# Southern pride: Why? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 26, 2008, 1:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041 "2008-01-26T01:29:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 4:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/121 "2008-01-27T04:11:56Z")
[QUOTE=vibrotronica] [West Fucking Virginia](http://www.flickr.com/photos/98157122@N00/316626603/) [/QUOTE] Yeah, but even West Virginia got out of the South when it could. 😃 Your link reminds me of a Thai kid here who spent a year in West Virginia as an exchange student in high school. He loved the place! Could not talk about anything but West Virginia. Usually wore some sort of West Virginia T-shirt, of which he had many. Wanted to go to university in West Virginia. Was horrified when I suggested there were better universities outside of West Virginia and he might want to consider some of those. ---
**Author:** ![neorxnawange](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/f4b2a3/32.png) [@neorxnawange](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/neorxnawange)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 8:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/122 "2008-01-27T08:47:52Z")
If I’ve learned anything from this thread it is that there _is_ such a thing as “Northern Pride”. It manifests itself as Northerners exclaiming that they are superior to Southerners in every way. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 12:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/123 "2008-01-27T12:54:48Z")
[QUOTE=Argent Towers] Race is absolutely fluid in American society. Example: Right now we have a black man as a serious contender for President of the United States. Would this have happened 50 years ago? I don’t understand how you could think that race is truly more of a dividing issue than class, when we still have the majority of the money in the United States in the hands of a tiny number of ultra-rich individuals, we still have factories and farms closing all over the country and countless people (black and white) losing their jobs. The media is constantly yelling “RACE! RACE! RACE!” in our faces - I wonder why? Could it possibly be because the powers in charge would rather that lower-class blacks and whites distrust and fear each other than band together and unite against the fat cats and giant corporations? Have you ever seen the movie _The Killing Floor,_ about the Chicago stockyards in the early 20th century? The company bosses deliberately incited racism and stirred up tensions between the black workers and white workers. Divide and conquer. [/QUOTE] Mark Twain noted this 120 years ago. He could never understand how the poor white southerners took up arms to defend a system (plantation slavery) that had kept them poor and ignorant all of their lives! :eek: ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 2:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/124 "2008-01-27T14:08:12Z")
[QUOTE=neorxnawange] If I’ve learned anything from this thread it is that there _is_ such a thing as “Northern Pride”. It manifests itself as Northerners exclaiming that they are superior to Southerners in every way. [/QUOTE] Interesting conclusion from a thread in which that claim was not expressed even once. = = = [QUOTE=ralph124c] [Quote=Argent Towers] The media is constantly yelling “RACE! RACE! RACE!” in our faces - I wonder why? Could it possibly be because the powers in charge would rather that lower-class blacks and whites distrust and fear each other than band together and unite against the fat cats and giant corporations? Have you ever seen the movie The Killing Floor, about the Chicago stockyards in the early 20th century? The company bosses deliberately incited racism and stirred up tensions between the black workers and white workers. Divide and conquer. [/quote] Mark Twain noted this 120 years ago. He could never understand how the poor white southerners took up arms to defend a system (plantation slavery) that had kept them poor and ignorant all of their lives! [/QUOTE] I would be interested in seeing any concrete evidence for these assertions. I suspect that it is much more a case that the people near the lower end of the economic spectrum are desperate to make sure that they are not the very bottom of the pile and are willing to grasp at any distinction to give themselves the feeling of superiority over someone. I do not think this requires any manipulation from the powers (whoever they are) to accomplish. I am not denying that various economic classes exist in the country, but the idea that they are created and manipulated by the top tier to prevent threats to the top tier are pretty much extensions of outdated and discredited Marxist philosophy. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/125 "2008-01-27T14:17:13Z")
While I haven’t been involved in here, Tomndebb, your blanket statements reveal a profound ignorance of the Civil War. [QUOTE=tomndebb] Thr North did not fight the war to free the slaves or end slavery. [/quote] Not true. Large and important sections of the north did in fact fight to destroy slavery from the start, and by the end of the conflict most of the north had agreed that it was findamentally a crusade (in every sense of the word) to destroy slavery. > [@](#): > > This is a true statement; the North fought to preserve the Union. This is accurate as far as it goes. But it also conceals many motives, such as punishing the South for decades of obnoxious, undemocratic, and selfish behavior. > [@](#): > > (Of course, the reason the South voted for secession was a fear (not justified by any remark by Lincoln) that there was going to be an active movement to force aboilition, so the South did go to war to preserve slavery, even if it was not (yet) in serious jeopardy.) This is true but simplified. The South had whipped itself into a very weird ferver. First they were they were terrified that Republicans would try to end slavery by force (which was never true until the Civil