Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
You forgot that part. And nobody says, "How dare you compare Boston to Rochester!" It's like southerness is an affliction that gets worse and worse the closer you get to Mississippi. I guess people in Birmingham are hopeless.
And "Deep South," in some ways, has echoes of "deepest, darkest Africa." It's like the dangerous Congo that Europeans read about in the papers, but were deathly afraid to visit.
You are really so far off the reservation, why don't you just stop while you are ahead?
You forgot that part. And nobody says, "How dare you compare Boston to Rochester!" It's like southerness is an affliction that gets worse and worse the closer you get to Mississippi. I guess people in Birmingham are hopeless.
And "Deep South," in some ways, has echoes of "deepest, darkest Africa." It's like the dangerous Congo that Europeans read about in the papers, but were deathly afraid to visit.
Let me add a comment, this "NC is not the real South" tripe that you hear sometimes nowadays is perpetuated by people who move here, love it, and don't want to admit that what they really love is THE SOUTH. It's a NEW trend.
Growing up here I always considered NC as southern as any other state. The Dukes of Hazzard could have been filmed in Morganton for all I knew and Mississippi seemed a lot like home to me. I was jealous that SC got to claim Calhoun, and when I moved to SC I was proud to be a citizen of the Palmetto State and remember thinking my new (SC) town was so much more sophisticated than my "old" (NC) town.
Call it what you want, whether that's mid-atlantic, "new" south, northern south, mid south. It won't change what it is, and what it is is Southern. And folks from around here, us folks who have been around for generations don't call The Georgia South anything different than the Carolina South, even though they may be as different as Pittsburg and Boston. Just like we don't differentiate amongst the yankees. Everyone from PA or north is a yankee, and Maryland escapes by the skin of their teeth. Which is appropriate for such a short state.
The person who wrote that comment might not have grown up in NC, but lived here long enough to hear the bit about how NC was one of the last to secede and join the Confederacy in the Civil War, which is true.
The fact is there used to be a lot, and there is still some, national societal prejudice against the South. We were seen as dumb hicks as portrayed by the popular media in shows like The Dukes of Hazzard, and The Beverly Hillbillies, or movies like Deliverance. We were the racist sheriffs in all those Burt Reynolds car movies and their ilk. People looked down their noses at Southern accents and thought we were stupid because we had a Southern accent. And, of course, the Civil War and subsequent Jim Crow period up to the Civil Rights movement with the march from Selma to Montgomery and white sheriffs blasting marchers with water hoses and sic-ing dogs on them didn't help the image of the South. Consequently, there were many folks who lived in the South who had a certain degree of conflict about that and tried (and some still do try) to distance themselves from the South. Many educated Southerners tried to get rid of their accents so they didn't sound "dumb". And I think it makes some people feel better about living or having lived (not sure which in this case) in the South in North Carolina to say things like North Carolina was never 100% Southern and certainly isn't today.
Who's to say what 100% Southern is? I also disagree with his point about Virginia not being Southern. NOVA is not very Southern, but the rest of the state from Richmond to Roanoke to Bristol certainly is. My mom's side of the family have lived there since the 1600s and my dad's side has been in NC since the early 1700s (Scottish and English, btw, mom's was English and German — the Germans came in the 1800s.)
So, that guy has an inferiority complex about living in the South is all. NC is still southern although the more urban areas are certainly more multi-cultural and not just white people and black people any more. Research Triangle Park, in particular, brings in people from all over the world. We have a sizable Hispanic population also, mostly Mexican, and Central American. The foundation of the state is definitely Southern, though.
And for your northern analogy I think Northeast and New England :: South and Deep South is what you're looking for.
If "the South" and "the Mid-Atlantic" had anything to do with geography beyond very loose associations then sure, NC would be mid-Atlantic. Geographically it doesn't get much more mid-Atlantic than this. We are the halfway point between the tip of Florida and the easternmost spit of Maine.
Anyway I think AdmiralX might've been saying that "NC has never been 100% southern", as opposed to "NC has never been southern", which sounds more reasonable. It certainly isn't 100% southern right now. When most people in the Triangle don't have southern accents, it is very easy to make the argument that that part of the state is more mid-Atlantic. Though it is still a mix. The Triangle still embraces eastern-NC style barbeque. Cook Out, Chargrill, Q-Shack and so forth attest to that. I think if you ordered iced tea in most places they'd ask what kind, but you'd probably get 50/50 results for sweet or unsweet if they didn't ask.
Outside the Triangle the rest of the state is much more southern than not, and the state as a whole is mostly southern, and it's more southern than any other state that is ever contested in arguments about whether a state is southern or not--states like Texas, Virginia, and Florida are all less southern. Overall, NC is southern. I think the propensity to argue otherwise can stem from the misunderstanding that southern can't also be cosmopolitan, or progressive. It can be both of those things.
