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We've seen a ton of threads on the most southern or the most authentic southern state in the US....Which of the southern states is the least culturally southern?
Florida followed by North Carolina, in my opinion. It's where all of the NYers wind up. They either go directly to NC or they go to Florida first and then move halfway back.
Well, I have to say the results were a surprise to me. This is for the entire DC Metro Area:
38.1% from the South
23.0% from the Northeast
16.3% from the West
11.4% from Maryland (outside the DC metro)
11.3% from the Midwest
Now, if we exclude the exurban counties, which I think are pretty Southern, we end up with:
35.7% from the South
24.6% from the Northeast
16.3% from the West
11.8% from Maryland (outside the DC metro)
11.7% from the Midwest
Now in terms of where people are coming from for each part of the DMV.
DC:
40% Northeast
21.6% South
18.1% West
15.6% Midwest
4.6% Maryland (outside the DC metro)
MD (DC metro):
25.4% Maryland (outside the DC metro)
23.4% Northeast
14.7% South
12.3% West
10% Midwest
VA (Suburban and Core):
45% South
21.4% West
20.4% Northeast
12.2% Midwest
4% Maryland
People aren't really moving from Baltimore or Annapolis to DC or Virginia, but they are going to PG, Bethesda, etc. This is relative to overall growth as the Virginia suburbs are growing really fast (so maybe they are moving to Virginia, but not as much as everyone else). Northeastern people are more willing to move into DC then the rest of the country. This is also in relative terms as NE people prefer the suburbs in absolute terms. I was really surprised how many people were moving to Virginia from the South. This isn't just Virginia-to-Virginia. North Carolina and Houston had the two largest county-to-county transfers to Virginia (to Fairfax).
Anyway, I don't know if this really shows anything, but I spent a ton of time on it, so let's just pretend it does.
That's not surprising to me at all. The migration flows are somewhat consistent with the population distribution of the country, which makes sense since DC is the nation's capital and therefore attracts migrants from all over America. It's not so much that the city is "northernizing" due to domestic migration so much as it's homogenizing. As the data shows, people come to DC from everywhere. If anything, the culture should be more southern skewed since southerners make up a plurality of domestic migrants to the region.
The stats for DC are not surprising either. One of the top senders to the DC--Middlesex County--is the home of Harvard University. The breakdown for DC is actually pretty close to the breakdown of Harvard's student body.
17% are from New England
22% are from the Mid Atlantic
19% are from the South
10% are from the Midwest
21% are from the Western and Mountain states
11% are international or from U.S. territories
Just thought it was interesting to point this out (don't read too much into it). Since DC draws more from elite schools than other parts of the country, and elite schools tend to have a Northeastern bias in terms of their student body makeup (I couldn't find stats but I bet that Northeasterners are WAY over-represented at Stanford and Michigan), it's not surprising to me that the District itself would have more northern than southern transplants.
At any rate, it's often difficult to tell where people in the DC area are from since few people carry defining regional traits. Many are like Julia Roberts (Smyrna, GA) or Ben Bernanke (Dillon, SC) who are upper middle class and/or well-educated and don't speak or act the way southerners are stereotypically depicted in mass media. This is especially the case if they were raised middle to upper middle class in a larger metro area (i.e, Nashville, Dallas, Atlanta, Houston, etc.). Likewise, many northerners in the DC area lack defining regional traits. It's much harder to pin down the regional origin of a New England WASP than it is a working class guy from Saugus, MA.
I can only argue through anecdote, unfortunately, so I'll understand when you take this with a grain of salt. But my California friends constantly complain how the culture is very different in DC from California (even small things I take as standard behavior like jaywalking is something they find terrible when I do it (they say people in DC have no respect for drivers)). Similarly my Midwestern friends say the attitude in DC is very different (they say Northeastern, but you can choose a different term). My Southern friends don't really complain, but they do say DC is not Southern when I ask them (one friend is from South Carolina; the other was born in Virginia, but he spent more of his life in Alabama than any other state).
I would have to break my anecdotal observations down by race and geography:
Whites
-DC whites are comparable to Creative Class whites in Center City and Manhattan/Brooklyn. But I don't see much of a difference between these whites and the whites in hip urban enclaves in Seattle, Portland and Atlanta. General American English seems to be the norm in these places. And the majority of these people are standard operating procedure liberals.
-DC doesn't have many working-class whites. You need to go out to the exurbs to find them (i.e., Stafford, Calvert) and most of them tend to be Anglo and southern. In Philadelphia, working class whites are a much larger proportion of the population and tend to be "ethnic" whites more often than not. These are the type of white people who vote Democratic out of loyalty (their fathers or grandfathers may have been union guys who would die before voting Republican), but hold more socially conservative views (anti-affirmative action, anti-immigration, pro-life). Many vote for Republicans.