War). Then, they used this fear to justify starting brutal, armed secession militias and the Rape of Kansas. They furthermore decided that all Northerners were against them… so they started a campaign of hate, lies, blackmail, and instransigence against the North. What’s odd is that I detect no animosity the other way, at least initially. The South _made_ it’s own enemy in this case. Without the constant insults and furor, the South probably would have continued unmolested. Indded, they criple the Democrats and literall destroyed the Whigs, both of which had been national parties until them. Thereafter, the Democrats became two seperate sectional parties (a rift which to this day has never toally healed) plus the Republican Northern party. I’ve never understood this. It seems to have been some sort of private mental masturbation on the part of the South’s collective opinion makers. > [@](#): > > Lincoln was pretty much opposed to slavery, but as president of the U.S. (which recognized the legality of slavery) he was not that excited about endng it. > [@](#): > > On the other hand, the Emancipation Proclamation was a political act intended to prevent Britain and France from providing any more support for the Confederacy. It was not an action planned to harm plantation owners for all time, just a tactic in an ongaing war. Again, grossly simplified. It was not _just_ a tactic. Or “just” anything else. It was first of all an ideological level, a declaration to Americans of what the war had become and what it had to become. Second, it was a sign to Europeans (who intially were incapable of understanding it or the legal/Constitutional system which produced) that the Union was serious about ending slavery. Third, it was a very serious signal to the south that their ways were going to be destroyed; that their entire way of life was simply no longer acceptable, and that the North would from now on free any slave it came across. This represented a major change in the purpose of the war. Until then, the Union might have accepted slavery now in exchange for Union and hope of manumitance later. It did signal a change in tactics, but the the Proclamation itself was not really a tactic and initially produced no gains. The North thought it overly vacillitating or likely to incite more resistance, the South thought it laughable, and the Europeans thought it pointless. But then (and now), people simply didn’t understand that the President’s powers were limited. Lincoln could punish areas in rebellion (stretching if not breaking the Constitution) but had no leverage over those who weren’t. Behind the scenes, he worked to end slavery, and eventually did so successfully (IIRC, it took almost two years and some political logrolling). People also forget that until that time, Union armies hadn’t fought against slavery. Early in the war, they would often even turn over escaped slaves to their owners, because no law against slavery had yet been issued, and the legal staus of rebels and their property and state governments hadn’t been looked at. > [@](#): > > You claim that no effort was made to assist freed blacks to enter society was simply wrong. The Freedman’s Bureau was an active agent of the U.S. government. It did fail, ultimately, but that had to do with local intransigence in the South, lack of decent direction (as no one had ever really tried doing anything similar so there was no blueprint to follow), vetoing of funding by Andrew Johnson, and eventual removal of support as voters got tired of supporting an agency that was failing to provide clear return on investment. Actually, this is… totally correct. What’s sad is that during the war the Freedman’s bureau, if not perfectly a model of freedom itself, was highly successful in organizing former slaves and getting work done while educating them and helping them get on their feet. I think perhaps that people were simply exhausted mentally and emotionally by the end of the war and preferred to forget the ugly realities around it. Well, I’m not a Southerner by birth or by culture. And even now I actually live near Knoxville, which was probably the most un-Southern city in the South. During the Civil War, East Tennessee was a huge anti-Southern guerrilla center, and Knoxville was only lukewarm towards the south (downtown on S. Gay Street, there were two recruiting stations - one Union and one Southern, half a block from each other). The region provided thousands of troops for the north, along with Admiral Farragut. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 2:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/126 "2008-01-27T14:39:06Z")
[QUOTE=smiling bandit] Not true. Large and important sections of the north did in fact fight to destroy slavery from the start, and by the end of the conflict most of the north had agreed that it was findamentally a crusade (in every sense of the word) to destroy slavery. [/quote] While Abolition was a moderately strong and growing movement in the North, I have never seen any evidence that anyone outside the explicit Abolition movement fought “to destroy slavery from the start.” It is true that freeing the slaves took on a larger motive as the war progressed , (draft riots notwithstanding), but the idea that the original calls to arms included any “free the slaves” rhetoric in 1861 is vastly overblown. You can find some such rhetoric in the writings of Henry Ward Beecher, for example, but he had been promoting Abolition for years. I find no similar texts in January to June of 1861 from the likes of Horace Greeley–who argued strongly against the secessionist movement, condemning its leaders, but who did not resume calls for Abolition until the war had bogged down in earnest after the summer of 1861–or the calls to arms among the various Northern states. My statments _were_ simplistic, but I was trying to respond to false assertions without hijacking the thread into a completely new direction. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 2:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/127 "2008-01-27T14:41:53Z")
