It's remarkable to me how folks who would never, ever be seen to say anything rude about other races (or who would only do so very obliquely) will quite loudly smirk about how much they hate Southerners, how stupid they think Southerners are &c.
It's all just class. One can be just as intelligent with a Southern accent as one can be stupid with another.
When I moved to New York City after living in Florida and North Carolina, I was really surprised at the blatant bigotry here. I've had people respected in this industry for their open mindedness look at me without irony and ask me if it's really as bad as everyone "down there" calling everyone else ... (looks around nervously) ... the N-word.
I had an opposite experience - I moved to Louisiana from a northern state and was shocked at the amount of racism and bigotry openly displayed. While looking in to buying a house I was told but multiple realtors to avoid certain areas because they are "too black." Also I distinctly remember seeing a bumper sticker that deriding mixed race relationships that ended with "don't be a race-mixing slut." Absolutely blew my mind - I didn't know those attitudes still existed.
Was it the openness of the bigotry that shocked you, or the bigotry itself?
In my experience, there isn't a huge difference in the level of racial bigotry between northern and southern states. The difference lies primarily in the openness of it.
For example, the effects of deed-restricted home sales are still being felt today in many neighborhoods in northern states.
In some ways, the openness of the southern brand of racism is more respectable than the northern brand. While the southern real estate agent was open with you, the northern real estate agent may simply assume you don't want to live in a neighborhood that's "too black," never say so to your face, and proceed to only show you houses in the "nice" part of town.
Yes, it's a contrived example, but it's also something that happens every day all over the country.
>In my experience, there isn't a huge difference in the level of racial bigotry between northern and southern states. The difference lies primarily in the openness of it.
When I was managing people in the '90s in California one of the technicians who worked for me was black and had worked all over the country.
He said he much preferred living in the South, because while there was no difference in the number of bigots he ran across, outside the South the bigots weren't brave enough to be open about it so it was harder to tell where he stood.
I think there's probably some legitimacy to that view, but I always wonder how much "shit happens" type stuff gets identified as racism. I'm white, so when a white guy is an asshole to me I assume he's an asshole. If I were black I might assume he's a racist.
>While looking in to buying a house I was told but multiple realtors to avoid certain areas because they are "too black."
Besides racism, that's also a way to say "too poor/downtrodden/crime ridden".
To which, they would indeed have a point (statistics wise), although that of course is caused by the systemic injustice and lack of opportunities against blacks for centuries.
Also notice how people still say the exact same thing about "white trash" places in the North (and South), and nobody seems to mind, because while the US got more tolerant about race, they still don't give a rats arse about classism and social exclusion based on being poor and not a "success".
When I moved to New York City after living in Florida and North Carolina, I was really surprised at the blatant bigotry here.
There is a lot of bigotry in the Bay Area and online. Considering what we know about the mental shortcuts people use to process complex social information, evidence/science minded people should expect there to be bigotry as an unfortunate phenomenon to be aware of. Instead, it has received the imprimatur of "sin."
It's a thorny problem. Talk about bigotry in the "wrong" way, and you ironically open yourself up to yet more bigotry involving projections about your internal mental state.
This particular point has always been a bit funny to me.
I mean, sure, there are super racist areas in the south. I grew up and lived in mostly rural Alabama for the first 20+ years of my life, and there were some rural areas that were just as terrible as people imagine (cross burnings, open Klan meetings, etc, though that was starting to die down in the last 10 years or so I lived there).
That said, a lot of cities in the south are 30% - 50% black (sometimes more), and people who live in those cities, generally speaking, coexist and interact with many black and white people on a continual basis. It'd be kind of hard to do that and be super racists to the level people imagine the south to be.
I talked to a lot more black programmers in meetups in Atlanta than I have in San Francisco (I'm not American and was a visitor in both places) & was surprised by how biased against the former people in the latter were, despite evidence to the contrary.
In Atlanta race is not a special issue, it's a fact of daily life. Interacting with black people isn't an unusual event where you get to pat yourself on the back for 'not being racist'. It's simply what happens everyday.
Or maybe I am just bitter about a 70% white city talking about how racist a 53% black city must be.
Exactly. As a southerner, I have an accent, but I also don't answer important questions fast. IOW, I pause a beat to collect my thoughts. People tend to think this too is a sign of "stupid". Really, it's just I don't like to be wrong. I'd rather be slow up front and be right, than fast up front and be wrong. However, our development culture tends to think everything needs to happen as fast as possible (the whole twitter in a weekend meme).
