’t shown me that. It took an hour of clicking other article links at the bottom of their pages leading to other pages before I finally “crapped out” = zero of the 4 links at the bottom were enticing enough to click on.
That’s literally what I was thinking of. Don’t get me wrong. My college was pretty stereotypical “elitist Northeast private school for rich fratboy d-bags”. But we liked to think of ourselves in more of a “fun Animal House / Van Wilder” sort of way. From what my wife describes when her sorority would get reps from “National” down South, they were taking this shit to a whole new level. Certainly everywhere has their version of entrenched “Old Money”. That sort of elitism where it doesn’t matter what you do, but what family you were born into (indeed actually “doing stuff” may actually be looked down upon). But to me it just seems more ingrained into the culture down South.
Texas i don’t consider “The South”. They have their own special thing going on.
Southerners tend to make a huge deal over “being raised right”. That also feeds into what you’re talking about.
I recently watched (for the millionth time) that movie “Drumline”. The character played by Zoey Saldana is the pretty girl the NYC-based protagonist falls in love with at first sight. When he makes the moves on her, she playfully tells him “Southern sisters don’t casually date.” Which is bullshit. Southern girls are just as wild and as fun-loving as anyone else. We all know this. But this is how she signals that she was raised a certain way.
And the ONLY reason for the Texas independence movement was to re-establish slavery in a region where it had been abolished. Today, that is the furthest thing from the thoughts of people who subscribe to Texas Pride. One does not necessarily imply the other.
Based on my experience with the “Southern Pride” crowd, the voting history of the “Texas Pride” crowd, and the fact that Texas has a huge number of black people still stuck in involuntary servitude (one of the largest per capita prison populations in the country, and huge profits being made on that free labor), I think the implications of “Texas Pride” for black people is pretty clear, and I don’t believe at all that it’s ‘farthest from their thoughts’.
I deal with a lot of Texans at work. My brother lives there and is married to one. Oh well.
My take is “Texas pride” isn’t carefully nurtured long-simmered antebellum slaver pride. But for damn sure, virulent racism is an important component of many Texan’s prideful thinking.
In a twitpost: “Real=white Texans are independent minded honest git-shit-done doers; non-whites are dependent lawbreaking lazy antiTexans, with blacks the worst of the worst.”
Either way it’s an ugly sentiment.
I have long advocated returning Texas to Mexico. It’s never too late to do the right thing.
Neither side wants that as both are racist in their own ways! 
Let me make clear that I don’t necessarily disagree that the civil war isn’t part of Texas pride, it is but it isn’t the main focus like those other confederate states. Texas pride has to do with fighting for independence to become its own country, cowboys and the wild west, cattle and oil barons, going BIG at everything and all the various natural wonders contained in one state.
I have literally hundreds of white and mexican-american relatives that live there and they get along fairly well and exhibit some form of Texas Pride. “Don’t Mess With Texas” is an attitude held by both.
But I can see that blacks are no better treated there than anywhere else, some may rightfully say worst but its not my place to say. I only lived there as a child but have visited for months on end for many years, so I don’t really know the situation of blacks there as I do in southeast Michigan and how they feel about Texas Pride on a first hand basis. I can imagine there are many aspects of it that make them cringe.
Clarification: while the Texas state prisoner labor program is profitable (because relatively few inmates are paid anything for their work), that income* is a small fraction of what it costs to house Texas’ inmate population.
*something like $81 million annually, out of a total state prison budget of around $3 billion).
As is typical, the prison labor program profits go to the company running the prison labor program, and the prison budget gets paid for with tax dollars. That income doesn’t go to offset what it costs to house the Texas inmate population, unless they’ve changed the program radically since I looked into it before.
But there’s a difference between the U.S.-UK relationship, and the way the South treated the outcome of the Civil War.
By implementing Jim Crow, and fighting tooth and nail to keep it in place for nearly a century, the South never really came to a mutual agreement with the North. (Admittedly, the federal government seemed to signal their approval of this by pulling troops out of the south in exchange for Republican victory in the disputed 1876 presidential election).
There’s a story (maybe true, maybe not) about the UK embassy in Washington putting up a sign on July 3rd: “This office will be closed tomorrow, due to circumstances beyond our control”.
When Southerners start making jokes like that about the Civil War, the relationships will be comparable.
I’m the last one to defend the abhorrent practice of private prisons. But it’s worthwhile to remember Econ 101. From the POV of the prison company, revenue is revenue and profit is profit. Different buckets of money are not qualitatively different.
If they need to make e.g. $10M on facility X this year to meet their cost of capital plus profitability goals, they can get it either from state taxpayers or from exploited prisoners in any combination. Every dollar they exploit out of the prisoners is one less dollar the taxpayers have to stump up to meet that goal. And vice versa.
Now of course even better for the prison company management is to overcharge both sides and laugh all the way to cashing in the ever-appreciating stock options as profitability beats the stated goal quarter after quarter.
But at least in principle, the taxpayers could (through their legislative reps and executive departments) claw back the excess by offering lower payouts next year. They are the 500lb gorilla in the negotiation. If only they can get their agents to act in their interest.
Econ 101 typically has little to nothing to do with the real world, and this is a good example of why. When you have an overarching organization split into separate divisions with separate budgets and separate funding sources, which division makes money and which pays money is very relevant.
Are you familiar with Harrison, Arkansas? Please enjoy this video of a man who sat on the side of the road with a “Black Lives Matter” sign and received a torrent of heckling, abuse, and threats.
That’s the south that I know.
I guess you might argue that the person received all this abuse because of the sign they were holding. So we should modify your hypothetical to suggest that if a black family is delayed and needing assistance in Arkansas, they should remember to avoid direct eye contact, speak in deferential tones, steer clear of controversy or offense, and keep their hands in plain sight at all times.
Yeah, I don’t see a big cause for pride there.