War is often more than just what history says. Sometimes, the leaders fight a war for one reason, and the people fight it for another. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/128 "2008-01-27T16:09:22Z")
[QUOTE=tomndebb] While Abolition was a moderately strong and growing movement in the North, I have never seen any evidence that anyone outside the explicit Abolition movement fought “to destroy slavery from the start.” It is true that freeing the slaves took on a larger motive as the war progressed , (draft riots notwithstanding), but the idea that the original calls to arms included any “free the slaves” rhetoric in 1861 is vastly overblown. You can find some such rhetoric in the writings of Henry Ward Beecher, for example, but he had been promoting Abolition for years. I find no similar texts in January to June of 1861 from the likes of Horace Greeley–who argued strongly against the secessionist movement, condemning its leaders, but who did not resume calls for Abolition until the war had bogged down in earnest after the summer of 1861–or the calls to arms among the various Northern states. My statments _were_ simplistic, but I was trying to respond to false assertions without hijacking the thread into a completely new direction. [/QUOTE] Fair enough. My response was actually more copnfrontational than it should have been. In this particular case, I think you may be underestimating the abolition movement. They formed a large part of the early recruits, and were very influential in politics, and because of that they tended to have a larger influence than the raw numbers. ---
**Author:** ![Ogre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/ecb155/32.png) [@Ogre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ogre)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/129 "2008-01-27T19:49:52Z")
Jesus Christ. It’s taking _so_ much longer than we thought. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 8:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/130 "2008-01-27T20:01:28Z")
> [@](#): > > Race is absolutely fluid in American society. > > Example: Right now we have a black man as a serious contender for President of the United States. Would this have happened 50 years ago? Are you expecting some special ceremony to occur at Obama’s inauguration where he’ll have his race changed? Because otherwise what you’re saying is a complete non-sequitur. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/131 "2008-01-27T20:07:40Z")
> [@](#): > > War is often more than just what history says. Sometimes, the leaders fight a war for one reason, and the people fight it for another. This is very true. People generally fight a war because their government tells them to. So the real issue is why governments go to war. And that’s very relevant to the secession crisis of 1860. Many people make the claim that it wasn’t about slavery because the majority of people in the south didn’t own slaves. This is true. But the decision to secede was made by a smaller group of people - and the overwhelming majority of these people were slave owners. ---
**Author:** ![MichaelQReilly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@MichaelQReilly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MichaelQReilly)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/132 "2008-01-27T20:09:58Z")
I’m going to come out and lay my prejudices on the table and say that I don’t like the South. In fact, I wish that when the Civil War ended the North didn’t let the Deep South states back in, as they’ve been pretty much a drag on the rest of the country. For some reason Southerners passionately love the South. Look at all the songs extolling its virtues (Sweet Home Alabama, Georgia on My Mind, etc.). Yet, we are talking about a place that to this day ranks at or near the bottom of the country in just about every quality of life measurement. Go look up statistics on life expectancy, education, violent crime, incarceration rate, and income. Even granting that the Deep South has improved quite a bit over the last 60 or so years, its still by numerous objective measurements the worst place in the United States to live today. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 8:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/133 "2008-01-27T20:34:37Z")
Now that you have laid your prejudices in the middle of the Great Debates Forum, I suggest that that entire line of discussion drop out of this thread. The question is why people take pride in their place of origin and why is it particularly apparent among those from the U.S. South. It is not a display of prejudices. Take it to the **Pit** or open a serious discussion (with references to facts) in a separate thread. (The other thread might also not survive in **GD** , but it will not be a hjack of this thread.) * * * Stick to the topic, folks. [/Modding] ---
**Author:** ![MichaelQReilly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@MichaelQReilly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MichaelQReilly)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 8:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/134 "2008-01-27T20:44:03Z")
[QUOTE=tomndebb] Now that you have laid your prejudices in the middle of the Great Debates Forum, I suggest that that entire line of discussion drop out of this thread. The question is why people take pride in their place of origin and why is it particularly apparent among those from the U.S. South. It is not a display of prejudices. Take it to the **Pit** or open a serious discussion (with references to facts) in a separate thread. (The other thread might also not survive in **GD** , but it will not be a hjack of this thread.) * * * Stick to the topic, folks. [/Modding] [/QUOTE] My goal was only to point out that irony that by many statistical measures the South is not a particularly great place to live and yet it seems to engender a surprising amount of pride in its residents. If I did so an inflammatory manner I apologize. I only included my own opinions in the interest of intellectual honesty. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/135 "2008-01-27T20:52:02Z")