Blacks
-DC area blacks have a strong southern influence. Part of that is because DC was the South when the first large wave of blacks moved to the region from deeper south. Jim Crow was the law and there were not many poorer, European immigrants to influence their speech patterns, etc. The other part of it is that new waves of African Americans continued to move to the area long after the end of the Second Great Migration.
-Northern blacks retained southern cultural staples such as soul food, religion, etc., but have been influenced to a great degree by the ethnic whites and Hispanics that often lived within blocks of them. If you think about it, there are a lot of things associated with black urban culture like the "Yo!" in "Yo! MTV raps" that northern blacks co-opted from Italians. "Ma" or "Mami" is vernacular northern blacks adopted from Puerto Ricans. And blacks have also taken on much of the dialect of working class whites, often saying for example "tawk" for "talk," and "wooder" for "water." There's much more ethnic white and Hispanic influence. And there hasn't been much recent African American migration from the South to the North to "southernize" the northern black community.
Hispanics
-The DC area's Hispanics come largely from Central America. They're a bit geographically removed from most of the black population, which means you don't see the same relationship between, say, Guatemalans and blacks as you do between Puerto Ricans/Dominicans and blacks throughout most of the Northeast.
-Puerto Ricans are the dominant Hispanic culture in the Northeast. In the cities, Puerto Rican culture has been blended to a great extent with ethnic white culture as well as black culture. Angel Garcia is a good example of the blending of Hispanic/ethnic white culture/attitude/dialect. Angie Martinez, the famous NYC radio personality, is a good example of the latter (notice how Angie drops the "N" bomb at the 1:20 mark).
Last edited by BajanYankee; 12-31-2013 at 09:32 AM..
Similarly my Midwestern friends say the attitude in DC is very different (they say Northeastern, but you can choose a different term).
This "attytood" you find in the Northeast is also very different from what you find in DC. LOL. It is partly an attitude thing. Check out the 1:28 mark in the second video and see how many times Sigel puts his hands on the interviewer. His extreme hand gestures are a very Italian thing, which makes sense considering he grew up in South Philly.
Hispanics haven't changed the way Anglo-Whites act in New York. That doesn't mean that Hispanics haven't changed the culture. It just means that many whites (especially the Anglo-Whites in Manhattan) lead insular lives.
Yeah, that's what I was generally going for. The same is true about DC.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BajanYankee
C'mon, man. That wasn't the point.
It's clear we have different criteria, however. Demographics matter. I mean, what defines the culture of a region more than the actual people living in it? You just can't cherrypick the things you think make DC similar to Northeastern cities, but then dismiss the things that obviously make it easily distinguishable from those cities.
Yeah, I know. I feel the overall area feels more Northeast than any other region. To be honest, I classify as what I always called the Mid-Atlantic growing up, which is an area from DC to South Jersey (possibly up to New York).
Quote:
Originally Posted by BajanYankee
Having lived in Boston (college), New York (work), Philly (home) and DC (work/family), I see a lot in common among the first three. They each have a ton of white, working class Catholic voters (which affects the politics quite a bit). They also have African American and Puerto Rican working class populations that share many of the expressive elements of the white working class population (accent, vernacular, dress to some extent, etc.). Although there are many other groups in these cities beyond the aforementioned, these groups form the general ethnic substrate of Northeastern cities from Rochester to Reading to New Haven (though the size of each group changes from city to city).
The DC area could not be any more different. But you have to look beyond Anglo-Whites to see this. I mean, yeah, you could say that the white people walking around Back Bay are the same as the white people walking around Georgetown. But that's not even close to considering all of the different types of people that live in the region. Besides, the things that people generally associate with the Northeast (accents, foods, etc.) are the products of the working classes, not the Creative Class lawyers, bankers and web designers that inhabit tony suburbs and hip urban enclaves.
My perspective on the Northeast is based on where I grew up. Havertown (hometown), Northeast Philadelphia (where most of my family lives), Center City (where my dad worked, so I was dumped off in the summer), Newark, DE (where I went to high school and college), and now I live in Washington. My dad's family lives in New England, with a couple cousins in Minnesota. I have no experience with the West Coast. I do have a decent experience with the South because practically every family vacation was to the South (Raleigh, Fredricksburg, Williamsburg, the Outer Banks, random towns in South Carolina, Savannah, Atlanta, Tampa) and because I lived a year in Miami (so, not the South).
So, you have to keep in mind that I have ample experience with suburbia. The suburban people of Philadelphia and northern Delaware are Northeastern. Maybe not in the same way as those from Philly, New York, and Boston, but in a way that is different from those in the South. The pace of life is different here than in the South, and I've been told many times it's different from the Midwest and West Coast. People always tell me that DC is not like Madison, Milwaukee, or Chicago. I do view it as a cross between the Northeast and the Southeast, with elements from everywhere else thrown in. But I think the dominant cultural attitude is like that stretch from South Jersey to Annapolis.
