Ditto, except central Mississippi. I’ve lived most of my life in Kentucky, which is not the South, it’s the Midwest. Go try and order a sweet tea anywhere in Kentucky: chances are you’ll get a glass of brown water with sugar at the bottom.
I am a Christian, but I’ve never been asked about my religious affiliation. I have friends who are Muslim, Wiccan and others, and they have never mentioned that they don’t fit in because of their religion. Jackson, the nearest large city, is 75% African American, and you would have a difficult time finding a Republican there. I live just outside of Jackson, and we not only have a diverse mix of people, but an incredible school system: we were Star status this last year.
I’ve lived in Mississippi for 14 years. Before I came here, I believed all the stereotypes and swore MS was the last place I would ever visit. Now that I live here, I don’t want to live anywhere else.
I am from the Deep South (rural Louisiana) but have lived in the Boston suburbs for many years now. I consider myself firmly Southern even now but the reality is that I am a hybrid and don’t really true home anymore except the U.S. as a whole. The North and the South are very different with good and bad sides to each. Boston is much more segregated to this day in black and white terms than Louisiana ever was. My home town is about 50/50 white and black.
Of course there are the usual inter-cultural frictions but also a lot of love and things hum along pretty well on a day to day basis. Everyone is right there side by side. Our nannies and elementary school teachers were mostly black as rule and that makes a long-lasting impression on kids. The love to talk about black issues on NPR in the Boston area from the confines the elite and exclusive white and Asian suburbs but I don’t think most of them socialize with any black people unless they are famous or a politician. That isn’t true in the South. Racism is a weird thing. In the South, some people that proudly proclaim they are racist don’t let that reflect in their actions. In Boston, the opposite is true.
They do have plenty of fatties and dummies back home but they are mostly good and kind people to anyone. It is hot as hell there though. Whenever I have gone back to visit in the summer, I am amazed that I made it past early childhood without dying from heat stroke.
[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
Racism is a weird thing. In the South, some people that proudly proclaim they are racist don’t let that reflect in their actions. In Boston, the opposite is true.
[/QUOTE]
It’s an old saying in the South that I’ve heard from both blacks and whites: “In the south they hate the race but love the individuals; in the north they love the race but hate the individuals.” It’s an overly broad generalization of course, but like many cliches I think there’s probably some truth in its origin.
Blacks and whites have co-existed in the south for almost 400 years and for much of that time they depended on each other for survival both as individuals and as large groups. I’m not romanticizing the past at all- the soil itself seems to breathe racial tension in many places and there have been some very major and a hundred million minor race related horrors. The inseparable nature of both races from southern society make racism anything but a simple thing; it’s one of the most complicated, individualistic, multi-layered systems imaginable.
And the south is changing. We have the same multimedia, high speed Internet, chain stores, etc., as the rest of the country and are as much a part of the move towards a monolithic American culture, simultaneously a good thing and a bad thing, as the rest of the nation. You can’t imagine the difference those things make; it’s second only to air conditioning in having driven many people more inside their homes than outside with their immediate communities, which again is both a good and a bad thing.
When explaining the south, I’ve always phrased it that “The south seems to institutionalize discrimination while neglecting to practice it at the individual level; the north seems to institutionalize tolerance, but they don’t practice it personally.”
To the OP’s question; I’ve lived in most areas of the country and IME the most intolerant and unwelcoming region by far is the Pacific Northwest. The sheer quantity of sneering intolerance for someone “different” was overwhelming.
It was the first time in 5 states and 3 countries I found my (southern) accent openly mocked and ridiculed at work;
It was the only place I’d lived where strangers felt it their duty to criticize everything from my choice of cars to my biking clothes. My F250 pickup seemed to enrage a certain subset of the save-the-whales crowd, and I got treated to more than one sanctimonious lecture at the gas pumps while filling its tanks. (In fairness, the NRA and Bush stickers probably didn’t help. You’re not allowed to openly support conservative candidates there.);
The city newspaper (at the time) featured a columnist who essentially trashed newcomers moving into the area, and he even bragged about his “KBO” club in the paper (Keep the Bastards Out);
And if you think Southern Baptists are pushy, try letting a Seattleite find out you’re not a faithful member of the Church of the Environment. Our office’s enviro-scold would routinely become apoplectic when discovering I was using precious fossil fuel to haul the jetskis and boat over the mountains for yet another weekend at Banks Lake. Apparently one is supposed to use only a sailboat, and haul it with a bicycle, I suppose.
