Posted on 07/14/2005 6:10:21 AM PDT by robowombat
Bias against Southerners misses the mark By RICHARD COX Published July 11, 2005
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Does prejudice exist in Pasco County, an area with a very diverse population and seemingly very progressive?
I am certain that African-Americans, Hispanics and people from other countries, the poor and homeless, as well as members of certain religious faiths, experience treatment different from the mainstream populace. However, I am a member of a minority who has experienced attitudes and reactions from many individuals who assume that I am intellectually and socially challenged.
A very large percentage of the population of New Port Richey in particular is from the Northeast. I personally like the outspokenness, mince-no-words attitude, the ability to criticize as well as accept criticism without being offended, that seems to represent the culture in which Northerners grew up.
My family members seem to have the disadvantage of being born and living most of our lives in the South, in our case, Tennessee. I grew up in Knoxville, a city that many people seem to associate only with the fanatical behavior of our college football fans, and my wife is from a small city near Chattanooga.
There still seems to be a stereotype that some people associate with Tennesseans. When those individuals heard the distinct accent of my wife, my stepdaughter, and myself, it seemed to conjure up that redneck image one might associate with the humor of Jeff Foxworthy and other Southern comedians. That image is of a culture of ignorant hillbillies (certainly due to inbreeding!), barefoot, living in a shack with no indoor plumbing (but certainly an outhouse in back), having a dog living under the front porch, and owning an overgrown lawn populated with broken-down, dilapidated automobiles. And, yes, we all chew tobacco and sit on the front porch swing playing the banjo. Everyone also flies a Confederate flag and reminisces about the War Between the States.
I first noticed this attitude when my stepdaughter, an honor student, came home from middle school several days in tears because several other students harassed her daily, calling her an ignorant redneck and hillbilly among other derogatory terms. My wife and I have experienced the sudden change in facial expressions from many when they hear our accent. They seem to associate our accent with ignorance, and speak in simpler terms so that we can understand what they are saying. Telephone conversations often produce the same reaction.
I beg to differ. Tennessee is the home of several major universities, four major metropolitan areas with all the drug and gang problems associated with other large cities, and the most visited national park in the United States. Oak Ridge, in the Knoxville area, probably has as high a percentage of residents with doctorate degrees as any city in the United States. Tennessee has a musical heritage equal to none, and it is not exclusively country or bluegrass genres. Many nationally prominent politicians are from my home state, including three former presidents.
Tennessee has produced many famous musicians, actors, scientists and other intellectual and talented natives.
Well, to set the story straight, rural areas of most states have their own populace and dwellings that approach this stereotype.
My wife and I grew up in your average suburban neighborhoods, we both graduated from major universities and had successful professional careers, and, to risk seeming boastful, are probably as intelligent and knowledgeable, if not more so, than the average American. Believe it or not, East Tennessee, the section of the state we are from, fervently supported the Union during the Civil War.
I have noticed in the Pasco Times notices of meetings for various groups from areas of the Northeast and from other countries. Perhaps Southerners in our area should form a similar group. With apologies to an African-American group with a similar title, we could call our group the NAASF, the National Association for the Advancement of Southern Folks, Pasco County Branch. I hope there are enough local Southern residents available to attract to our organization.
--Richard Cox, a retired middle school science teacher and department head, lives in New Port Richey
LOL. St. Pete and New Port Richey are damnYankee senior paradise. But parts of Tampa are quite all right. If you think in terms of the real urban and the extreme suburban, I think Tampa's okay. It's the in-between stuff where you've left the city parts and before you get back to Florida that is Noo Yawk lite, the part I hate.
I promise if I ever get to Michigan again, I won't spend any time or money in Ann Arbor, either, though Dominic's Pizza is pretty good, and their sangria jugs are all right. But there ain't any doubt the only time I'll spend anywhere near Detroit is driving away from it at the fastest clip I can.
Yankee states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania have more whitetail deer hunters than any Southern state sans Texas.
That lampoon is from South Texas btw....laid out on an old Series 110 ragger
I reply to the right honourable gentleman with the answer I gave some moments ago:
"And as to city crime, such comparison is almost always about offenses known to the police. If Kitty Genovese didn't teach you that nobody reports a thing to NYC's cops, I'm wasting my time posting to you."
The UCR is based on police-reported offenses. Does anyone bother even reporting a larceny to New York cops? How about an assault? If nobody is calling cops over a woman getting KILLED, why bother with a small thing like a larceny?
