Not all news is good news...

Combing the news over the last week, I came across two articles that continue a trend I’ve recognized in news coverage: there’s never any good news about the South.  Why the South (and a few other places, e.g. Detroit) never receive good news, I’m not sure … I would love to hear our readers’ thoughts on the matter.  Is it because there truly is nothing good to report?  Is the South a whipping boy for the rest of the country?  Do fancy-pants reporters not value the valuable things about the South?

Apart from this question, here’s a weekly update — both spell bad tidings for Mississippi:

1) Teen Pregnancy Rates – http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090107/ap_on_he_me/med_teen_births

Click to read more…

In an earlier post, Brian aptly mentioned that strange situation we three panhandlers share: we’re “kind-of” from the South. Of course, this isn’t true from a literal, geographic standpoint – we’re all definitely from the southern portion of our country. I never in my childhood lived north of the Florida panhandle. Until I recently moved to Michigan, the “dead of winter” was signaled by 45° weather. Still, culturally each of us panhandlers exist in that liminal space where we aren’t quite Southern enough for Southerners; but too Southern for the rest of the country to be anything but.

Let me give you an example. I was talking to my grandmother on my cell phone awhile back, and the connection was bad. I said to her “I’m having trouble hearing you,” and she said to me: “that’s because you talk like a Yankee.” Ouch. Don’t sugarcoat it Granny.

Click to read more…

In my first post on the subject of racism in the south, I argued that the South is more racist than the rest of the country – but perhaps less so than many would imagine.  In particular, I presented some cross-tabs showing the regional breakdown of the number of people harboring negative feelings toward African Americans in various contexts.  Throughout the cases I looked at, the Deep South consistently displayed higher percentages of people expressing negative feelings.  However, I also showed that the differences between the South and the rest of the country were often not huge (the differences were frequently just 10%, in terms of the number of people expressing negative feelings toward their fellow black citizens).

For those even mildly familiar with descriptive statistics though, there is something you might fault me for: there are higher concentrations of black Americans living in the South than in rest of the country.  “So,” this argument goes, “its not shocking that we don’t see as much negativity to African Americans as one might expect; because a lot of African Americans live in the South (and we’ll assume they aren’t as likely as white Americans to dislike black Americans).”

This is a very good point.  This is certainly an issue I would have to deal with if these posts were about doing “journal-grade” social science.  Yet, for my present purposes, I think this argument about population goes beyond a simple methodological “problem;” it brings out a point that underlies our understanding of the South.

Click to read more…

A couple days ago, I went to a presentation on the topic of “quantification,” and what it means when we convert information to numbers (pretty boring, I know).  Less boring was an offhand remark that the presenter made about achievement tests.  Paraphrasing what she said:

And, of course, its been shown that tests like the SAT or ACT or LSAT disadvantage minorities, women, southerners, the poor, etc.

Inside my head I’m thinking “What?!? Southerners are disadvantaged in acheivement tests? Hmmm… I wonder if I would have scored better if I wasn’t from the South?”

Looking into this further, it seems that there is some minimal evidence that Southerners are indeed disadvantaged.  They tend to score, on average, about 2 points lower than the national average.  This isn’t a huge difference; its no where near the 20 point racial/ethnic score gap.  And frankly, the Southerner disadvantage is probably explained by things like race and income more than anything else.

So this probably isn’t a big factor for test scores.  Still it makes me wonder, is this a widely held belief?  Does this say something about how people think about Southerners?