So? Just because there isn’t a lot of people there doesn’t mean that they aren’t very culturally different.
This aspect of the discussion kicked off with a claim for the red state blue state paradigm. If there are few states in which the entire state is red or blue, then that dichotomy is seriously challenged. (And, since there is no state displayed on that map that is completely red or blue, that would tend to argue against that perception even more.)
Beyond that, there is the completely separate issue of what actually constitutes “red” or “blue.” I know any number of voters who felt sufficiently compelled by the war arguments of GWB to support him in 2004 even though they were highly critical of his “Faith Based Initiative,” his policies promoting the worst deficit in the nation’s history, or his opposition to abortion rights. I am sure that we could find “blue” voters who swung the opposite way because they opposed the war and did not feel that GWB’s stance on abortion rights or Creationism in schools was sufficiently relevant to the election.
When discussing culture, I suspect that voting majorities, particularly in a two-party system where a single issue might trump a lot of other concerns, are not nearly as relevant as any number of other guidelines.
The US is a lot more uniform than about half of Europe.
Parts, like southern Italy are strictly monocultural, but most of central and eastern Europe and Iberia is wracked with immigrants.
I use red state/blue state as short hand for culture, not just voting paterns. While there may be shades of blue in a red state or vice versa, the cultures of red and blue are distinct. When I visit my in-laws in Arkansas, I am very much a foreigner. I have very different values and concerns than the locals do. I am as much out of place as when I visit Poland. We might share the same language but there is surprisingly little other shared experience between us. Different movies, different tv, different news, different ideas about the proper role of religion in public life, other than fast food we didn’t have much in common and McDonalds is in India as well as Little Rock so that doesnt’ count. In fact when you get to an issue such as creationsism/evolution, I would argue we don’t even share the same perception of reality.
I was at a local highschool football game out there and everytime a player got hurt everyone in the stands and on both sidelines would bow their heads and pray for the kid. Cheerleaders and players on both sides got down on their knees and really, fervently prayed. I was just kind of stunned. At that moment I was every bit a stranger in a strange land.
And would you expect to find that same experience in the red sections of Montana or the red counties of Northern Michigan? Would expect to not find them in Little Rock or Fort Smith or Pine Bluff? I suspect that you are really talking about geographical regions rather than anything that could be identified by a “red” or “blue” flag on a voting map and, therefore, the red/blue dichotomy is misleading.
I would expect the places you mention to have a much closer attitude to Arkansas than to NW Washington, DC. Again, red/blue is just short hand for a host of cultural differences such as attitudes on the proper role of government, religion in public, life, science, art, technology, you name it.
Please don’t get hung up on red/blue terminology, as I said it is a linguistic hook. The OP asked how culturally diffferent the US and my answer is very different. An east coaster like myself is a foreigner in the middle of the country.
Another difference I just remembered. My in-laws live in a dry county. You can’t buy alcohol in stores or restaraunts. Now that is very different than my American experience. Nothing says cultural difference to me than not being able to have a glass of wine with dinner.
But those boundaries aren’t defined by state boundaries. And a big state like CA or TX or FL is going to have a mish-mash depending on where you are. You think the folks in South Beach are much like the folks in the Panhandle (of FL)? No, they’re more like the folks in NYC or SF. It’s more of an urban vs rural thing.
But here’s the thing: Arkansas doesn’t have an attitude. Arkansas is a state. Your in-laws have an attitude, which you are projecting onto the entire population of Arkansas. That’s what I mean when I say that you are wrongly imagining “red states” as monolithic.
If you mean there is a general Black accent that a lot of people have, I might agree to an extent. But if you met my wife and I you would not likely know that we’re from Texas. And my wife lived in Texas all her life - nowhere else. White people have told me that I sound White on the phone, but Black people usually know I’m Black.
But the vocabularies and accents of Black people regionally are quite different. I can tell Black Southerners, East Coasters, and West Coasters apart fairly easily. Obviously Southerners have the drawl, but East Coasters talk quickly. The most “generic” Black accents to me at the West Coast folks. I didn’t mention Midwesterners because I can’t really tell those folks apart… I don’t know enough Midwestern Black folks, I guess.
Vocabulary is very different as well. I met a Black woman the other day who told me she had a “grip of people over at her house.” I asked her if she was from California… yep. Same thing if I hear somebody say “hella.” If a Black guy calls me “son” repeatedly, I usually figure that he’s from NYC. Rural Black folks from Texas (and by extension their family who moved to Houston and Dallas) love to get your attention by saying “Looky here.”