The person who wrote that comment might not have grown up in NC, but lived here long enough to hear the bit about how NC was one of the last to secede and join the Confederacy in the Civil War, which is true.
The fact is there used to be a lot, and there is still some, national societal prejudice against the South. We were seen as dumb hicks as portrayed by the popular media in shows like The Dukes of Hazzard, and The Beverly Hillbillies, or movies like Deliverance. We were the racist sheriffs in all those Burt Reynolds car movies and their ilk. People looked down their noses at Southern accents and thought we were stupid because we had a Southern accent. And, of course, the Civil War and subsequent Jim Crow period up to the Civil Rights movement with the march from Selma to Montgomery and white sheriffs blasting marchers with water hoses and sic-ing dogs on them didn't help the image of the South. Consequently, there were many folks who lived in the South who had a certain degree of conflict about that and tried (and some still do try) to distance themselves from the South. Many educated Southerners tried to get rid of their accents so they didn't sound "dumb". And I think it makes some people feel better about living or having lived (not sure which in this case) in the South in North Carolina to say things like North Carolina was never 100% Southern and certainly isn't today.
Who's to say what 100% Southern is? I also disagree with his point about Virginia not being Southern. NOVA is not very Southern, but the rest of the state from Richmond to Roanoke to Bristol certainly is. My mom's side of the family have lived there since the 1600s and my dad's side has been in NC since the early 1700s (Scottish and English, btw, mom's was English and German — the Germans came in the 1800s.)
So, that guy has an inferiority complex about living in the South is all. NC is still southern although the more urban areas are certainly more multi-cultural and not just white people and black people any more. Research Triangle Park, in particular, brings in people from all over the world. We have a sizable Hispanic population also, mostly Mexican, and Central American. The foundation of the state is definitely Southern, though.
And for your northern analogy I think Northeast and New England :: South and Deep South is what you're looking for.
Great post. I agree. There's a certain disdain for the South, which is to some degree understandable, but also regrettable. The South is probably the most unique region of the country. But people fail to see that because they can't get over things that happened a long time ago (and many of the same things happened in Northern cities like the black man being harpooned with an American flag in Boston).
As far as the analogy goes, it's not really applicable because you don't have parts of the Northeast turning up their noses at other parts. Nobody gets offended, for example, when you compare Philadelphia to Boston or vice versa. But anytime two southern cities are compared, there's always discussion about how "Winston-Salem is certainly not like Birmingham" or "Richmond really has nothing in common with Charleston at all."
I absolutely agree that it's an inferiority complex. And it's really no different from Blacks in the Dominican Republic claiming whatever little Taino or Spanish ancestry they have to the complete exclusion of their African heritage.
Anyway I think AdmiralX might've been saying that "NC has never been 100% southern", as opposed to "NC has never been southern", which sounds more reasonable.
Even if you were to apply the "100% Southern" standard to North Carolina, it would still be inaccurate since North Carolina was 100% Southern in 1860. And the state was definitely 100% Southern when it was enforcing Jim Crow. I think this guy was engaging in historical revisionism, which some people are inclined to do when dealing with a past that's less than flattering.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vatnos
It certainly isn't 100% southern right now.
What does that mean? Is it 80% Southern and 20% Northern? What is New York State?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vatnos
I think the propensity to argue otherwise can stem from the misunderstanding that southern can't also be cosmopolitan, or progressive. It can be both of those things.
But anytime two southern cities are compared, there's always discussion about how "Winston-Salem is certainly not like Birmingham" or "Richmond really has nothing in common with Charleston at all."
I actually don't think that's true. I think you're setting up a straw man there. Most people don't compare cities that way in the South. That one guy you found in those comments might, but I think Richmond and Charleston do have a lot in common, actually. Richmond has a lot of history preserved, though, it's perhaps not quite as beautiful as Charleston by the water and all.
Winston-Salem and Birmingham are certainly different cities, like Buffalo and Newark are different, but they have many commonalities. I don't think Winston-Salemites seek to differentiate themselves from Alabamans because they don't want to be associated with them. In fact I think they share a lot of history with regard to Civil Rights.
Even if you were to apply the "100% Southern" standard to North Carolina, it would still be inaccurate since North Carolina was 100% Southern in 1860.
I'm not sure what you mean here. There were always people in the South who were for and against slavery and for and against Lincoln in the 1860 election. No one wins 100% of the votes in an election. I have seen old family letters in my own family from that time period between two young women (cousins, I believe). One was the kind of letter that you wish you didn't have in the family archives (bigoted, racist, etc), but one was kind and caring and progressive and made you proud that you had an ancestor that thought that way during that time.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
