Paul Greenberg: Letters From an Editor (On Southernness, Texican and pedantry)

Tribune Media Services ^ | February 2, 2004 | Paul Greenberg

[quidnunc]

Dear Friend,

It was wholly a pleasure to get your invitation to participate in a kind of Festschrift about what makes a Southerner. To quote the professor who's soliciting essays on the subject:

"The goal is to publish the collection with a University Press specializing in southern history. The idea, naturally born in a conference hotel bar, is to explore what historically it has meant to be a southerner. Is southern identity limited to those who are white and native-born? When and under what circumstances do Black, Jewish, Latino, Native American and Asian southerners make a claim to southernness … ."

I note the professor doesn't capitalize Southern or Southerner as I do, which indicates our differences from the start. To me, being Southern isn't so much a geographical as an ethnic designation. Being more southern doesn't make a place more Southern. See Florida.

This sounds like just the sort of topic I would love to expatiate on, but only in a hotel bar. Which demonstrates my bonafides, since the lowest common denominator of Southernness is an eagerness to talk about it, endlessly, till we talk each other under the table and send the other patrons fleeing.

-snip-

[GeronL]

They need to read a book not write one.

In the rural south you can see blacks wearing straw hats and overalls fishing off a wooden bridge with a cane pole...

Does that not count as southern?? =o)

[SeaDragon]

In the rural south you can see blacks wearing straw hats and overalls fishing off a wooden bridge with a cane pole...

With a white guy sitting next to him in the same outfit...............

[GeronL]

listening to rap on a bombox?? =o)

[Ursus arctos horribilis]

Well, I guess these heroic Jewish sons of the Confederacy thought themselves to be southern.

They fought and died for the stars and bars, today they lay in eternal rest at the Hebrew Confederate cemetery. Which just happens to be the only Jewish Military cemetery outside Israel.

http://www.jewish-history.com/shockoe.htm

[Arkinsaw]

Does that not count as southern?? =o)

There is no Southern Culture without Black Culture. When I sit down to eat fried okra I know wherefrom it cometh. A South without the Delta Blues and King Biscuit? I think not. Being Southern has nothing to do with race.

[IndependentSouthernDemocrat]

The South is a juxtaposition of many cultures. The primary cultures that influenced Southern cultures the most were the Scots Irish, the English Cavaliers, the Africans, and the Native Americans. There are also strong influences in the periphial edges of the South and in enclves from many other groups like the Germans, French Hugeonots, French Creoles/Cajuns, Jews, Czechs,Greeks,Spanish, and many other groups. In the South we see ourselves as Southerners, not as hyphenated Americans. In South Carolina, you can hear a Carribean like accent in Boineau, a Germanised Southern drawl in Lone Star, and a twangy Scots Irish brogue in the Upcountry. Charleston had the largest Jewish population in America once and has the oldest Reform synagogue in the Western hemisphere. The diets of "Southern" blacks and whites here are indistinguishable. The South has many unique subcultures that are part of one greater Southern culture, but Southern culture in general is becoming endangered by the hideous onslaught of Americanisation.