Do us a bigger one and stay put yourself, especially when we kick New England out of the Union as our thank-you for the Civil War and the Gilded Age ripoff, and redraw the boundary of the United States up the middle of the Hudson River to the Croton River and then over to the Connecticut state line, all the way up the New York line to Lake Champlain .....and we keep Bedloe's and Ellis Island, and you guys get Fire Island and Riker's Island, Longg Guyland, and Ted Kennedy's favorite U-boat proving grounds.
Sound like a deal? Great! Say hello to your new fellow-citizens in New Brunswick for us.
One of the most agreeable towns I've ever been in was Spooner, Wisc. -- back in 1960. I was very favorably impressed and asked my dad, who was driving, if we couldn't move there. It was a picket-fence paradise.
I'd like to see more of northern California and maybe the northern Rockies. Also, upstate Michigan, upstate New York, upstate New Hampshire.
The reason the writer is having problems is because he has bought into what these elitist snobs are shoveling.
If he can't accept what and who he is and is not satisfied with himself he shouldn't expect others to be.
He also passing this crappy "pardon me for living" attitude onto his kids.
He needs to grow up, find some people who judge a person by who they are and what they do, not where they are from.
There are good people on both sides of the Mason Dixon Line.
Unfortunately there are a**holes on both sides too.
Don't waste your time trying to cultivate their friendship.
Even if you do, all you will have is some friendly a**holes.
You are posting to the premier South-basher on FreeRepublic. He's from Bahstin, and he hate Southerners, I assure you from having read his spew before. You will conserve your energy and time by plonking his odious, and odiferous, drivel.
As for people speaking the Queen's English, H. L. Mencken and other scholars, paying attention to the known tendency of rural districts, especially isolated ones, toward linguistic conservativism, have announced from time to time that the so-called "hillbilly" inflection of the Appalachian and Ozark hollows is actually pretty much what Elizabethan and Jacobean English sounded like, before the 18th-century stage affectation of an actor named Beaumont swept upper-class English society and became the accent of today's Windsors, and the basis of the modern English accent.
Far from barely speaking English, those Ozarkers and "hillbillies" actually speak better English than the affectation-ridden BBC, if you get right down to it.
Might I add another Yee Haa for the motto
American by birth, Southern by the Grace of God.
As far as the talk, I got it all the time when I was in the military. Of course after I had managed to completely get em turned around and ended up with their resources and the commanders ear, they realized the error of their ways.
Course now I am back in Louisiana, home of the Cajuns, Rednecks, and people from New Orleans (New Orleans is my group). Its good to be back home, spent a few years in Boston... /shudder
Was wondering what southerners think of non-white, non-hispanic, non-muslim foreigners (Chinese, Indians, etc) who come to work legally in southern cities ?
Congratulations, you made it out of Mass! I'm still stuck here, and will be for another 3 years, at which point, I'll be a retarded Sailor heading back to Missippy.
These people here have no sense. Their roads are bad, the design is poor (rotarys-wtf?), their manners are atrocious, and their pronounciation, well, if I'd try to talk like that in grade school, my butt would still be sore.
Not a day goes by when my wife and I talk about getting back home as soon as my 20 years are up. It's getting to the point that we specifically teach our 4 yr old boy how to pronounce things the RIGHT way - with that drawl :)
Buddy:
I have a master's degree, so put your "illiterate" comment where it belongs. You just don't like hearing comments about the North. Mine are true. I was THERE. I have probably traveled and been to more diverse places than you.
Don't flatter your ego. It usually works the OTHER way around. The heat alone, stops the average Yankee dead in his tracks. :)
Why don't you go pay the Louisiana state FR BBS a visit and ask the Louisiana Freepers what they think of Bobby Jindal? They'll tell you.
They'll also tell you what they think of Mary Landrieu, who interceded in the governor's race on behalf of a walking nitwit/nonentity to lay a vicious smear on Jindal that cost him the governorship. They'll tell you what they think of The Tolerant Party in Louisiana politics.
Go ahead, go ask them; we'll be around.
Thanks. I know who Espinola is. He makes a habit of stopping by to "inspect" our Mississippi threads from time to time.
How about this one that you see over here in Lone Star?
NATURALIZED TEXAN
I wasn't born here, but I got here as fast as I could!
Michigan on the east side above Detriot.
"Us Yankees can't wait to get home and watch the evening news when you clueless southerners get a dusting of snow."
So you can watch your clueless reporters stand outside in the snow everytime there's a dusting?"
ummmmmmmmmmm nope.. We do not send our reporters down south to cover southern "snowstorms"
Those are southern reporters, partner.
;)
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