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
I don't want to hold the actions of 19th Century carpetbaggers against present-day Nothern migrants to the South, anymore than I want Northerners to hold it against me that most of my ancestors were Confederates. Besides the ancestors of most Northerners immigrated to the US after the 1870s, and it hardly seems proper to hold them to bear for the sins of overzealous Radical Republicans.
As well, there are plenty of more proximate reasons for sectional enmities in the U.S. today (witness the much-discusse Red State/Blue State divide), so I don't need to go back 130 years to find things to get my blood up. In truth, there are many Northerners with whom I presently have much in common. For instance, I feel very at home amongst conservative rural-types from WI, MN and MI.
I included Rice. According to various ranking services, Baylor, TCU, and SMU are certainly good schools at the undergraduate level. (I haven't checked the grad school stats.) But none of them make the top 50. For example, among National Univesities, US News ranks Baylor at 84, SMU at 71, and TCU at 98. According to that same survey (for whatever it is worth) only about 20 of the top 120 National Universities are in the South.
Just out of curiosity, what schools did you transfer from and to?
There are plenty of weak programs all over the country, and some of the Southern cow colleges are as weak as they come. But you can still get a decent baccalaureate education if you apply yourself, challenge yourself, and let your board know you want to work, and don't take those weak courses you mentioned. Sometimes you can't get out of them: my freshman math was the third time I'd seen that material in four years, and then I reprised some more of it the next year in analytical geometry and introductory calculus. Probably just as well: my instructor in calculus was a master's man from MIT who prided himself more in delivering his lectures in fully-parsed Standard English than on getting the content across to the students. Understanding was our problem. I barely passed. My classmate who had to take it over, took another instructor during a summer session and achieved a good grade easily.
What was the college you left, whose program was so unimposing?
What they don't explain to high-school students is that matriculating in one university and getting by with a gentleman's "C" will open more doors than taking the same degree from a college less well thought of. Haverford versus Florida A&M, Oberlin versus Sul Ross State or New Mexico Highlands. It's a class descriptor, like Paul Fussell pointed out in Class, and not just an education.
Shell Oil doesn't even recruit geophysicists and geologists at a number of "oil-patch schools" that are well-known for the preparation of their students for industry. It's that snob factor; and when products of other schools encounter ex-Shell managers at other companies later on, the prejudices are applied nearly as strongly as they would have been at Shell. Companies play favorites unremittingly and for keeps, and managers who are veterans of those companies carry those prejudices elsewhere without inspection, because they serve the useful purpose of reducing the inventory of subordinates the manager has to take seriously.
Not justiciable, of course -- but you knew that when you put up that cynical little post.
But that's okay. We'll just fix your wagon good, later on. And don't waste time worrying about it, okay? You can't get out of it, and you won't see it coming. So just settle back and enjoy the ride.
I think Kerry and Gore are proof positive of that.
I agree with your comments on the snootiness factor in that calculus is calculus whether taught at Harvard or Woodchuck State. I also know a corporate recruiter who prefers to hire engineers from Union, Bucknell, and Lehigh, rather than MIT and Cal Tech, because he wants engineers who can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Exactly the point Fussell was making. Gore Vidal has said something similar (not that I particularly appreciate what he has to say, as a rule).
Fussell intended his book as a warning, that the fabulous social mobility available to Americans in the past is beginning to dry up, as rentseekers and people who like to pull up ladders behind them start to do things like I've described company managements doing, such as embracing credentialism -- which was savagely and very effectively attacked in a Reagan-era essay by James Fallows, "The Case Against Credentialism", which appeared in the December, 1985, issue of The Atlantic (as The Atlantic Monthly was briefly called). Contents-page epitome: "America celebrates the entrepreneur but increasingly rewards the M.B.A. Yet business schools neglect the skills and outlook on which America's economic renaissance depends." One of the topics the essay dealt with, however, was the habit society had gotten into by that time, of topping out people's career trajectories early in life, in reliance on intelligence testing, which was used to gate educational opportunity and therefore work opportunity.
That's what we're talking about here. Fussell's thesis was simply that, as a sequel of what Fallows was observing, the country would build a permanent class system based on life expectations founded on early opportunities. Which sounds a lot like Dickens, and no doubt for very good reasons: lots of very clever people are beavering away in private life to ensure that things come out that way, pro bono their own offspring and the offspring of "People Like Us"; and when their wants intersect with government, they tend to become policy, often without asking anyone's permission.
