On Jan 18, 1994: > I am trying very hard to hold my temper in place here, but as a native son of > the very southern state of Georgia, I am deeply offended by the stereotypes > which are being thrown about in recent posts on the net. It astounds me that > anyone who has looked at the media with any insight would take media stereotyp > of the region at face value, or that you would confuse representations of the > south in the 1950s and 1960s with the reality today. Take any of the statement > you folks are making about the south and substitute the minority of your > choice-- Jews, Blacks, etc. -- and see if you would be prepared to make the > same > kinds of comments in a public forum. I honestly don't think most of you would. > Are southerners close minded towards outsiders? Look, I live in Boston > right now and there aren't many other places in the world more close-minded > to outsiders. Maybe southern resistance to outsiders has something to do with > the snobbery and arrogance of people who come into other regions with the > assumption that all southerners are dumb hicks. > Are southerners racist? Most of us from the south have had to confront our > racism from day one, we live in a place where the history of racism is ever > present. When I was going to school in the midwest, I encountered forms of > racism that were so overt and so naive that it made my mouth drop. Fraternitie > at major midwestern universities had "Martin Luther Coon Birthday Parties," > where everyone wore black-face, ate fried chicken and watermellon. When the > frat boys were asked about their actions, they looked astonished that anyone > would find this offensive. It was just an honest joke! Where I came from, > you probably wouldn't do something like that if you had an ounce of humanity, > but if you did, you would have known what you were doing and meant it. > I don't mean to be flaming other regions. All I want to suggest is that > the south is being presented here as a scapegoat for national problems and it > has been used that way for more than a hundred years. > --Henry Jenkins Although I do not know the South in general at all, from my own experi- ence of coming to Chapel Hill NC from Boston, that the South is not as homogenously racist or whatever as I had been led to believe. Grant- ed, Chapel Hill is probably atypical of North Carolina, let alone the South, but one shouldn't get carried away with generalizing the entire region. I was surprised to find a thriving "punk"/grunge/what have you scene in Chapel Hill and I'm sure the tales of Athens GA have not gone un- noticed. Of course, Chapel Hill is far from perfect; there are still noticeable acts of racism but most of these are institutional or care- fully hidden as they are almost anywhere else in the country. There are still the Jesse Helms, who, if are not overtly racist, do capital- ize on racist attitudes, but I would tend to argue that the biggest difference between such Southerners and, say, Northerners is that Northerners are more sophisticated in their concealment/denial/what have you. (My example of "alternative" music is only to point out that things which are normally associated with urbane and/or liberal areas are prevalent in the south as well. Gosh, they aren't just a bunch of dumb hicks down here.) --Sterling Chen