We Southerners have long recognized that Southern-prejudice is accepted, that our intelligence is always in question, that a Southern accent immediately lowers the IQ at least fifteen points, that it is always open season on the South, and that the rest of the country often assumes that ALL Southern schools are abysmal.
I have been privy to insults directed at Southerners, even at the highest levels in the field of education, because I have no Southern accent. The guilty were shocked (but not embarrassed) to learn that I was born and reared in Alabama.
Once, in response to my contribution to a committee report, an administrator from New York chirped patronizingly, “Why, you just used an SAT word.” I refrained from countering with corrections of his grammar.
Such attitudes have given rise to an old joke among Southerners: Northerners are like hemorrhoids; the good ones go back up.