Do we Yankees judge the South too much?

Dinah and I have spent a great deal of time talking about and processing upon the South’s attitudes towards race, its culture, the support for Trump, and a feeling that the South hasn’t escaped its history. I admit to having entered the South on this trip with impressions and biases that are driven by my growing up in the civil rights era, the taint of slavery, the more recent poverty of southern states, and the tropes about rednecks and southerners that are everywhere.

Another amusing Wiley. This one replacing one of the many statues on Monument Ave in Richmond, VA that had honored civil war hero’s.

After nearly two months below the Mason-Dixon line, I’m glad to hold some of my biases to the light, take a hard look at them .. and rethink them. Southern Hospitality is real and our experience of the people down there was amazing, we saw tremendous signs of economic growth, and at least our experience was that (more about this later) we saw nothing but graciousness between white and black people.

The South carries its past into the present in a way that’s completely missing in the West. The ante-bellum era and civil war are relived in monuments, preserved houses and battlefields in a way that makes it clear that many people down there are still celebrating that past or wish the Lost Cause had turned out differently. Indeed, polls show that well over 30% of Southerners believe that the Civil War was a just cause and that even Reconstruction was simply a large theft of southern wealth by the North.

Isn’t this a problem if they won’t let it go?

While it’s obvious that today, southerners are proud Union members, it seems that a large chunk of their anger at Northern liberal elites stems from that historical impression. But I don’t think those resentments towards the north are aided by our own current stereotypes about Southerners that are not exactly hidden.

This miniature house in Winchester, MD was one of many painstaking recreations of historical buildings.

And then there is the issue of race. As Belinda, a high school friend of Dinah’s who we visited with outside of Wake Forest, NC said, there really hasn’t been a ‘reckoning’ of the treatment of Blacks that affects the African American community to this day. There is, at minimum, a comfort with the relative economic status of Whites vs Blacks that I’m not comfortable with. And most certainly, even if it’s from a minority and I don’t actually know whether it’s more than elsewhere in the nation, racism is present.

But the south also celebrates its hero’s of history, music, literature, political success, and other cultural wins in a way that I rather wish we did in the West. Some of that ante-bellum/civil war energy, I think, just stems from an honoring of the past that we westerners are not as focused on.

As we moved north and now find ourselves in Pennsylvania, I find myself missing those smiles and greetings and the warmth that we experienced in the South.