The Southern States of America have some of the most beautiful landscapes and climates this country has to offer. It also harbors some of the worst people and culture this country has to offer.

Having traveled all over the US, being to every state other than Hawaii and having lived in a total of seven, four of them being Southern States, I’ve had the chance to see what the country is like, it’s various cultures and the people that make up those cultures, and have a developed a strong opinion from my experiences.

That opinion: Fuck the South.

I vividly remember moving from a North Western state to a southern state as a child and experiencing the utter culture shock from the move.

In the NW, I was welcomed for who I was. In the South, I was not.

In the NW, I was able to be who I wanted to be. In the South, I had to be like them.

In the NW, you were judged by your character. In the south, you were judged by the cost and size of your material items.

This is not Red vs Blue States. This is the South vs the rest of the United States.

The utter amount of corruption in Southern governments from the Governors offices’ down to the local police departments is both appalling, but extremely apparent if you just stopped to actually take a look.

There’s a massive amount of suffering from those in poverty in Southern States because of the rugged individualism in the culture and the utter lack of empathy towards those they do not know. As long as they get theirs, that’s all they care about. In the Southern Culture, the mentality is not “we’re in this together”, it’s “not my problem if it doesn’t affect me”.

The South = “Me, Myself, and I” and always has been. Disagree? Then how else can you explain their history if not for their own selfish reasons?

Everyone’s main focus is themselves and their immediate family/friends. Everyone else just exists (barely) and if their existence is worse than the Southerners, then that’s their problem and the southerner will not lose any sleep over it.

The South’s education is abysmal.

During my time of puberty I was living in southern states.

I had no idea what sexual intercourse was or how it was performed until I was 14 because my health classes sex education was “abstinence only”.

I learned by watching pornography.

I didn’t know about the female reproductive system or how it worked until I was 16 when my girlfriend told me about it. When we talked about sexual intercourse and the reproductive systems of both men and women, we talked about solely about STDs and how losing your virginity causes you to lose a part of yourself (this was an actual lesson in the sixth grade, I shit you not. My teacher also talked about how pornography created Ted Bundy. Again, I shit you not).

It’s not at all surprising that teen pregnancies ravage southern states. How could it not? They purposely keep teenagers in the dark as a form of control. And if a teenager breaks out of that control and gets pregnant, then their punishment is to have the child and be a teenaged parent. But this isn’t surprising. The culture of the south has always been about controlling others. They literally betrayed and fought against the United States because of it. And even after they lost, they still could not accept losing control. The KKK was formed, Jim Crow laws established, and they repealed the rights of their fellow Americans. And this mentality still affects Southern Culture to this day with their weaponization of religion and identity politics. (Did you know the Department of Justice was created just to fight the KKK because they were such a big fucking problem?)

Southern culture is also a very cruel and hateful one. (I know! That seems ridiculous to think! But is it when compared to the rest of American Values?)

“What about Southern hospitality?” You may ask.

This is true. The South is known for being polite.

But being polite is not the same as being kind.

Politeness is the social norm of the south, but kindness is not.

Southerners only take kindness at face value. It’s not done out of the kindness of the heart, it is done out of egotism and the need to feel morally superior than those around them. Hence, they’re polite. Not kind.

In my experience, the southerner is the first to judge, but the last to take any criticism.

I could go on and on with little intricate criticisms like the priority of athletics over education (SEC is absolute proof of this), or how you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a picture of a village in a developing nation and small town in rural Mississippi, but I don’t want to be here writing all night.

Obviously the world is not black and white. I know not every southerner is a bad person. I know you can’t put everyone in a singular box as every person is different. But when it comes to defining the culture of the American South, it is an utter embarrassment of the United States and against what our forefathers wanted the country to represent. Freedom and Tolerance of others (Benjamin Franklin actively pushed for the tolerance of other religions in the US. Would the average Southerner do that?)

Our biggest mistake as a country was not completing the Reconstruction of the American South. It is because of this failure you still see confederate flags on the back of their trucks and monuments of traitors in the center of their towns. And now the democracy of the United States is at risk because of it.

Fuck. The. South.

  • rwhitisissle@lemmy.world
    21·
    1 year ago

    I get where you’re coming from, but this is a textbook case of “familiarity breeding contempt.” Prejudice is a national problem. Americans, regardless of regional distinction, have been historically prejudiced against all non-whites. You think Native Americans in the pacific Northwest had it easy when their kids were forced into Indian Schools? Or that the million or so Hispanic-Americans rounded up throughout the Southwest and unceremoniously deported to Mexico in Operation Wetback weren’t victims of systemic injustice? The particular brand of systemic racial injustice that served as a cultural foundation for the South is a historical product of complex social factors going back centuries, and it’s so vibrant in our imaginations because of an equally complex confluence of historical factors, not the least of which is that American audio-visual media of the 20th century has a fascinating obsession with the South and its history. A lot of this can be tied to the fact that at the time when film making was truly getting started the Civil War was distant enough to not be a horrific memory in the lives of your average American, but close enough to be a point of nostalgia. There’s other factors there too, of course, like the intentional spread of Lost Cause mythology, but there’s literal tomes of historical analysis written about that. But anecdotally, the first truly successful major motion picture was The Birth of a Nation, without which you don’t get a movie as monumentally influential as Gone With the Wind. I know I’m sounding like an apologist, but the reality is that while the abortions of justice in the South are tragic and extensive, they aren’t particular to the region. They’re just magnified in our collective cultural consciousness by virtue of complex historical, cultural, and technological factors.

    Oh, also this point: “there has never been a single good thing the US has done that can be attributed to a Southerner or Southern state.” My brother in Christ, Martin Luther King, Jr. was from Atlanta. The Civil Rights movement might have been national at the time of its closing, but it started as a distinctly Southern Black political and social movement organized by Southern black congregations. I know you’ll probably say “they wouldn’t have had to form a civil rights movement if the South wasn’t so racist.” Yeah…of course. But that’s the point: it isn’t a monolith to which you are only free to attribute purely negative qualities. It’s a complicated place with a complicated history and a complicated blend of cultures and peoples. Which is equally true of, well, most places, really.