While we did meet and befriend some wonderful people, the PNW is the only region I was glad to leave because of the hostile natives. When I turned in my notice to leave, one coworker informed me that there was “No speed limit on I-5 south if you have TX plates and are pulling a U-Haul”. :rolleyes:
In all our moves, we’ve never encountered this level of animosity.
… So no, the south isn’t the worst.
I’ve never lived in the south although I have visited many times, but I had to remark on this. A good friend moved from Michigan to NC a few years ago and said exactly this - part of a normal greeting was the question about which church.
She is not a church-goer, she is white with a black live-in boyfriend and both of her daughters are bi-racial. Nevertheless she loves it down there, is making a nice life and asserts she’ll never move back to Michigan. SE Michigan is certainly quite segregated.
This is really the way to be, IMHO; or even at home in the world at large if one has the connections and wherewithall, which I don’t. But as intollerantly as I was treated there, I am undeniably the product of the hard-bitten, no-nonsense Midwest.
As for the heat down South; I live in the metro Atlanta area, and leave the a/c off all summer. I’m tall and thin so I have an efficient surface-to-mass ratio, and the heat here is nothing like I knew in southeast Wisconsin or Nevada. And shit guys: man is a tropical species, so just acclimate and save a few bucks on your utility bill.
I’ve heard similar comments, even up North. There seems to be a certain type of person, typically educated in a community college or lesser state school, who so long as they have a job (typically some low level IT or other operational job or trade) tends take a disparaging view against people with more/better education or more “professional” jobs.
I was born and raised in Tennessee and given the OP, if you didn’t intend your comment to be an insult, then you need to explain why you think Pakistan is so wonderful.
I have been in Georgia for the past 31 years and I still love it. The amazement I feel when someone casually passes a racist/homophobic/misogynist/xenophobic comment has been noted in the south, northeast, northwest, Canada, Brasil, New York, Los Angeles, and on and on. I think the narrowmindedness of which you speak is more a human than geographical phenomenon.
(swimming pools help with the summer heat, by the way)
I agree that racism exists everywhere to some degree or another, however my personal experience is that when I moved to Florida when I was 17 (after being raised in Arizona and spending large chunks of my summer in New England) I heard people use the word “nigger” and mean it for the first time in my life. And I heard it a lot. And I saw people get looked down on for being “nigger lovers.” One (white) friend of mine was dating a black boy and she regularly got called names and even had things thrown at her in the halls at school. I never saw anything remotely like that in all the years I lived in Arizona, nor did I see it in my travels to New England. I later, as an adult, moved to the DC suburbs in northern Virginia and that was the most racially mixed place I’ve ever lived, and I never heard/heard of/saw any racially motivated negative activity or speech (not to say it wasn’t there–I’m sure it was somewhere, but I never personally saw it). When I moved 8 years later to Georgia, I ran into people who had Confederate flags on their cars and homes, and I again heard people use “nigger” out loud in the open.
Once again, to restate, I KNOW, for certain that there is racism in every part of the country. There was racism in AZ, there was racism in VA, there was racism in New England… but in all the years I lived there, I never encountered it. I DID encounter it in the south, in two separate locations. So my own anecdotal evidence and experience leads me to conclude that it’s very likely that racism is more common in the south than it is in at least the other parts of the country that I’ve lived and visited.
I’m sure if I wasn’t a white half-Irish, half-German (lower-) middle class person I’d have experienced racism in more places, but all I’ve got to go on is my own experience.