So, you have to keep in mind that I have ample experience with suburbia. The suburban people of Philadelphia and northern Delaware are Northeastern. Maybe not in the same way as those from Philly, New York, and Boston, but in a way that is different from those in the South. The pace of life is different here than in the South, and I've been told many times it's different from the Midwest and West Coast. People always tell me that DC is not like Madison, Milwaukee, or Chicago. I do view it as a cross between the Northeast and the Southeast, with elements from everywhere else thrown in. But I think the dominant cultural attitude is like that stretch from South Jersey to Annapolis.
If we're talking about the suburbs, then I'd say it feels more similar to Metro Atlanta and the Research Triangle (especially the VA burbs). It seems like everybody's from somewhere else. And aside from a decent Jewish presence in Montgomery County, there's not really any ethnic flavor to the whites there. It's kind of vanilla. Then you have Prince George's County, which is the equivalent of Dekalb County in Metro Atlanta. The overall structure of the regions is strikingly similar with huge black populations in the city and suburbs (large Hispanic and Asian populations in the ATL burbs too), black political dominance in the inner city, the two premier black colleges in the nation (Howard and Morehouse/Spelman), and largely WASPy transplanted whites in the suburbs. The look and feel of both regions are the function of having experienced most of their growth in the second half of the 20th Century.
Anne Arundel County has a lot of true southerness to it. You have to remember that Prince George's County was largely a redneck county before blacks moved in. Most of them moved out to Calvert, Charles and Anne Arundel County when P.G. schools desegregated. Now Charles County has a large black population and they've moved again. The Annapolis you're thinking about is the Naval Academy and the cute walkable areas near the Bay. That's not the "real" Annapolis. A lot of people overlook the many black low income neighborhoods that aren't that far from the state house. As you move away from the capitol, Annapolis becomes decidely more southern.
When I think of "Jersey," the first thing that comes to mind is tons and tons of diners.
It's just a different feel, imo. Some people on here claim that DC has that "East Coast attitude," but I honestly can't see DC media running something like this, this, this or this. The region lacks that brashness you find in Philly, NYC and Boston. Those images perfectly capture that "attytood" that so many posters talk about. That's the attitude Boston, NYC and Philly have in common (which DC lacks).
Last edited by BajanYankee; 12-31-2013 at 01:32 PM..
If we're talking about the suburbs, then I'd say it feels more similar to Metro Atlanta and the Research Triangle (especially the VA burbs).
I don't think so based on my experiences visiting Metro Atlanta and the Research Triangle (and based on the people I know from those areas). Though I'd agree that the Virginia suburbs is much closer to those areas (particularly North Carolina) than the Maryland side is. I'd say it's a cross between the Research Triangle and the Maryland suburbia.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BajanYankee
It seems like everybody's from somewhere else. And aside from a decent Jewish presence in Montgomery County, there's not really any ethnic flavor to the whites there. It's kind of vanilla. Then you have Prince George's County, which is the equivalent of Dekalb County in Metro Atlanta. The overall structure of the regions is strikingly similar with huge black populations in the city and suburbs (large Hispanic and Asian populations in the ATL burbs too), black political dominance in the inner city, the two premier black colleges in the nation (Howard and Morehouse/Spelman), and largely WASPy transplanted whites in the suburbs. The look and feel of both regions are the function of having experienced most of their growth in the second half of the 20th Century.
I think I need to figure out where the Italians who hang outside the Italian store in Arlington go to church. They're as authentic as any Italians in Jersey, though only 10% of Fairfax County's population and 4.5% of Arlington's is Italian-American. The majority White population is Irish, but they're not the same as Philly or Boston's Irish population (nor Havertown, for that matter).
Quote:
Originally Posted by BajanYankee
Anne Arundel County has a lot of true southerness to it. You have to remember that Prince George's County was largely a redneck county before blacks moved in. Most of them moved out to Calvert, Charles and Anne Arundel County when P.G. schools desegregated. Now Charles County has a large black population and they've moved again. The Annapolis you're thinking about is the Naval Academy and the cute walkable areas near the Bay. That's not the "real" Annapolis. A lot of people overlook the many black low income neighborhoods that aren't that far from the state house. As you move away from the capitol, Annapolis becomes decidely more southern.
No, the Annapolis I'm referring to is Edgewater, MD. It's an area that flirts with being Southern, but isn't really. Kind of like a lot of areas in Delaware.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BajanYankee
It's just a different feel, imo. Some people on here claim that DC has that "East Coast attitude," but I honestly can't see DC media running something like ...
the region lacks that brashness you find in Philly, NYC and Boston. Those images perfectly capture that "attytood" that so many posters talk about. That's the attitude Boston, NYC and Philly have in common (which DC lacks).
That's not how I define East Coast attitude. I think I have an East Coast attitude and that's not me (The NY Post is a garbage rag and the Philadelphia Daily News isn't much better). I could see the Washington City Paper running something like the middle one, though.
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