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Kansas City and St. Louis are probably outliers. The rest of the state has a heavy Southern influence.
My parents are from rural northern Missouri, and I've been enough times through enough of Missouri to know that northern Missouri is basically a southward extension of Iowa. Literally the only aspect of Missouri near or north of U.S. 50 that's even vaguely Southern is a cluster of small towns within about a 25-mile radius of Moberly that require more than just your fingers and toes to count the black population. Minor oddity aside, the only part of Missouri that's ever struck me as being more Southern than Midwestern was the far southern region of the state. Draw a line from Joplin to Cape Girardeau. Near and south of that line is more Southern, but the rest of the state is unquestionably Midwestern.
Archie Bunker was very much *not* Italian though. The show pretended he was a WASP, but he had an old Irish New York working class accent that's probably virtually extinct today.
But the Irish population in NYC is pretty small now and is more middle class than working class. Italians are the only major white group in the city in which the majority don't have college degrees.
Archie Bunker was very much *not* Italian though. The show pretended he was a WASP, but he had an old Irish New York working class accent that's probably virtually extinct today.
I didn't say Archie Bunker was Italian. I said that Staten Island and Howard Beach would be more accurate portrayals of White working class NYC since Italians make up a larger share of the White working class in the city than any other group.
It's not that the media doesn't portray this side of NYC (though *nobody* mentioned it in my "East Coast vibe" thread). The working class probably gets portrayed, on average, more in movies and shows set in the Midwest because the Midwest is more working class.
Just now jumping in here. Like it or not, Missouri is a Midwestern state, as designated by the official United States Census. That doesn't mean it doesn't possess certain traits from other regions. Northern MO may was well be Iowa, Southern MO may as well be Arkansas, Kansas City is a quintessential western stockyards metropolis, and St. Louis is an old-line eastern/rustbelt city. All this BS about Missouri being "more southern than Midwestern" is complete bunk. Yeah, so the rural areas of MO may be more Baptist than the rural areas of other Midwest states, but the Midwest is a diverse region. Despite religious variations, Missouri is no more religious overall than its peers in the Midwest, at least not to any noticeable degree:
My parents are from rural northern Missouri, and I've been enough times through enough of Missouri to know that northern Missouri is basically a southward extension of Iowa. Literally the only aspect of Missouri near or north of U.S. 50 that's even vaguely Southern is a cluster of small towns within about a 25-mile radius of Moberly that require more than just your fingers and toes to count the black population. Minor oddity aside, the only part of Missouri that's ever struck me as being more Southern than Midwestern was the far southern region of the state. Draw a line from Joplin to Cape Girardeau. Near and south of that line is more Southern, but the rest of the state is unquestionably Midwestern.
Ironically, central Missouri also has one of the 2 HBCU's in Missouri(Lincoln University in Jefferson City) and I knew that the current coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers, Tyronn Lue, is from Mexico MO. Those are a couple of things that put me onto the presence of a Black population in that part of the state.
I think Hannibal and St Joseph are really the only cities in the northern part of the state with enough Black people to notice. There may be a couple of other places though.
Is Missouri more similar to Illinois, Iowa or Kansas overall?
As I said, it's like the chameleon state. People in STL will say we're more like IL, but I'm sure that would vary depending on what region of the state you're in. MO is kind of its own thing with a schizophrenic identity.
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