Great piece. I’m a working class kid from the south and integration is just a given. We were all down there at the bottom together. Having lived long enough to become, for a time, a professional class liberal in the north, there’s just a lot less hanging out comfortably with people of other races in that milieu. To the extent that it happens, it’s mostly not with black people.
I actually think the liberal race obsession makes hanging out with black people, in particular, more fraught. Having to worry about stepping on various mines, things like “cultural appropriation”, makes it less likely that people of different races will simply chill together. For people who take it to heart; people in the south who ignore that stuff are mostly doing what they’ve always done. But I have found the introduction of all speech and behavior coded, obsessions with privilege and power dynamics, sort of heartbreaking. It isn’t progress, not at all.
I relate to this to a degree. I went to high school in a very diverse Texas suburb. Racial tension was not really a thing, the neighborhoods were quite mixed and there was no large majority group so the salience of race was just not very high.
As an adult I lived and worked in the very segregated city of San Francisco and routinely listened to people make scornful pronouncements about those horrible racists in Texas and how everyone there lives. A few times I described my parents neighborhood and my school, and people didn’t believe me. “You must have been in a really unusual situation.” But, no, I wasn’t.
For certain people this is part of their social status. They learned in history class all about *those states.* They can look down on those states and their people. Actually, it’s a bit like… well, nevermind.
Because you mentioned it, folks from San Francisco definitely helped inspire this piece. But I've been thinking about this ever since I moved to the DMV. It made a huge impression on me and was also very disappointing and sad, because of what it said about the country as a whole.
Ironically, a lot of our Italian ancestors left the old country precisely because they hated these sorts of provincial attitudes you describe among Southerners.
As a native St. Louisan of Missouri, we were always painfully aware of being *adjacent* to the South, but we considered ourselves Northerners. It's one reason the slow invasion of country music grated on me over the years.
And yet, living smack dab in the North now (Connecticut, outside NYC), it's pretty easy to tell what was *different* and *Southern* about "back home". The barbeque up here just doesn't compare, even when it's relatively good. There are gruff, ruralist, work-boots types, but they're missing that hilariously special brand of redneck "skilled stupidity" earned through generations of just barely surviving fireworks accidents -- it's more like they're just cosplaying a culture they've osmosed from Fox News and country music videos they only watched to piss off the libs. Some people I meet like whiskey, but few can really appreciate a good oaky bourbon down to their bones. The only venison I see at the supermarkets is packaged by some national specialty distributor like D'Artagnan from hundreds of miles away.
There were bad things about back home, too, but I do miss a lot of the culture.
Great piece. I’m a working class kid from the south and integration is just a given. We were all down there at the bottom together. Having lived long enough to become, for a time, a professional class liberal in the north, there’s just a lot less hanging out comfortably with people of other races in that milieu. To the extent that it happens, it’s mostly not with black people.
I actually think the liberal race obsession makes hanging out with black people, in particular, more fraught. Having to worry about stepping on various mines, things like “cultural appropriation”, makes it less likely that people of different races will simply chill together. For people who take it to heart; people in the south who ignore that stuff are mostly doing what they’ve always done. But I have found the introduction of all speech and behavior coded, obsessions with privilege and power dynamics, sort of heartbreaking. It isn’t progress, not at all.
Well said. And I do not think it is a secret but I have to say, I agree with you.
I relate to this to a degree. I went to high school in a very diverse Texas suburb. Racial tension was not really a thing, the neighborhoods were quite mixed and there was no large majority group so the salience of race was just not very high.
As an adult I lived and worked in the very segregated city of San Francisco and routinely listened to people make scornful pronouncements about those horrible racists in Texas and how everyone there lives. A few times I described my parents neighborhood and my school, and people didn’t believe me. “You must have been in a really unusual situation.” But, no, I wasn’t.
For certain people this is part of their social status. They learned in history class all about *those states.* They can look down on those states and their people. Actually, it’s a bit like… well, nevermind.
Because you mentioned it, folks from San Francisco definitely helped inspire this piece. But I've been thinking about this ever since I moved to the DMV. It made a huge impression on me and was also very disappointing and sad, because of what it said about the country as a whole.
Ironically, a lot of our Italian ancestors left the old country precisely because they hated these sorts of provincial attitudes you describe among Southerners.
As a native St. Louisan of Missouri, we were always painfully aware of being *adjacent* to the South, but we considered ourselves Northerners. It's one reason the slow invasion of country music grated on me over the years.
And yet, living smack dab in the North now (Connecticut, outside NYC), it's pretty easy to tell what was *different* and *Southern* about "back home". The barbeque up here just doesn't compare, even when it's relatively good. There are gruff, ruralist, work-boots types, but they're missing that hilariously special brand of redneck "skilled stupidity" earned through generations of just barely surviving fireworks accidents -- it's more like they're just cosplaying a culture they've osmosed from Fox News and country music videos they only watched to piss off the libs. Some people I meet like whiskey, but few can really appreciate a good oaky bourbon down to their bones. The only venison I see at the supermarkets is packaged by some national specialty distributor like D'Artagnan from hundreds of miles away.
There were bad things about back home, too, but I do miss a lot of the culture.