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I haven't been to Arkansas yet, but I wonder how the two states differ in culture.
I've heard in this forum about how materialistic Arkansas is. Oklahoma City and Tulsa, by contrast, seems to be very frugal. So is Little Rock more flashy than Tulsa or OKC?
Is NWA really that much more Southern in feel than Tulsa?
I haven't been to Arkansas yet, but I wonder how the two states differ in culture.
I've heard in this forum about how materialistic Arkansas is. Oklahoma City and Tulsa, by contrast, seems to be very frugal. So is Little Rock more flashy than Tulsa or OKC?
Is NWA really that much more Southern in feel than Tulsa?
I'm not sure where the perceptions of materialistic differences come from. They don't seem drastically different in that regard.
Little Rock and NWA can be white collar, so you'll see a lot of BMW types in those places. I wouldn't say they're overly flashy, though, but the image of Sam Walton driving an old pickup after striking it rich doesn't very well describe Arkansas either.
In Arkansas, it seems like as soon as someone came across a little money, they didn't hesitate to let you know they came across a little money. The brick McMansion and obligatory large SUV are the first things you'll notice. It's a low-income state by and large, so I just can't call it flashy or materialistic on the whole.
NWA is a different animal when it comes to being southern.
I will say that Arkansas is, without question, a southern state through and through. Ozarks and Ouachitas are kind of like the upper south regions of Tennessee or Kentucky. The other 2/3's of the state is decidedly more related to the deep south.
While NWA is saturated with people from all over, it's also surrounded on all sides by southern culture and is beholden to a southern state's government. It manages to be somewhat different than the rest of the state, but hard to categorize as anything other than southern. Some try to say that area is midwestern but I have no idea what part of the midwest they would be likening it to.
NWA reminds me quite a lot of some random sprawling metro in North Carolina with a noticeable absence of a centralized focal point.
Kind of hard to say it's more or less southern than Tulsa. NWA is pretty generic, but I'd give it a slight nod to being more southern than anything else.
How all this compares to Oklahoma kind of depends on how you view Oklahoma, if that makes sense.
To me, Oklahoma is like West Virginia in that it's hard to categorize with any particular region. Like, "what part of the country is Oklahoma in?". "It's in the Oklahoma region."
I sometimes tend to lump it with Texas as being their own sub-region of sorts. The U.S. census says they're southern, and ultimately that's what I'll call them but of course it's more complicated than that.
Where Oklahoma is southern (like the eastern part mostly), it's similar to Arkansas, especially the western parts of AR. Otherwise, OK is kind of southern/western/southwestern/great plains/with a dash of midwestern...... at least that's my take being from Arkansas.
IMO Arkansas has some deep south and some Ozark Upland south with NW Arkansas demonstrating some more cosmopolitan culture due to it's corporate/university presence.
Oklahoma has a tiny bit of deep south culture along the Red river but most of eastern Oklahoma is that Ozark Upland Culture. Tulsa is similar to NW Arkansas in that it is a mix. As you move west in Oklahoma if you are north of I 40 it slowly morphs from Arkansas to a hybrid Texas/Kansas type of thing. South of I 40 it morphs from Arkansas to more of a north Texas culture. The southwestern part of Oklahoma is very much like Wichita Falls/Abilene and to a lesser degree the Texas panhandle.
The Oklahoma panhandle is a mixed bag because it is Kansans, Texans and minorities from all over the world in the packing plants.
I'm not sure where the perceptions of materialistic differences come from. They don't seem drastically different in that regard.
Little Rock and NWA can be white collar, so you'll see a lot of BMW types in those places. I wouldn't say they're overly flashy, though, but the image of Sam Walton driving an old pickup after striking it rich doesn't very well describe Arkansas either.
In Arkansas, it seems like as soon as someone came across a little money, they didn't hesitate to let you know they came across a little money. The brick McMansion and obligatory large SUV are the first things you'll notice. It's a low-income state by and large, so I just can't call it flashy or materialistic on the whole.
Interesting. Would you say that a typical upper muddle class guy in a nice OKC or Tulsa suburb is more frugal and less likely to get the McMansion and BMW/big SUV than the typical upper middle class guy in NWA or Little Rock?
To me, the new areas of NW OKC and Edmond don't seem that materialistic at all. McMansions are just standard development wherever land is cheap, don't really see anything materialistic about it. Just something you can get much easier in a low COL, sprawling city. Are you saying nice areas of NWA and Little Rock are more materialistic than their Oklahoma peers?
That's a good take. But I also want to hear from Southern purists who insist that Arkansas is Southern while Eastern OK is not.
I don't think there are too many Deep South purists who would negate my assertion because, in general, most Southerners know that Eastern Oklahoma is culturally part of their region just as Arkansas is.
Some (maybe Georgians and some Alabamans) would say that Eastern Oklahoma AND most of Arkansas are not Southern, but I doubt they would say it by singling out the other because I think there is a pretty strong consensus in the similarities of a good chunk of Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma.
This thread is interesting. I've never been to either state, but have always pictured Oklahoma as 100% a Great Plains state. "There's a bright golden haze on the meadow" and all that nonsense.
Oh, and I've heard there are mesas too, which certainly doesn't sound southern. Of course, things are rarely as simple as that.
I don't think there are too many Deep South purists who would negate my assertion because, in general, most Southerners know that Eastern Oklahoma is culturally part of their region just as Arkansas is.
Some (maybe Georgians and some Alabamans) would say that Eastern Oklahoma AND most of Arkansas are not Southern, but I doubt they would say it by singling out the other because I think there is a pretty strong consensus in the similarities of a good chunk of Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma.
I guess, but what I'm really trying to get down to in this thread is the idea that the South has a culture of conspicuous consumption, that middle class Southerners like to splurge on a nice new car and big new house the moment they come across some money. That seems to be what people say about Arkansas. What about Oklahoma, though? I drive through nice neighborhoods in NW OKC and Edmond and the cars there really are nothing special. Would you say that middle class Oklahomans are more frugal and less showy than middle class Arkansans? Would you say that Edmond has a less Keep up with the Joneses mentality than Fayetteville? Would you say that Oklahoma does indeed have a frugal mindset that is perhaps more Midwestern than Southern in nature? Or would you say that even in Arkansas, Texas, and the Deep South, there are still cities that are also pretty frugal and that middle class spendthrifts are not a Southern thing but vary from metro area to metro area within the Deep South?
While there are topographic and climate similarities between western Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma, there are big cultural differences for me. The most important one is that most of eastern Oklahoma is Indian territory, and the Native American presence is palpable in a way that it really is not in Arkansas, and then there is Tulsa, which was the western terminus of the trail of tears. In other ways, Tulsa to me looks and feels much more like a mini-Kansas City than any southern city. Tulsa is way more midwestern than southern in both architecture and city lay out and in terms of street names feels positively yankeefied!!! The major north-south arterial roads have names like Harvard, Yale, Peoria, Utica. I don't know of any southern city with as many streets named after northern cities and institutions as Tulsa. For a good 50 years Tulsa could claim the title of Oil Capital of the World. The shady and often toxic mix of oil and Indians is brilliantly captured in a book like "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI." And the recent Supreme Court decision makes it very clear how regionally distinct the history of Eastern Oklahoma is...and how alive that history still is.
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