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 am no snob. You insulted me, by inferring that I was illiterate. And that "piece of paper" as you call it, was a result of hard work, study, and dedication. I have social skills as well, but I am as proud of my home as you are of yours, and I am going to defend it, when it is insulted. I made no stereotypical comments. Remember, I was there. My comments are from personal experience.
CBS has had three in a row that covers over 50 years of broadcasting. Uncle Walter the Red, Crazy Dan and now Bob Shieffer, all with Texas accents. ABC had Brinkley for what seemed a few centuries with a North Carolina accent, Roger Mudd has a Southern Virginia accent, and I'm sure there are others if I stop to think about it.
You know, 140 years is not a long time in the scheme of things. It is hard to forget, especially when you hear stories of reconstruction from your Grandparents.......
Well, there's a bit of a problem now, in that IT managers coming out of the Indian Institute of Technology, IIT, are going around saying they'd rather hire IIT men than MIT men (or any other Americans by extension, is I guess the point of that), because IIT men are "better prepared" than their MIT counterparts. No, they're really saying this stuff.
I'll leave that fight to the only people prepared to fight it, the CalTech and MIT and maybe the Georgia Tech and Purdue guys.
It was the War of Northern Aggression.
This topic should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with Southern history. We in the South have been harshly criticized for hundreds of years. I believe that this has its origins in the Anglo-Saxon efforts to destroy the culture of Celtic peoples. (Irish, Scots, and Welsh). (Despite what many may think, most white Southerners are of Celtic heritage.)
I find the term "redneck" as offensive as the "n" word. The only ethnic group left who can be freely criticized are white Southerners. Sadly, some of our own people have come to believe that their culture is inferior. I can't tell you the number of times I have heard Southerners apologize for their accents. I don't hear of any other group doing that.
If one looks at Southern culture objectively, one can see that there is a great deal of consistency with the Celtic culture of our ancestors. One can also see shortcomings, which may be found in all groups.
We need to reclaim our history. The textbooks now used in schools don't really tell our story,, and the popular national culture usually dismisses us as ignorant bigots.
I am not discouraged. We have a way of enduring, and we will continue to do so. DEO VINDICE
I'd love to be fishing now, but have to work.
There's been so much rain here on Norris Lake I imagine the water's pretty murky. Also I'll bet TVA is generating, so the trout should be feeding in the Clinch tailwaters. Between rains it'd be a nice float trip.
I was born in Clinton, and my folks moved away from here when I was a toddler. I came back and spent the 70s in Dutch Valley. For the past 10 years I've been living in Greeneville, and me and hubby just moved here on Norris Lake a month ago. I'm still unpacking (when I'm not sneaking online to check out FR). I'm hooked on FR, have been for years. Just began posting a few months ago.
Half of Anderson County is populated by my kinfolks.
"We're not stupid!! We're really Yankees stuck in this hellhole called the South. We can prove it! We come from a section of Tennessee that supported the North. We're not really part of that whole South thing."
Was that statement of his necessary? It's like someone saying, "Yeah, I live in Alabama but I'm originally from New York so I'm not stupid like my neighbors." He's right about people's reactions to the accent but he just sounds to me like he's saying he's better simply because he's from that area of Tennessee. Is that not the same thing he's complaining about but in reverse?
Houston is in Texas. Texas is not part of the South. Texas is simply Texas. You guys got your own whole thing going on there and you should be proud of it.
But it is amazing about people's reactions to my accent from Alabama with these people in Vegas. If I get that reaction from someone I automatically assume they are bigots with a superiority complex. And I'm not too shy to let them know I think that as well. ;-)
I'm always entertained by the Northeners having to get up early in the morning to dig their cars out of 4 foot snow every freaking day for months! But we don't put it on the nightly news because we're too polite to make fun of certain folk.
Probably not anytime soon. But it certainly does ebb and flow throughout time according to intellectual fashions. As I've often said on this forum, in the 1970s the CBF was considered a piece of quaint Americana, whereas today it is considered to be a blunt symbol of racist oppression. What changed? Was it the symbol or was it the mentality of our elites?
Anyway, I'm just biding my time waiting for this upsurge in fashionable South-bashing to become unfashionable again.
Besides, like my grandmother taught me, two wrongs don't make a right. :-)
talmand,
I don't think the poster meant it that way.
Tennessee was truly the "brother against brother" scenario during the Civil War. I had ancestors who fought on both sides, one (confederate)in Fort Sumter, S.C., and others on the Union side in Greeneville TN. I have a copy of a bill of goods my grandma's grandfather kept for the use of our homestead for Union headquarters.
Greeneville, TN changed hands between Union/Confederate control nine times during the war. East Tennessee was mostly Union sympathizers, but also had some strong Confederate ties. And of course President Andrew Johnson from Greeneville became the Union's military governor during those days.
Diane Sawyer, west Texas.
Judy Woodruff was in Atlanta before she went to PBS, but I don't know if she's from down there -- I kinda think so.
Charlayne Hunter-Gault was one of the kids who integrated Little Rock High, I think. Ed Bradley, maybe.
Hodding Carter III is a Mississippian from an old newspapering family.
Cokie Roberts is none other than Cokie Boggs, daughter of the mighty Wade Boggs of Louisiana, longtime power in the House of Representatives, and of Lindy Boggs, who held that New Orleans seat for over 20 years.
Charley Rose is from North Carolina.
That's because until recently Coca-Cola OWNED the South. There were bottling factoris all over the South, there was a bottling factory about half an hour's drive from where I grew up. It's a traditional thing. When Coke switched to that new formula there were nearly riots at the local Piggly Wiggly's over it. If we'd wanted Pepsi we'd drive up North for it. It's just one of those weird things about the South that only Southerners can truly understand and appreciate.
But that doesnt mean there arent good students elsewhere, or that all IITians or MITians are very good either.
As for preferences, its based on personal experiences. I wouldnt hire/prefer to work with Europeans (except Germans and Brits) and almost all Latin Americans.
Oh, really?! That must be why Robert E. Lee stood in his stirrups at Spottsylvania Court House and called out, when he saw Hood's Texans going by, "The Texans always move them!"
Must be why Sam Houston and David Crockett were from Tennessee, and William Barrett Travis was from South Carolina.
It also explains the presence of the New Orleans Greys at the Alamo, and why many score of thousands of Texans wore butternut and gray in dozens of battles all over the South, and why the last battle of the Civil War, a Confederate victory, was fought in Texas at the mouth of the Rio Grande.
That must be it.
Great !
I would rather focus on the news on not very distracting accents of network anchormen.
There's a lady on Fox News nowadays that has a distinct accent. It doesn't bother me in the slightest. I was raised to not judge people by the sound of their voices but by what they say. And if I judged you following that criteria with your post then things sure wouldn't look good.
These gentlemen were not Southerners, they were stupid racists probably with relations going back to slave owners.
I've had my dealings with such people in the South and I hate them with a passion. I have personally chastised my own mother for using that word to describe one of my friends while in high school. To this day it still bothers me that she had done that. My experience of being raised in the South is that it is mostly a generational thing that hopefully will be stamped out in the South except in Florida where they will retire. I would slap my own child for referring to another human being in such a derogatory manner. It is uncivilized to behave in such a manner.
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