I think it always kind of sucked that Black people on TV (sitcoms and the like) used East Coast vernacular… they never had a legit Southern Black person on any of the shows. (Whitney from A Different World does not count, BTW.)
My in-laws aren’t from Arkansas. They are from Maryland, they live there to take care of elderly parents.
In place of 'attitude" use culture. The region certainly has a culture and it is very different than my culture. The OP asked how culturally different the US is from coast to coast. I don’t imagine Arkansas to be monolithic, but I do acknowledge that a phenomenon we call culture exists and that the culture of Arkansas is very different that the culture of Washington, DC.
When discussing culture, you are by definition speaking in generalities. Culture is a collective social entity. If we were discussing Siberian culture we could of course find Novosibirsk residents who don’t fit the mold, but the construct of this discussion requires us to remain at the macro level, because we are discussing a broad collective thing known as culture.
In response to the OP: I would argue that the US is culturally very different from coast to coast. As an example, the culture of Arkansas is very different than the culture of Washington, DC. We have very different attitudes about religion, food, sex, and alcohol. When you add up any one community’s attitudes on these subjects (among others) you get something we call ‘culture,’ which is necessarily drawn in broad brush strokes because it is describing people as a group, not individuals.
I don’t disagree that the cultures are different. But where you see very different, I see slightly different. By European standards, anyway. DC is not as different from Arkansas as London is from rural Greece.
It seems to me that people who WANT to see cultural diversity will see it anywhere and not just in America, and people who WANT to see cultural uniformity will see that, too. Like the glass being half-full or half-empty. I’d say there’s quite a degree of both. Enough uniformity to make it feel like you’re in the same country; enough diversity to give it a rich flavor. I’ve never bought into the cultural “melting pot” analogy; I see it as more of a tossed salad, with the bowl being the country, the ingredients inside being the different groups, remaining distinct but all together.
I grew up in a small city in West Texas. Lived for a spell in a medium-sized city in the Southwest. And I lived for a time in Hawaii. Trying my best to look objectively at it and not TRY to see anything, I’d say those three places were quite different. And that’s not that big an area; it doesn’t even touch on the Northwest or anywhere back East. My city in Texas was very segregated, with some mixture near the university, and no Indian (pardon me for not using Native American, but that’s just TOO PC for me) influence at all. In the Southwest, you could not escape the heritage of the Pueblo and Navajo Indians, the rich Spanish and Mexican history in that region. A friend from Suthern California recently sniffed that Mexican food in New Mexico was just Tex-Mex, never realizing how wrong he was. He had no idea of even the vast culinary difference a few hundred miles could make. And Hawaii is a prime example of a place being incredibly cultural diverse AND incredibly conservative at the same time; the conservatism being a legacy of the missionary influence of the 19th century.
It’s also been my observation – and this is only my personal observation, I’m not trying to preach any Great Truths here – that a) non-Americans who see the US as more culturally uniform than not have not spent much time in the country, or if they have, then only in one location, like for university. (This reminds me of a guy I knew in Hawaii. His sole experience abroad was a year in one small city in about the exact center of China. Probably not representative of the country as a whole, but he was always going on about “Well, the Chinese don’t do that” and “The Chinese do it this way.” The Chinese I knew in Hawaii were always slapping their heads in wonder at this guy, because what he really meant without realizing it was “They don’t do it that way in this one podunk little berg in the middle of nowhere.”) And b) my fellow Americans who see the country as more culturally uniform as not have usually been stuck in one place, or at least not many; I was the same way in my youth, until I finally branched out.
And I don’t buy the “red state, blue state” analogy. I’ve known conservative Hispanics and liberal Hispanics. I’ve known conservative and liberal Indians. I’ve known white conservative Republicans who were more open-minded about other cultures that many I’ve met, and I’ve known quite a few close-minded liberals. And vice versa, of course. I feel that politics is often apart from culture.
That’s my two cents’ worth.
Is this a competition? Do we have to be more or less diverse than the EU? The US can hardly match the diversity to be found from Norway to Bulgaria, but that doesn’t make it culturally homogeneous by any means.
The Cajun (or Creole) in the bayou, the old Spanish families in the SW, and the vacationers on Martha’s Vineyard might as well be from different continents, although their kids might speak a semi-recognizable version of English. Probably could find at least as much diversity from Lisbon to London, to say nothing of Budapest to Belfast. So “yes”, the US has fewer cultures and people on more land and with less history, but it’s not uniform.
That’s simply incorrect. And I’m a little bit queasy about the dismissal of Indians as non-entities or comprising some homogenious cultural sludge. Indian nations were as culturally unique as European nations, and are just as significant historically.
