southern comfort?

[subjective]

lately i feel weirdly hesitant to say anything negative about florida and/or the south in general, because i seem to keep running into people who have never lived there or maybe never even been there who make sweeping generalizations about how awful it is. there's plenty that i hate about southern politics on the whole. i am critical of my roots, but maybe it's sort of like how you can call your sibling lots of mean names and then when the neighbor kids do it you want to deck them for disrespect.

my entire family (save one aunt in oregon) lives in the south (mostly florida & georgia, some in tennessee & alabama) & has for generations. that is where i grew up for 21 years. i had important reasons for leaving & i for sure have a love/hate relationship with the south, especially politically. but (again) that doesn't excuse the way other people talk about the south as if it is some homogenous, utterly backwards geographic area. the south is complex & complicated & please stop saying things that simplify southern people & history in this really degrading way. and i'm pretty fucking sick of non-southerners discussing the south in an overarching diminuitive way that (by default?) casts "the rest of us" as shining examples of progressive politics. the south is not your scapegoat, thanks.



that said, this is entirely fucked up.

Comments

[filmstills.livejournal.com]

i went to university in the south, so i know for sure that it's a complicated, complex place with all sorts of history to unravel. i find when people talk about the south, especially if they are not from there, often it's in a very classist way, as in "all the poor white trash" or whatever. i went to a rich "prestigious" school, so there was this definite disdain about the south from certain portions of the school. i mean, my time there was limited and my experience was limited compared to someone who actually grew up there, but it was enough for me to know that it's impossible to generalize so blindly about a whole, complicated region and its culture.

and that article is so fucked up beyond belief. i think it's truly disgusting.