Marylander here, grew up in the DC area (specifically Bowie). We were most emphatically not Southern. I don’t have a Southern accent, and never heard of grits or scrapple until I was a teenager.
This is my experience as well. Ask a Pennsylvanian, and they’ll tell you Maryland is part of the South. Ask a Virginian, and they’ll say Maryland is part of the North.
Making him yet another one who got tripped up by the idea that all of Maryland is culturally the same. It’s not. The DC area, Western Maryland, and the Eastern Shore are all culturally very different from each other (I’m less familiar with other parts of Maryland, but I know those three, and they are very different from each other).
I pronounce “poor” and “pore” the same (they rhyme with “or” and “oar”, also pronounced the same), but my non-Marylander friends agree that I don’t have a southern accent.
Eh- everybody’s too busy sniggering at the fact that our state song has the same tune as “Oh Christmas Tree”.
As a third generation native of Fairfax, Virginia, I gotta tell you all, none of these folks are from around here! They came here from Ohio, or Iowa, or Michigan, or Texas, or some damned place to work for the Hot Air Factory, and then stayed to bitch about how awful it is to live here.
Fifty years ago, it was a sleepy little southern town, where people smiled at you when you passed them on the street, and said hello. There were more trees than there were people, and for the most part the exchange has been marginal at best.
Well in 60 posts I count 19 posts basically saying Yes it is southern today in parts
13 of them reference confederate flags, rednecks, intolerance or the Klan
4 talk about a general non-specific Southern feel or perception
2 were enough in between not to try to quantify
So I think that was a fair statement. As I said in my first post - I’d like to see what the OP was referring to as Southern Identity before I tried to answer as far as MD today (as I think it was more southern than Northern until the last century) - but I think my response was fair given the way the thread had continued to evolve.
jimmmy, it’s just odd and distressing to me that in a lot of minds Southern=“confederate flags, rednecks, intolerance or the Klan.” (And I’m not picking on you particularly, since, as you say, you were just synthesizing earlier posts).
My feeling is no, Maryland is not the South. Regardless of past history, these days I think most Marylanders would not consider themselves Southerners. Regional borders can vary by who’s drawing them. If memory serves, during the last election, when the Washingon Post collated the election results by region, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina (!) were considered to be Mid-Atlantic States. Odder still, everything northeast of New York was considered to be the “Northeast”, not “New England”, as it is usually known. Weird.
Except for three years, I’ve lived in Maryland for most of the past twenty-six and a bit years. I’ve never met anyone who even mentioned the KKK. There have been a few times (I think) when I saw a Confederate flag decal, but it hasn’t been very often, and I’ve never met anyone who made a big deal about being a Southerner. Pointing out examples of racism doesn’t prove anything. Racism exists everywhere in the U.S. to some extent, and it’s not that related to the area of the country. The most racist people I’ve ever met are ones who live in what are (in some ways) very liberal suburbs. Their children go to schools that are about 4% black. They would be horrified to live in the next suburb over, where the schools are 12% black. This sort of disguised racism exists all over the U.S. and isn’t particularly Southern. Nobody in the U.S. who’s not rather rich is silly enough to think that they can live in completely white areas with completely white schools. They just don’t want to live in an area where the black population is more than about 4%, and they don’t want to send their children to schools where it’s not true that nearly all the students go to college. This subtle racism is closely mixed with their subtle class prejudice. They wouldn’t claim to be prejudiced against blacks or against working-class people, but they make sure that they and their children spend little time associating with either of them. None of this has anything to do with what section of the country one lives in.
Typically Southern food (like scrapple) exists in Maryland, but it’s not very common, and it’s eaten outside of the South at times anyway.
O.K., if that’s true, then it makes the point that someone was trying to make earlier that Southern food is eaten in Maryland even less true. Even if scrapple is eaten in Maryland (and it’s not very common), it has nothing to do with whether Maryland is part of the South.
I’m not quite sure why you’re questioning whether or not scrapple is eaten in Maryland - all the grocery stores around here sell it, in a couple varieties, even. Saying it’s not very common is strange. I know a lot of people who eat it, and it’s on the menu at local mom & pop style diners, as well as chains like IHOP, Waffle House and Denny’s. I’m not sure if it’s on the menu at the chains on other parts of the country, but it definitely is here.
I have no actual cites for KKK activity in Harford and Cecil Counties, but I work with a lot of people who live there, and they have confirmed that there is a lot of Klan activity in their area.
If you want to see Confederate flag decals and t-shirts, and even Confederate flags on homes, head north and east. It’s all over the place up here.
I have never seen anyone eat scrapple or talk about eating scrapple. I have never seen any evidence of the existence of the KKK in Maryland. I have seen very few Confederate decals on cars.
>I have never seen anyone eat scrapple or talk about eating scrapple.
It’s also on the menu at the New Ideal Diner in Aberdeen, MD, the Spready Oak Diner in Rising Sun, the Elkton Diner in Elkton, and at the Double T Diners in Bel Air and in White Marsh.
>I have never seen any evidence of the existence of the KKK in Maryland.
Somebody burned a cross on the lawn of the Cecil County Court House on Main Street in Elkton a few years back. It killed one of the trees planted there. That’s why the row of trees in front of the court house is missing one tree. I don’t know if this was the KKK or not, but it does kinda have their look and feel.
>I have seen very few Confederate decals on cars.
There’s one! Look, there’s another one! Damn, this one isn’t going to work…
Like I said, you’re looking in the wrong place. Try rural Baltimore County, and Harford and Cecil Counties.
Try a volunteer firehouse; guaranteed you’ll find confederate stuff on at least 50% of the cars.
Since we’re about fighting ignorance, let’s separate the Stars and Bars from the KKK, as they were at one time mutually exclusive, but have become co-mingled in the minds of many. The KKK began in Pulaski, TN, after the end of the Civil war, and for many years displayed the Stars and Stripes, not the Confederate Battle flag.
That newspaper is not ours - it’s largely the personal spew of a none-too-highly regarded individual with many agendas. (At least, that’s the feel I get from a local message board.) And I have to say that I don’t recall seeing many confederate flags hereabouts, at least never in quantities that I would characterize as a hotbed. In fact, apart from the Amish, most of the people I encounter are technical professionals who work at the Navy base.
Now, I’ve never patronized the drag race strip or the motor cross track, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see rebel wanna-bes there. I’ve driven past there on rally weekends, and the place does have a certain air about it.
I grew up just north of Baltimore, and I never thought of myself as a southerner. Then again, I kinda figured the Civil War ended long enough ago that people should just quit fighting it. Silly me…