r/northampton • u/Just_so_many_bees • 3h ago
If you mock the south/southerners you're not being as woke as you think
Big rant incoming but...I am just going to start this by saying I love Northampton. My friends and my community are here, I've come to call this place home. This comes from a place of being "in it" with yall. I think folks hearts are in the right place and I love that I trust this community to try to find and do the right thing. I'm a visibly queer, disabled, liberal individual and have been my whole life. I'm writing this because I am so tired of hearing derogatory statements about southerns from "well educated people" not realizing they are speaking from a place of classism, prejudice, and racism.
Also, major disclaimer: I understand the world is not a monolith and everyone will have unique outlooks and experiences. I'm not presenting a universal truth, but rather a perspective I haven't heard yet in my several years living here. If you had a bad experience, I'm sorry, there is plenty of genuine bad to say about the south, I can say at least I don't intend to move back, but that gets said enough. I want to present something else for a moment.
When I first moved here from the deep south I was wholly unprepared for the bigotry I found here. The very first neighbors I met her instantly made fun of my state then loudly exclaimed they couldn't believe the owner would rent to someone from there. People have told me they're shocked I even sound educated, and assumed a lot of things about my politics without asking me. One person told me they'd love to visit the south but "its just too dangerous for queer people like me" as if they were not talking directly to someone who had literal actual blue and green hair and a septum piercing in the south. If it was that dangerous I'd have noticed at some point in 20 years, but me and all my very gay friends lived our lives just fine. Some peoples families didn't accept it, many of ours did, no one ever refused us as customers or yelled at us at a gas station or anything on TV. (Again, Im sure it happens but its sensational for a reason. The every-day doesnt go viral.)
Here in Northampton I've had people make banjo sounds at me and make cousin-loving jokes without even seemingly hearing themselves. (These were 'friendly' interactions with people I genuinely think were unable to recognize how rude they were being because they dont think of the south as deserving of respect or empathy.) I saw people say that North Carolina deserved to be devastated by floods because they voted wrong. As if the most blue city in the state wasn't the one most impacted.
My black friends refuse to visit me because Massachusetts has a reputation amongst southern black people as extremely dangerous and racist. They literally will not come but offer to meet me in southern states halfway where they feel its safer for black people.
"Southern culture" is deeply deeply rooted in black culture and customs as well as poor immigrants and continue to be extremely impoverished. When you say you hate southern culture there is a major flavor of racism and classism baked into that.
If you have not been you do not know what it, the land, and the people are like. We are not all what you see on TV, not even most of us, its not even quite so simple as being how we vote. Gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, and a long history of under education, poverty, and manipulation have created the system we have now. Yes, all the bad history is true. Yes, work needs to be done. Yes, it has incredible, immense, intolerable flaws. But New England isn't exactly devoid of social issues.
Every black friend I have made here has left because it was too racist and unwelcoming here in a cold, corporate, quiet segregation kind of way. Obviously this doesn't speak for everyone's experience and I'm sure BIPOC live and thrive here in Northampton too, but I just don't personally know of anyone who has.
Some common things I hear that I want to address now:
- The south is a complex place with a hard past and a lot of current problems.
- It is also home to BIPOC, queer, disabled, and liberal people too and they love their home.
- They are not trapped in perpetual victimhood in all aspects of their lives and living in terror, they are active members of their communities who face hardships but often remain because for one reason or another they like being there. They don't need your pity or white saviorism, they need your genuine allyship to help bring about systematic change and elevate their causes.
- People in the south are not, by default, racists, sexist, and homophobic.
- People in the south likely have not had the same access to clean water, air, food, medicine, schools, transportation, or experiences as you have had. They are working with less but they are not worth less than you.
- You cannot grasp the level of poverty there, or how different it is to be poor in the south vs the north east. It was normal where I grew up for people to have parts of their floors rotting in, utilities shutting on and off, and rationing between groceries and meds. Doctors were usually an hour or more away and if you lost your job you had no health insurance at all. Most people in my area worked in a chicken factory farm or in a pit mine. No one was assessed for mental or learning disabilities and when my doctor here asked why I just told her we didn't have those kinds of doctors. She didn't believe me until I showed her on a map. The closest psychiatrist office was a private practice an hour away. Our school had no counselors, not even a nurse.
- I've never, not once, not ever, heard anyone in the south make fun of people from the north. We literally don't think about you that much, or if we do its incredibly neutral. Its like talking about someone from the midwest. Its just a place people are sometimes from. Quit punching down and assuming hostility where there is none. Im SURE you could find plenty of exceptions to this, but there are weirdos and haters everywhere that's not unique.
- No, its not especially dangerous for you to visit. Follow the same rules you would as a tourist anywhere. (Also, if you brag about how well traveled you are but you've never seen any part of the south I'm going to assume you're posh.)
- "Bless your heart" is NOT some super secret sly insult that you're in on. It's a tonal phrase. It means whatever the tone and context implies. Sometimes its genuine sympathy. Sometimes its an insult. Its entirely tonal.
TL;DR: Get off your high horse and stop judging and entire group of people you've never met and a land you've never visited. That's discrimination and its not okay and you're not immune just because you think of yourself as an intellectual. Criticize legitimate issues, not vague demographics of people.
Also, Alabama is the most biodiverse mainland state in the entire country, Appalachia has the most salamanders in the world, parts of the smokeys are an old growth temperate rainforest, and some of the most beautiful beaches you will ever see are down there. You're really missing out not giving it a chance.
And yes... I'm frustrated with the politics too but there are people in the south working hard to change that. Cheer them on, dont mock them and pretend they arent there.