"Fussell intended his book as a warning, that the fabulous social mobility available to Americans in the past is beginning to dry up, as rentseekers and people who like to pull up ladders behind them".......and the prime example of people like this are Bill and Hillary Clinton, who are pluperfect examples, along with Gore, Kerry, and Lamar Alexander, of people who enjoy scintillating careers full of wealth and power at the very top of American society -- without ever having contributed anything tangible to it. They are precisely the people that Noam Chomsky called "the New Mandarins", and a political typology that typed people by their public career paths used the same word -- "mandarins". They are people who never worked at a real job in their lives, and who have spent their whole lives living in an environment of power, ordering other people around.
People like that aren't America.
I just got back from Princeton, NJ. I traveled with a British guy. When he spoke, smiles, when I did, frowns. When we told anyone we were traveling from Mississippi, condolences were offered.
Sad really. Even my British friend noticed the bias.
LOL!
Great! That reminds me of something that really happened once, long ago, involving an MIT man.
My dad was an electronics officer in the Air Force in the mid-50's, assigned to construction of the Pine Tree Line and the DEW Line air-defense networks across northern Canada and Greenland. He was based, and we lived, in Newfoundland, and from there he travelled in all seasons of the year, weather permitting, to construction and base sites at lovely places like Narsarssuak, Thule, Goose Bay, and occasionally Keflavik, often staging out of Gander Field, the big airfield in east-central Newfoundland. On one trip, he met a young MIT man who'd been sent up to Thule, who showed up in a short-sleeved shirt in brutally cold weather. Amazed, my old man asked him, well, where's your cold-weather gear? Shirts, underwear, parka? "Nobody told me to bring anything" was his reply. He was going to Greenland, which was cold in "summer" -- and he showed up in shirtsleeves! Unbelievable.
But I'm sure he was aces on the theory.
That's a very funny story, and that sort of stuff probably happens a lot.
Hey Tennessee Bob, both my Grandpas were coal miners recruited to work on the Manhatten Project, so my parents families ended up settling in Clinton/Oak Ridge. I'm right here in your area.
One Grandpa made moonshine and my Daddy ran shine years ago. Daddy used to tell us about dumping moonshine and gambling apparatus into Norris Lake at Point 19.
East Tennessee is God's country. I'm a hillbilly and damn proud of it, and I love watching Yankees react to my accent.
MIT is a classy place for engineering.. a PhD from MIT in physics or Engg is regarded as ultimate all over the world.
I don't try to beat the South up about anything. The South is a fine place, and so is the North. I'm just damn tired of the false stereotypes being thrown the other direction.
Some folks don't seem to get that point or are too wrapped up in their fake regional "identity" ego trips to even comprehend that they are the ones throwing stones.
Ditto what you said.
Well, hello neighbor!!! You just reminded me - I need to get my license so I can go drown some worms.
But my father raised his seven kids to always give people the benefit of the doubt and treat people with the proper respect.
He said if people where good to you then you be good to them.
We where taught to judge people by there actions not by the color of their skin and not by what someone said about them.
He also told us to do whatever we could within reason to avoid a fight but be prepared to do whatever is necessary to win if one is forced on you.
Most southerners of my age and older where taught as a child simple manners that show proper, genuine respect. We where taught that being polite was not a sign of weakness but of strength of character.
We were taught to give respect and by doing so we had the right to expect it in return.
Most of the people of my age from my area where raised with similar values.
In answer to your question about how we see other people, if I see a man or woman working hard and playing by the rules trying to raise their family and are respectful of their fellow man and of our country and it's laws, they have my genuine rspect and admiration.
It doesn't matter what part of the country or world they come from including Mexico or the Middle East or whether he's picking peas or the Dean of Mississippi State .
We have a good many Mexican people working on farms in our area. From what I see and hear most are good hard working people.
Like I said in an earlier reply I have found what we call good people from all areas of the world and from all races.
I have also found those that do not qualify as a members of the human race from the same pool.
I think the way people, including Southerners feel, and treat people is not based on the area in which we live but it is based on the condition of our hearts.
Well, that's the whole topic of this thread, isn't it? Like,
When is that going to stop happening??
For instance, I feel very at home amongst conservative rural-types from WI, MN and MI.
As well you should; well, there are some good friends to be had there. I had some good friends in Minnesota when I was a boy. Always wondered what happened to them.
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