[QUOTE=Siam Sam] That’s true. There’s not one single Southern culture. I grew up on the fringes of the South. Way out in West Texas, I never got a sense that people thought of themselves as Southerners. (Just trailer-trash Texans. [/QUOTE] According to Joel Garreau’s [“Nine Nations of North America”](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_nations_of_north_america) analysis, West Texas is culturally part of the Southwest (“Mexamerica”), East Texas is part of the South (“Dixie”), and North Texas is part of the Midwest (“Breadbasket”). ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/136 "2008-01-27T21:25:18Z")
[QUOTE=Little Nemo] This is very true. People generally fight a war because their government tells them to. So the real issue is why governments go to war. [/QUOTE] But the South has a traditionally martial culture that distinguishes it from other regions. Southerners have always been more ready to enthusiastically support a war than Americans from other regions – no matter what the war is about. They predominate in the U.S. armed forces, and not just because military service offers economic opportunities. Southerners are also more prone to tolerate the settling of personal disputes through violence, especially where it involves a matter of “honor.” (This also explains the violent, macho street culture of inner-city African-Americans all over the country, whose cultural roots are really more in Dixie than in Africa.) [David Hackett Fischer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed) attributes this to the “hearth culture” of the effective first settlers – the Tidewater South was colonized by Cavalier aristocrats, the Highland South by Scotch-Irish, both very martial regional cultures back in the British Isles. See also [_Vietnam: The Necessary War,_](http://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-Necessary-Reinterpretation-Americas-Disastrous/dp/0684870274/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201468966&sr=8-1) by Michael Lind, Chapter 4, “The Fall of Washington”: > [@](#): > > The real reason for the persistence of sectionalism in U.S. foreign policy can be found in the ethnoregional theory of American politics, which has been developed by the historians David Hackett Fischer, Daniel Elazar, D.W. Meinig, Kevin Phillips, and others. The ethnoregional theory holds that in the United States powerful ethnic and regional subcultures are more important and enduring than political parties and ideologies. The labels “Democrat” and “Republican” differ in their meaning from generation to generation; regional subcultures such as those of New England and the Tidewater South change much more slowly. > > The greatest insight of ethnoregional theorists is that immigrants in the United States do not assimilate to a uniform American national culture; rather, they assimilate to one of a small number of preexisting regional cultures. The historian Wilbur Zelinsky has defined a thesis he calls the Doctrine of Effective First Settlement that holds: “Whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to affect a viable, self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance for the later social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band of settlers may have been.” . . . > > Historians differ on the question of how many of these enduring regional cultures there are in the United States. Most agree on three: a Yankee culture that spread westward overland from New England; a Quaker culture operating in Pennsylvania; and a Cavalier culture originating in the coastal South. Most, but not all, identify a fourth regional culture, that of the Scots-Irish Highland South from Appalachia to the Ozarks and Texas. In his magisterial _Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America_ (1989), David Hackett Fischer argues persuasively that these four “hearth cultures” originated in different regions of early modern Britain and were transplanted to North America by four waves of immigrants. In the first wave (1629-40), Puritans from the eastern counties of England settled New England. The second wave (1642-75) brought anti-Puritan, royalist Cavaliers from the south of England to Virginia. Quakers from the North Midlands of England colonized Pennsylvania and the Delaware Valley after emigrating during the third wave (1675-1715). The fourth and final major Anglo-American migration, which lasted from 1717 to 1775, transplanted so-called Scots-Irish from northern England, lowland Scotland, and the north of Ireland (Ulster). > > In addition to having distinctive folkways and dialects of English, these four groups of British-American immigrants had their own unique variants of a common individualistic and liberal British political culture. Fischer describes the New England Puritan ideal as “ordered freedom,” the Quaker ideal as “reciprocal freedom,” the Scots-Irish ideal as “natural freedom,” and the coastal southern ideal as “hegemonic freedom” (deference to traditional elites). Another historian, Daniel J. Elazar, calls the New England tradition the “moralistic” culture, the midatlantic region the “individualistic” culture, and the coastal southern tradition the “traditional” culture. . . . > > The ethnoregional theory provides the answer to the mystery of American sectional differences with respect to war. Regional disagreements about war are part of a larger pattern of regional disagreement about the legitimacy of all forms of violence. “Historians of Southern mores are agreed that violence as an aspect of Southern life clearly distinguished the region from the rest of the country,” writes historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown. Of the southerner, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “the energy which his [northern] neighbor devotes to gain turns with him to a passionate love