The dictionary defines “Southerner” as simply someone who lives in the southern United States. But I believe this is basically punting because they don’t want to delve into the hot-button complexity of what this term really means in practice. To better delineate this question, I think it would be helpful to ask about a number of hypothetical people who live in Brooklyn and have done for the past year, after moving from a Southern state. Let’s stipulate that they are all 25 years old, and lived the first 24 years of their lives in the same location in the South. They are mentioned in a newspaper article about something else than “Southernness”, but may perhaps be described by the reporter as Southerners to provide more flavour and background to the piece.
So my question is: which of these people would be most likely to be described in the story as a Southerner? Does the answer change if we toggle whether the reporter knows or does not know where the person lived before Brooklyn?
(1) Alonso is a Latino from Florida. His parents fled Castro’s Cuba and are active in the emigre community (and the Republican Party).
(2) Beauregard (whose friends just call him Beau) is a Caucasian from Alabama. His great-great grandfather fought for the Confederacy, and all his ancestors were white Alabamans.
(3) Ceci is an African-American from Mississippi. Her parents are active in the NAACP and the Democratic Party.
(4) Zev is an Orthodox Jew from Florida. Like Ceci, he has many relatives in Brooklyn.
(5) Hoc is from Atlanta; his parents were refugees from Vietnam.
(6) Tyler is a Caucasian raised in Chapel Hill, N.C. His parents were from Denver and NYC, moving to Chapel Hill only because they got faculty positions at the University of North Carolina. They never liked the South, and moved away when Tyler was eighteen; he stayed behind and went to school at UNC, taking advantage of the in-state tuition until he had completed his Masters degree.
I’m not sure what a reporter would report for flavor. Assuming they were born in the South, I personally would not quibble about their Southerness depending on where in Florida the Floridians were from. Anything south of the I-4 corridor, and most places in it, are not in The South unless, perhaps, you’re in the Lake Okeechobee area.
If they’re from the South (or moved there later), and call themselves Southerners, than I’d say they’re Southerners. I’m a Southerner, by the way. Ethnicity and religion don’t (or shouldn’t) matter at all.
For a real story, there’s this: My cousin grew up near Philadelphia and spent much of her adult life in that area and also in Delaware and New York City. However, she has spent the last twenty years or so in Houston. Is she a Southerner? I never thought so myself.
A minor point, but one that bugs many white native Texans is having someone casually refer to us as being “from the South”. No. Just no, OK? Crackers are from the South. White Texas is peckerwoods mostly, some hillbillies, lotsa plain old rednecks. But not crackers. Nosir.
Agreed that it’s a matter of self-identification. I would guess that Beau and Ceci would probably identify themselves as Southerners and the others probably wouldn’t, but if any of them corrected me on that, that’s their call.
I’m from Mississippi. I don’t consider Florida or Texas the South, really. They’re their own thing. I mean, if someone from Florida says they’re a Southerner I won’t correct them. But it’s not what I think of as the South.
I also don’t call myself a Southerner, because I don’t have that attitude. So, maybe I’m not even qualified to say.
They are all Southerners, at least if they want to identify that way. The South is varied, and contains many different subcultures. Kind of like the rest of the country, as it happens.
(And, Chapel Hill isn’t Southern? Chapel Hill is very consciously and proudly Southern. It’s pretty much the place to go if you want to study Southern literature or culture. The fact that it’s a fairly liberal and culturally diverse university town does not make it any less Southern, it just means that there are many parts of the South that do not conform to facile stereotypes, most of which are specifically stereotypes of the rural South.)
Looks like the premise of my question whooshed past everyone, so let me restate it, with emphasis added:
I phrased it this way because dictionaries are generally supposed to use written sources like newspaper articles in judging definitions. Essentially, this thread is about whether the dictionary has done its job properly.
What I am specifically not asking:
–Do you think these people are Southerners?
–Do they have the right to call themselves Southerners?
Also, why does everyone assume the two Floridians are in Miami or thereabouts? Maybe they live within spitting distance of the Alabama border!
ETA:
I did not know that! Thanks for the correction and I will endeavour not to make the mistake again.
ETA2:
To the contrary, please elabourate. This is kind of what I was getting at originally, that Southerner refers to a certain type of person who lives in the South, not just anyone in the South. What attitude do you mean?
Being Southern is a little like being Jewish. It is tribal and there are number of ways you can get to be one. Out of your list, only number 2 (the white Alabama guy with deep ties) and number 3 (the black woman from Mississippi) are undeniably Southern. They would have some serious denial issues if they claimed otherwise. Southern blacks are an integral part of the South and its history and I consider even most Northern blacks partially Southern because of heritage as long as their family was from the South.
I grew up right on the Louisiana/Texas border and was born into a paternal line that started at the 1st colony of Jamestown and stayed in the South for the next 400 years and still going. I am the only one in my immediate family that left. I have lived in Massachusetts for 18 years and I still consider myself Southern and my Yankee daughters half-Southern.
Because of where I grew up, I always had a problem with the ‘Texas is not the South’ claim. I could and did walk to Texas in a few minutes and many of the people I grew up lived over the border in East Texas. I knew for a fact that I was Southern and they were the same as me so there you go. Texas is a big state though. I always claim that South ends at the Western edges of the Houston and Dallas areas.
There are other ways to be Southern however and those don’t depend on race, ethnicity, or heritage. Some transplants take to it like a pig to mud and others stay culturally different and isolated. For those people, self-identification is the key.
Interesting and informative response, Shagnasty. But I want to be careful not to drift, here: I am asking about the noun, “Southerner”, not the adjective “Southern”. Obviously they are closely related, but I’m not sure they are quite the same. I can more easily buy that blacks from the South are going to be described by a journalist as “Southern” than that they would be called “Southerners”.
This gets problematic when we put them right next to each other, I think, because our logic circuits rebel at saying someone could be Southern but not a Southerner. And it is also starting to get into that mode (which may not happen to everyone but I know I’m not the only one) where repeating the words over and over make them sound meaningless and thus makes it much harder to talk about nuances of usage.
All that said, I can definitely see your phrasing “Southern blacks” being pretty prevalent in journalistic usage. But describing an individual black person as a “Southerner” without any reference to their race? I think that would tend to be avoided, either by the reporter or their editor–presumably because the default image in a reader’s mind of a Southerner is someone who looks like Bo and Luke Duke, or Paula Deen.
I think for a human interest piece like the one you’re hypothesizing, whether or not any of the people would be described as “Southerners” would be very much up to the individual reporter. So you’re not going to get any more precise answer there as you are asking each of us whether we would or wouldn’t consider them Southerners.
And on that note, my two cents would be that all of the described people are Southerners, with the exception of the two Floridians, assuming they’re not living in the panhandle. Yes, someone from Chapel Hill is in my eyes a Southerner, even if North Carolina in general is getting more “Northern.” Is someone from Arlington, Virginia a Southerner? That’s a much trickier question.
