fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2695 ]

[ SECRET POST #2695 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2695 ⌋

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I am from South Carolina (now live in Oklahoma and most of my relatives live up north). Generally people in the south are more polite and friendly. We say 'ma'am' and 'sir' all the time.

Also, I always hear people talk about how racist the South is, but from my experience Northerners are quite a bit more racist.

Tea is a big one. In the South we drink sweet tea, but those Northern heathens drink unsweetened terribleness. And more fried food in the South because we love fried food.

Uh...I can't think of anything else specific (I don't work well with broad questions D:).

Tea, yes. The first time I ordered tea in the north and received some shit that had no sugar in it was a bizarre thing for me.

Food is a lot different. Grits. Cornbread. Good BBQ (not that crap that's smothered in sauce). Good cole slaw. Good Key Lime Pie. HUSHPUPPIES, UGH. Don't get them up north.

I'm a Northerner who moved South, and I think they're probably about equi-racist in a broad / institutional sense. I think liberal Southern white people are less likely to be casually or "ironically" racist than their Northern counterparts and Northerners are more likely to think they get a free pass just for not being from Alabama, while having a shit-ton of unexamined prejudices.

Also, the schools where I live now are better integrated than in the North, because the South got court-ordered back in the sixties. The schools still suck, but they're integrated. Residential segregation is less pronounced, too -- but my sample size is small, so grains of salt all around.

Also also, fried food is delicious, sweet tea hurts my whole mouth, and the people here (Alabama) dress up for church every Sunday the way you could barely get us to dress up for a wedding up in Michigan.

DA

Yeah, it's also that racism is just...very different between the two regions. In the south race [or, rather, if someone was white or not] is almost entirely defined by skin color where as in the north it was defined by skin color and a few other things [social class, economic class, how long your family had been in the US, etc]*. So it was possible for someone to have white skin, but still be classed as "Not White" [a good example is how first generation immigrants were treated for a long time]. Plus, in the north you're far more likely to see de facto [or social, not done by law, segregation] where as the South was de jure [or done by law] until things were forced to change.

So that also plays a role in it as well.

...And yes, I have learned far more about this than I'm comfortable admitting.

*There is actually a name for this system, and has been quite a bit of research done for it - I just can't remember the name of it for the life of me at the moment, sorry!

So it was possible for someone to have white skin, but still be classed as "Not White" [a good example is how first generation immigrants were treated for a long time].

This has always confused me. If you're white, you're white. It doesn't make any sense to me how, for example, white European immigrants are considered "not white" just because they're originally from another country. White does not equal "white person that was born in the US".

It's the difference between "white" as a skin color and "white" as a category of people relative to the social strata.

ayrt

"white" as a category of people relative to the social strata

But WHY and how is that a thing? White is a race, period. It doesn't make sense otherwise. Would a black person in the same social category actually be considered white?

To my knowledge it's very much a historical thing. As we use the term now, white refers to a race, but during the Colonial Period and during all the immigration to the US from Europe, there was a social dichotomy of White vs Other. If a person fell into the social category of Other, not welcome or perceived as lesser, which included various European immigrant groups at different times, they would not be classified as white, because a person couldn't be both white and Other. As various groups were accepted into society, like the Irish, they became recategorized as white, because they now fit. It's not going to make sense based on our usage of white as a race.

One thing it's interesting to see is how much the racial caricatures look like each other. Early 19th c. Irish caricatures look A LOT like the black caricatures that were going around at the same time, even though actual ethnic Irish people and actual black people don't tend to look that much alike in RL -- the cartoon versions shared a lot of physical features like apelike mouths, big feet, long arms. . . Anti-immigrant cartoons from 1900 of scary Mediterraneans look A LOT like anti-immigrant cartoons today of scary Mexicans, and so on. It's all about the Other vs. "our" jobs, women, religion, culture; who gets otherized changes according to a bunch of factors.

It's not really, though, if by "race" you're thinking "group of people closely related to one another genetically" or something like that. Whiteness in the US at least is more like a fraternity that's picky about how you look, but also about how you act and who your friends are. "Italian" and "Greek" worked their way into the fraternity, while "Mexican" and "Lebanese" (for example) were kicked out -- but not because the range of skin tones was particularly different among those groups.