Just a useful trick, you can have the best of both worlds if you respond with "well, it depends", play up a dramatic pause, and follow with "on one hand..." and finish with a counter-point. It seems to result in a less argumentative response when people disagree as well.
(impending anecdote) - this is something I noticed when I lived in the south for a while. More people tended to think before they spoke which would result in cleaner, less runny conversations compared to the typical word diarrhea I was accustomed to sifting through growing up in the Northwest. It was actually quite nice to deal with after a short adjustment period for me to discard my knee jerk reaction of assuming the heat fried everyone's brains.
> IOW, I pause a beat to collect my thoughts. People tend to think this too is a sign of "stupid".
A lot of tribes in the US have members that exhibit this same behavior. A respectful pause to consider a response and a slow cadence should be a sign they have considered their words, but instead is portrayed as stupid. It made going to DC and dealing with bureaucrats in the 90's a pain in the butt.
>IOW, I pause a beat to collect my thoughts. People tend to think this too is a sign of "stupid". Really, it's just I don't like to be wrong. I'd rather be slow up front and be right, than fast up front and be wrong.
I'm really glad to hear that I'm not alone with this struggle. Still don't have a good answer for it though. :(
That's because there is often a social (status signaling) benefit to disparaging Southerners in many parts of the US. Particularly in coastal, urban areas.
The only reason I even live within commuting distance of a large city is because that's where the only good-paying tech jobs are. If I had been a, say, banker or a mechanic or a plumber I'd be able to work in any town in the country, but no, dumb me had to become a computer programmer.
If I could participate in this career/industry from a smaller town, you bet your butt I'd do it in a second.
Do you realize that ours is one of the few jobs that can be conducted entirely remotely? Perhaps the remote-work train is destined to derail at some point in the future, but at the moment it's totally possible to find work that lets you live anywhere there's available internet.
Is it really? I see this written on HN all the time, but of everyone I know who tried to find a remote job failed.
The people who ended up working remotely are the ones who worked in the office for many years and gained the trust of their employer. Then when the family moved (usually due to a spouse changing jobs) the employer decided to let them work remotely rather than letting them go, at least in the near term.
> The people who ended up working remotely are the ones who worked in the office for many years and gained the trust of their employer.
Well yes pretty much this. I worked for a year on-premises before switching to remote, and I can imagine it's harder to find remote work from the get-go.
I've had many remote jobs (including current). Another option is to start as a (remote) freelancer / consultant and transition to normal full-time while remaining remote.
Yes; but I don't want to work remotely. I want to work in an office with colleagues. I just don't want to have to commute to the center of a large city to do it.
My father was a school board administrator. He was able to make good money, work in an office with colleagues, and still had the ability to live in practically every town in the US. School boards are everywhere. Tech companies are only in the largest cities.
I noticed that, particularly about the New York Times. Periodically they'll have a piece about something in the South and it's always about the stereotypical slack-jawed yokel who's trying to marry his sister, or is living in a dirt hut but has 5000 guns, or a preacher who preaches black people are the descendants of Cain, or some such. It's like people in New York can't start their day without feeling superior to someone else.
The people who Fox News caters to the most are suburbanites. Most people way out here are lukewarm on Fox News. They're just... different. They agree with some things that I imagine would be popular in big coastal cities, but disagree with other things that might surprise you, so.
> Sure, but I'd wager that the rural folk would be fine if all the city dwellers disappeared, and that the opposite is not true.
As much as I like rural folks and like to spend time with them (and despise folks who look down on them), the farmer is just as reliant on the financiers who ensure a steady cash flow for the multinational which delivers him his fertiliser, his fuel, the parts for his tractor, his clothes, his food &c. &c. &c.
But do you think your medicine, qualified doctors, medical equipment, internet, computers you use, movies and tv series you watch, trucks you drive and tons of other things besides grow on trees?
Cities really, truly, have historically predominantly invented, produced and designed those things (including designing and paying for the factories seemingly in the country).
Not many medicine schools, pharma corps, research labs, car manufactures, tech companies, tv and movie studios, etc operating out of rural Idaho, or South Dakota, or Alabama, or what have you...
In the United States, if the "city dwellers" all disappeared, the "rural folk" would go from barely getting by despite being heavily subsidized by everyone else to some kind of devolved state that looked like an Amish version of The Road Warrior.
If the opposite happened, urban areas would buy their food somewhere else and eventually save some money thanks to the increased competition in the market and the lack of agricultural subsidies, not to mention all the other ways we subsidize rural America's inefficiencies.