Yes, absolutely. The South IS the worst place on Earth to live, and you should stay FAR away from it. If you come within 500 miles of the Mason-Dixon line, terrible things will happen.
KEEP AWAY IF YOU VALUE YOUR LIFE!
Is he gone yet? Good. Now we can talk about him behind his back.
I live in Austin, which is a fairly liberal city in Texas. Just north of us is Williamson County, a much more conservative suburban area.
Some years back, I heard a local comedian/DJ doing a long rant about how scary Williamson County is, how it’s a place filled with dangerous Christian loonies who’ll send you to the state pen for 20 years just for smoking a joint. One colleague of mine who lives in Williamson County was smirking at everything the comic said.
Later, after it was over, the colleague smirked, “What a (sphincter). He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s nothing like that.” I asked, “Then why don’t you TELL him that?” He laughed, “Why would I correct him? I’m GLAD idiots like him are afraid to come to Williamson County. I live in a nice boring town, and I like it that way. As long as guys like him THINK we’re scary and backwards, they’ll stay away. And that suits me fine.”
Well, the same principle holds here. Is the South REALLY what the OP imagines it is? Of course not. But why wouldI want to disabuse him of his foolish stereotypes. I’m GLAD he thinks the South is a scary place. I’m GLAD he doesn’t want to set foot here!
I think ultimately it’s the same as “Is a memory foam mattress the worst you can have?” Some people love them, some people hate them, some people can sleep on anything. Ultimately it’s personal experience and preference.
If I could choose my “ultimate place to live” the main requirements would be a good economy, mild summers, and most people know all the same showtunes I do. I haven’t found said place yet.
I sat in a bar in North Conway, New Hampshire about 5 years ago and listened to a New Yorker across the bar rave for 15 minutes about “niggers”. I heard that particular word more often in that 15 minutes than I have in my entire life to that point, and I grew up in Montgomery, Alabama.
Out of curiosity, when concerned white Northerners make blanket statements about how foul the entirety of the South is…do y’all realize there are people of color there too? And that you’re insulting them as well, with these blanket statements? Or am I to believe that when the culture of the South is lambasted and we’re called ignorant, disinterested in education, and intolerant of outsiders, you’re only talking about white people and you’re qualified to talk about every last white Southerner in existence?
Whenever these discussions come up, it just seems like white Northerners have had a few select interactions with white Southerners and use that as an excuse to generalize about an entire region, instead of grasping that not everybody is the same and even if you’ve met a couple of bad apples doesn’t mean that entire group is rotten. Why, it’s the sort of thinking I’ve run into among racists.
I heard nigger spewed more in the Midwest than in the deep South, FWIW.
Also, while I’m at it - Birmingham, Alabama. Fire hoses and police dogs, right? White supremacist bombs that kill little girls in church, right? Intransigent racist, supremely white Southern hellhole, right?
Well, no. Birmingham is now 73% black, has a black mayor and mostly black city council. It’s also a relentlessly Democratic city.
It’s a patchwork, dude, just like every other place on the face of the earth. Don’t be a boob.
… except people who don’t agree that that their imaginary god is simply a murderer.
You tell people that their god is imaginary and a murderer, and they’re not friendly to you! How intolerant! They should embrace you and thank you for enlightening them. You’re fulfilling an age old stereotype of the Northerner (I don’t know where you’re really from and it doesn’t matter) who looks down his nose at the ignorant, provincial Southerner and then wonders why they don’t appreciate his insight.
And I simply cannot believe that you have actually heard people in the South say disparaging things about other groups, religions, races, cultures, football teams, and sexes! Just imagine! That doesn’t happen anywhere else. What would make the Southerner prone to such outrageous behavior?
I’ve pointed that out several times on here. Some posters (not all) seem to make a distinction between southerners and blacks, which is an ironic act of racism since it seems to disenfranchise the millions of black people who live in the south as southerners. The South got over Jim Crow half a century ago (not without one hell of a fight, granted, but that was before most southerners are now alive).