of field sports and military exercises; he delights in violent bodily exertion, he is familiar with the use of arms, and is accustomed from a very early age to expose his life in single combat.” Southern states lead the nation not only in military academies but in homicide rates and death penalty laws and in low penalties for domestic violence. Northern states have the lowest homicide rates and the greatest number of statutes requiring a citizen to retreat before attacking an assailant or intruder in hishome. > > These regional differences reflect the difference in moral systems between the post-Calvinist Puritanism of Greater New England, which shuns violence as a means for resolving disputes, and the cultures of honor of the Scots-Irish Highland South and the Anglo-American Tidewater South. The two southern cultures are quite different, but compared to Greater New Englanders, both Highland and Tidewater southerners look with greater approval on violent retaliation for insults. But southerners are not indiscriminately violent. The difference between northern and southern homicide rates is accounted for almost entirely by violent responses of southerners to personal offenses: arguments, insults to women, lovers’ quarrels, and disputes within the family. The researchers Richard E. Nisbet and Dov Cohen discovered that, at the same university, white southern students were more likely to respond aggressively than white northern students to the same set of insults and provocations. The same researchers have pointed out the similarities between the culture of honor of white southerners and that of inner-city black Americans, most of whom are descendants of southern migrants. In short: “Southern pride” exists, not because of anything in particular the South has to be proud of, but because Southern culture, to a far greater degree than other regional American cultures, is **based** on pride. ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 9:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/137 "2008-01-27T21:27:29Z")
[QUOTE=DLuxN8R-13] I take it you’ve never interacted with anyone from West “By God!” Virginia, then. 🆒 Those folks (of whom I was one originally, but not for a lo-oo-ong time\*), while the butts of a lot of prejudiced bullshit jokes about feudin’, cousin-marryin’, parent-fuckin’ and no-teeth-or-shoes-havin’ from all the ignorant bastards in the rest of the USA, are totally down with being hillbillies and Appalachians and with having a culture and a history that’s not quite like anywhere else’s in the country. Of course, West Virginia isn’t the South (except to Northerners) any more than it’s the North (except to people from south of Roanoke); it’s actually a melange of Border South and Industrial Northeast in a lot of ways, which adds up a whole that can sometimes look downright _strange_ to an outlander \*_They_ call it “West-by-God”, _I_ usually call it “West-Gawd-Damn”. Nobody who’s not originally from there gets to, though. 😃 [/QUOTE] I grew up in West Virginia, and you are right. I remember a PBS special that called West Virginia a place of “terrible beauty” which is a very good description. And wonderful place, with wonderful people, who have been screwed over in the past 200 years, in some cases due to greed, and other cases due to ignorance. Anyone can make all of the jokes you want, but travel through WV and break down outside of cell phone range, and see if you aren’t helped with a ride, a tow truck, a meal, and 12 invitations for overnight lodging. How long ago has it been that you check into a hotel, and they give you a room key and tell you to pay before you leave in the morning? It was 2005 for me on a trip home.. ---
**Author:** ![Shagnasty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9dc877/32.png) [@Shagnasty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shagnasty)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/138 "2008-01-27T22:30:01Z")
[QUOTE=MichaelQReilly] My goal was only to point out that irony that by many statistical measures the South is not a particularly great place to live and yet it seems to engender a surprising amount of pride in its residents. If I did so an inflammatory manner I apologize. I only included my own opinions in the interest of intellectual honesty. [/QUOTE] Your location lists you as being in Connecticut. The last time I checked it had the highest per capita income in the nation yet there is Hartford and New Haven which are shitholes by all accounts. The reason is that the resident black population was never assimilated. They don’t have such people in Greenwich. Believe it or not, the South is much more integrated than New England but in its own way. That is why you find so much cultural diversity there. People in Connecticut can treat the resident blacks like cute little pets all they want because there simply aren’t that many. Cities like New Orleans that spawned defining musical styles like Jazz through Louis Armstrong and world class cuisine are often majority black and are proud of it. The same can be said for Northern Mississippi which invented both the Blues and much of Rock and Roll through people such as Elvis. Connecticut is a disgusting example of tisk tisk tisk by playing lip service to the minorities that are unfortunate enough to live there. Connecticut is firmly a white man’s world and some people like you don’t choose to think that it should be any other way elsewhere in the nation. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/139 "2008-01-27T22:33:13Z")
OTOH, I have never heard any references to “Connecticut Pride”. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2008, 10:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/140 "2008-01-27T22:36:33Z")
[QUOTE=Boyo Jim] OTOH, I have never heard any references to “Connecticut Pride”. [/QUOTE] [http://www.connecticutpride.org/](http://www.connecticutpride.org/) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041.md?page=6) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041.md?page=8)