You have two major misconceptions in this post. As Hippy Hollow rightly pointed out, there is no one single, monolithic African American English (AAE). There is a lot of geographic variation in AAE, just like any other dialect of English. Just within the state of North Carolina (where I have done some research), the variation is quite astounding. You find, especially among older speakers, quite strong Appalachian influence in some parts, Outer Banks influence at the other end, and a whole spectrum in between.
Secondly, TV and radio will have little influence on the way an average speaker talks. For one thing, interaction is key to learning a language, and you don’t interact with the TV. For another, people speak like who they want to be like (usually their peers), not like people on TV. I think you can ask almost any African American if he or she would like to sound like Ted Koppel, and I bet they would say no.
A point on the discussion as a whole, dialects of American English are becoming more diverse rather than more similar. So, in one aspect, the US is becoming more culturally diverse. Just thought I’d throw that out there.
Here’s another way to look at things. I agree there are pockets of the U.S., such as those cited by madmonk and SiamSam, that really do read as different – not just different from some East Coast liberal standard, but different from that part of America which is culturally somewhat uniform. When I wrote the OP, I was thinking of a particular type of American, Homo suburbensis. To take an example from that thread I cited, someone there is contending that Maine and Arizona are worlds apart. I would submit, on the other hand, that people living in the vast suburban sprawl of Phoenix, and the increasing suburban sprawl of southern Maine, are not that different culturally. I doubt if most of the people in suburban Phoenix are actually Arizona natives, just as I know that at least a fair number of people in southern Maine are from elsewhere.
So even though much of Arkansas, especially rural Arkansas, might be very different, there are at least parts of Arkansas – suburban Little Rock, let’s say – that are culturally almost interchangeable with suburban parts of the other 50 states. A middle-class, white-collar American is a middle-class, white-collar American, wherever he or she lives. Barring adherence to some weird religious or political extreme, these people all participate in a generalized American culture that is not that place-specific, and less so all the time.
People on the Dope can do this experiment: ask yourself, of all the people around you, how many were born and raised in that same location. If the answer is 50% or less, does that not argue that there’s a coherent American culture that transcends geography?
I grew up in South Florida (not as far down as Miami, but far enough south that the main tourist attraction were beaches), and ended up going to college in Tallahassee, which is in the “armpit” of the state. When I first got up there, having never been exposed to southern culture before, it was a bit of a shock. I was used to a fairly liberal metropolitan area with urban and suburban sprawl being the norm, where people didn’t really talk about religion and next to nobody would actually prosletyze to anyone else. (There were the occasional new converts who would knock on doors, but that was exceedingly rare.) Upon moving to Tallahassee and seeing that, not only was it smaller (both in size and “town mentality”), but it was one of the biggest things around, I had mentally labelled it as Mayberry. Why? It was small; people were “nosy,” and I felt like I’d been scooped out of the ocean and placed in a fishbowl. I didn’t quite understand a lot of things about southern culture (why on earth do they ask right away what church I go to, what’s all this fuss about football, why is a tank top and shorts inappropriate when it’s 102 degrees outside, and who on earth would want to eat grits? were major thoughts that came up.), and, well, I was in a very different environment where I didn’t know anyone for the first time.
Now, Tallahassee isn’t all bad, but it’s not quite for me. I need to live in a more metropolitan area to satisfy the things I like to do. If I want to see an art or foreign film, I don’t want to have to drive to Atlanta or wait three months until the one little art film house can afford to show it, and, although I don’t go out to clubs or fancy restaurants much, I’d like them to be available nonetheless. (Not a fan of the clubs aimed at the college aged kids for the most part, so that eliminates 90% of clubs in Tallahassee.) But this region of Northern Florida is culturally a lot more like Southern Georgia than anywhere else in Florida.
I realize that my experience may not be the norm, but I married into a rural neighborhood (think of this neighborhood in square miles, not square blocks) where no one has moved in from the outside for, I think, 30 years. You have to marry into it or be born into it. Seriously. When I married, I was the first new person in the neighborhood in eight years. The previous newcomer married the guy across the road. And both of us were raised less than 15 miles from the neighborhood itself.
Pretty weird, eh?
It’s pretty uniform. Someone raised in New York City can move to Little Rock, Denver, Sacramento, or Las Cruces and fit in just fine. I won’t deny that there are differences, you can find differences between large cities and smaller ones in the same state, but these differences are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things.
Marc
I might say “atypical” rather than “weird.” But leaving aside your apparent geographic isolation, do you feel like you’re outside the maintream of American culture?