If you want to go back to subsistence farming, sure. The world is filled with places like that. Don't forget that your machinery is largely designed and built in urban environments. Don't forget that your serious medical care comes from urban environments. And, most importantly, don't forget that your customers largely come from urban environments. If the cities went away, so do your clients and your manufacturing and transportation sources. So, back to subsistence living for you...
I grew up in the city and spent summers on my uncle's farm and have seen both sides. Gods, I am tired of this fucking stupid rural vs urban debate. They need each other, and can't exist in a modern world without each other. Move to the countryside and I hear stereotypes about how shit the people in the city are. Move back to the city and hear stereotypes about how shit the people in the country are. Both sets of stereotypes are largely wrong. Likewise, the people whose jobs straddle both urban and rural environments are not the people who use these stereotypes.
Part of that is because Chicago is considered the baseline "accent" for many news broadcasters, radio personalities, etc. As a result, most Americans have heard that accent their entire life and therefore don't really interpret it as all that different.
I've found that it's the keywords that indicate where people are from within the Midwest:
Even that can differ between rural and urban. I've lived in the midwest for most of my life, and apparently there's all sorts of "terms midwesterners use" that I've only rarely heard anyone say, and most often only to point out that they don't say it.
This depends though. Did you live "all over the midwest" or in a specific state? The very same things people pointed they don't say, could be prevalent in a nearby state.
On the other hand, look at how (politically) "those people" behave in aggregate. It might only be a majority of 51%, but clearly there is a sizable portion of people in the (traditionally somewhat sparsely populated) south / center of the country that have quite different values than the the people living along the crowded coasts.
Not saying one group is smarter/dumber, just that the difference in values makes it hard to come to an agreement, which can make the "other" side seem stupid / "full of shit" / nuts.
Yes, but there are lots of Southerners who are just as progressive as anyone. The distribution is skewed relative to the rest of the country, but that sort of thinking is far from universal.
It's only reasonable to recognize and acknowledge that the South as a whole acts somewhat differently. But it's wrong to talk about all Southerners as if they're the same, or treat all Southerners badly because of it.
It's just like with race. There are real, factual differences between racial groups, and acknowledging this is not a bad thing. What's bad is judging or biasing your interaction with people from those racial groups because of it.
Not everyone southerner has "southern" values. The south also has urban areas where people lean more to the left than their rural counterparts. There are just fewer of them. They (unfairly) get stuck with the same stereotypes.
That's the idea of generalizations. They don't need to be 100% fair, just statistically useful.
I'd wish people would get that, and only complain when a generalization is statistically wrong (e.g. doesn't really hold for the majority of the people it lumps along), instead of everytime they find a counter-example...
Simpsons paradox though. There are more conservative people in California than there are in Georgia (e.g. more people in California voted for Mitt Romney than people in Georgia). Slicing people up into states to make nice sound bite statistics is useless and leads to stupid stereotypes.
Well, that more people in California "voted for Mitt Romney than people in Georgia" might not tell the whole story.
Are the people in California traditionalist, religious, backwards, or even racist, etc, as the people in Georgia? They might not be, regardless of who they chose to vote for -- which takes into account many factors and policies.
That said, California is also traditionally regarded as conservative (at least by us in Europe) -- it's places like Massachusetts or Vermont that we'd count as progressive. Especially since California is regarded as hardcore pro-money/big-business, which is large part of being a "conservative" here.
Same percentage voted for Romney in Massachusetts as did in California. Again, grouping people by states is ridiculous to represent the views of the whole population of the state. It usually comes down to urban vs rural and that's about it.
Atlanta is not all that different from LA and Boston politically.
Or, you know, less people vote in the south. In the 2012 Election, southern states all had far less turnout than northern states[1]. Your'e not comparing apples to apples.
Saying the entire south in aggregate is "stupider" because of that is plain wrong.
1) I said that a difference in values (due to location / population distribution / history ???) made them reason differently, not that they were actually stupid.
2) I also meant to highlight "some do, some don't" by saying "perhaps 51%". Perhaps 51% is even too high, maybe it's just a vocal minority.
3) By calling them (in quotes) "those people" and "other" I was alluding to a certain amount of xenophobia on the part of coastal dwellers when considering fly-over dwellers. And yes, that cuts both ways.
If one hasn't visited the South and relies on current events and news to derive an opinion on the area it's hard to blame them for thinking the southern states are in a race to the intellectual bottom.
I've lived my whole life in the South and think the southern states are in a race to the intellectual bottom -- though only the legislators are actually running in the race. A majority of the rest of us are just cheering them on.
It's all just class. One can be just as intelligent with a Southern accent as one can be stupid with another.