Not All Southerners Are Racist Hicks? Shazzam!
By Cathryn Crawford (03/07/03)
What enters your mind when hear the word ‘Southerner’? Do you think of the Confederate flag, flying its rebel colors? Do you think of James Byrd, dragged to death in a little town not so far from my own Texas town? Or maybe you see a vision of a woman, barefoot and pregnant, in the hills of Tennessee with her live-off-the-land husband.
There is even another vision of Southerners (and especially Texans), which is particularly amusing. Some people actually think that we all own oil wells and drive Cadillacs, and that we’re all fantastically rich.
I wish.
You all know what I'm talking about, don't you? Whether you're from the South and have been fighting this assumption your whole life, or you're from the North and have watched it on "The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood", you have seen and perhaps even agreed with the automatic stereotype that we Southerners are the Confederate rebels who have never really rejoined the Union - you know, the stereotype that involves bumper stickers that say "My President is Charlton Heston", lots of alcohol, and church three times a week.
For all those who have been deceived by a Hollywood-induced vision of the South, I have news for you.
Not all Southern women are chain-smoking, pill popping, sluttish, boozing potty-mouths, as we are so often portrayed. Not all Southern men are wife-beating racists, either. Nor are we all stupid, backwards hicks who believe everything can be solved with religion and a shotgun.
Nor do we all speak in honey tones, elongated syllables, or nauseatingly adorable accents. Yes, we do speak a bit slower, and we tend to draw out our words, but we don't speak with the vocabulary of children, and we don't constantly use irritating terms of endearment like 'honey-chile’, etcetera.
We are not Gomer Pyle, we are not the Dukes of Hazzard, and we are not the Beverly Hillbillies. Yet Southerners are constantly and consistently downgraded to shazzam-type people, living simple, uneducated lives, while we are made fun of in cute and clever ways by our much-wiser cousins to the north.
So if Southerners are none of these, what are we?
There are some things that I am proud to say that, for the most part, we are. We do have a strong belief in an ancient triumvirate of loyalties: God, family, and country. We believe that the federal government should have less control and the states should have more. We believe that there are excellent gun control laws already on the books, and they should be enforced; it doesn't make sense to continue to make new laws when the old ones aren't even being upheld. We believe that loyalty and patriotism are not something to be ashamed of, that it is instead to be encouraged and instilled in our children.
So maybe we’re not quite as cool as our neighbors to the north. Maybe we do like to hunt, and fish, and shoot. Maybe we don’t have as much culture here in the South as in New York City or Los Angeles. That’s fine by us – we don’t decide our value and our self-worth by how much ‘culture’ we have. We do, however, have a strong image of a South that is worthy of respect, not the constant ridicule that we get.
We don’t have to have the constant approval of the whole world to do what we feel like needs to be done. We make up our minds, and we do it. We don’t bellyache over what everybody will think of us after we’ve done something that’s hard, but right.
Sounds kind of like the attitude of a certain U.S. president, doesn’t it?
Maybe it’s just a Southern thing.
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