Some very pale black people passed for white and became socially white -- but this meant cutting off ties with friends and family, since a blonde, blue-eyed person with one or more black parents would not be considered white. Walter F. White, an early NNACP organizer, had blonde hair and blue eyes and sometimes passed as white for his own safety, but he lived in black neighborhoods and identified as black because his parents had been slaves. His family was able to escape the 1909 race riot in Atlanta because they looked white, but if they had stayed in their own neighborhood they would have been attacked along with their neighbors.

It's complicated I guess is the answer. . . sorry to tl;dr

In that context it's more of a cultural thing than specifically about the way someone looks, which makes sense. I kind of see "white European immigrants" as different than "black people who can pass for white" although I can't quite explain how.

I thought Walter F. White was mixed race? From my experience mixed race people usually seem to be seen as whatever race they appear to be. Like pretty much everyone considers Barack Obama to be black ("the first black president" and all that stuff) even though his mother was white. But then when you get into fractions and who's what percentage of what race it all seems to kind of lose meaning almost, like what's even the point of categorizing people by race?

I don't know, I guess you're right...it's complicated.

Re: What are regional cultural differences in the USA?

(Anonymous) - 2014-05-21 03:13 (UTC) - Expand

I'm not sure if this is right, but I think a more specific criteria would be that immigrants who were not Anglo-Saxon/Germanic protestants were looked down on. So these European immigrants were still white, they just weren't the right kind of white.

still white, they just weren't the right kind of white

Well that's just fucked up.

That's a good way of putting succinctly what I was trying to say.

DA

yep.

But Germans had a hard go of it in some places, too - hate for everyone!

When the US entered WWI, the anti-German prejudice got a new lease on life (and lots of traditionally bilingual communities became monolingual within a generation -- including German-speaking towns that had been founded by socialist utopians in the 1850s and could not have been less sympathetic to the Kaiser):

Yes. They also got a lot of crap during the twenties because of the 'beer gardens', and during the Civil War by Southern soldiers/sympathizers, because it was assumed that the Germans were automatically Union. Missouri was divided, but St.Louis - a very German town - was 'the Northern city in the Southern state'.

Sadly, this meant Germans *outside* of St. Louis were often just killed by any Southern soldiers or sympathizers.

And now we have our Oktoberfests. Life is weird.

Re: What are regional cultural differences in the USA?

(Anonymous) - 2014-05-21 05:06 (UTC) - Expand

Re: What are regional cultural differences in the USA?

(Anonymous) - 2014-05-21 07:23 (UTC) - Expand

Re: What are regional cultural differences in the USA?

tabaqui - 2014-05-21 15:19 (UTC) - Expand

Yeah, I think the South is more integrated because we went into WE ARE NOT RACIST SEE SEE SEE mode.

Tea up North is terrible. D: My husband calls tea down here 'The Sweet Nectar of the South.'

I'm like the worst southerner, true facts. I hate sweet tea. When I went to Alabama as a kid and all they had was sweet tea (AND PEOPLE PUT SUGAR IN THEIR SWEET TEA) I was like "this sucks."

omggggggggg people putting sugar in the sweet tea; I HAVE SEEN IT; IT CANNOT BE UNSEEN D:

love every single other thing about Southern food, though . . .

It's because of the south exporting sweet tea to the rest of the country that I always have to go around now specifying that I want "hot tea" because if I just say "tea" there's always a chance someone will think that means sweetened iced tea, even when I'm in fucking North Dakota or somewhere. Hot tea is normal tea. That's how it's traditionally taken. It shoud be what "tea" defaults to. I shoudn't need to specify.

AKA: PEOPLE SHOULD KNOW WHAT KIND I WANT WITHOUT ME SAYING SO! WAAAAAAH!

When I order iced tea I usually ask is their iced tea is sweetened or unsweetened. Then I indicate that I would like unsweetened ice tea. I then add a little bit sugar to sweeten it up just a touch...

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