I am happy to introduce the first post in our newest series, “Southern Voices.” In this section, we present reflections from people who live or lived in the South who have unique insight or revealing experiences that help achieve the main goal of this site: offering an accurate view of what it means to be the South.

Without further ado, “Southern Voices” presents Kiran Patel, from Live Oak, Florida and now residing in Atlanta, Georgia.

Southern Hospitality…Desi Style.

Growing up as an Asian-American in the South was interesting, to say the least.  I think my family was like the second Indian family in my hometown when we moved there in the late 1980s.  I distinctly remember secretly wanting a southern accent, and sometimes I threw one in, just for kicks. Stop, visualize, and listen: petite, soft spoken, pink-wearing, 90-ish pound Indian saying “hey y’all!”  My sister and I came home to watch Country Music Television everyday – I was in love with Billy Ray Cyrus.  I also remember kind of shunning my own culture (Indian, Hindu) in my middle and high school years.  Why?  I am not sure anymore, but I definitely regret it.  I remember attending Fellowship of Christian Athletes , I remember allowing my friends to pronounce my name kuh-ron (instead of “kee-raan”), and I remember rarely talking about my ‘weird’ religion.  I am not sure why I wanted to fit in so much, but I did.  Maybe it’s because it’s hard to forget being called an ‘injun’ very early in life, maybe I just wanted to be like my friends.  It felt weird to be different, so I tried not to be.  It’s funny though because now culture is such a huge part of who I am.  What is it about that little town that made me stay quiet?  I don’t imagine my friends would have judged me, but, oh well.  So you learn.  I hope new minorities in my hometown are less timid about their culture.  I haven’t been to my hometown for an extended period of time in ages.  But I have to admit, sometimes I miss its small town appeal…who knows. Click to read more…

Being both a crazy and a dorky guy, one year during college I decided to spend a Spring Break exploring the South, with another crazy and dorky guy. Specifically, our plan was to see as much of the Mississippi River as would fit into our week-long Spring Break.

After a bit of research, it turned out that this was pretty easy to do. The Great River Road follows Ol’ Man River for most of his length (by the way, I highly recommend driving the Great River Road; it’s a cool historical route). Anyway, by making a giant box to get there (see below), the two of us eventually made our way from Memphis, TN to New Orleans, LA, sleeping in a conversion van parked in various state and local parks.

Our Route

Now, the stories I could tell from this experience could fill a number of posts. We ate at diners in Tennessee, saw Civil War sites in Vicksburg, and surprised Lawrence’s family with a delivery of crawfish from Biloxi, MS. Frankly though, some of these stories are too inappropriate to tell publicly – for instance, let me just say that after a night in New Orleans, I woke up inexplicably at a truck stop in Mississippi – with no wallet – after laying all night on top of two umbrellas on the floor of my van. However, certainly the craziest highlight of this trip took place in Greenville, MS.

Click to read more…

My friend Rob sent me the article “Eric Oliver on the Bigot Belt” from The Freakonomics Blog. In this post, the author looks at Republic Counties that went more red in 2008 compared to 2004, a trend that is frequently cited as being due to racism (an issue that some of the posts on this blog have discussed).

Erik Oliver, a professor at the University of Chicago, argues that ”the best predictor of a county’s Republican vote margin is its white racial percentage relative to its state’s black population size. In other words, the counties where Republican margins grew the largest tended to be predominantly white places in otherwise racially mixed states.”

The author links increased Republic voting to racist attitudes, but not in what we usually think of as the usual picture of racists featuring “poverty, low education, and rural residence underlie white racial animosity.” Instead, racism only leads to higher Republic voting in a very particular context:

“These patterns are consistent with research on individual racial attitudes. Historically, the greatest levels of racial violence occurred within white enclaves near larger black populations, particularly when these enclaves are poor and uneducated. Even today, whites who live in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods within more diverse metropolitan areas tend to be more racially hostile than whites who live in either integrated neighborhoods or within largely white regions.”

This theory of racism by juxtaposition and segregation is food for thought, Panhandler readers.

Check out some of the comments on the original post, people get really intense.

This long weekend, in the United States, I decided to celebrate by traveling with a friend of mine to visit another friend who took a teaching position at Arkansas Northeastern College in Blytheville, AR.

It is always interesting for me to go to a place in the South that is not the panhandle. Many southerners, perhaps rightly so, question my southern providence. Even when I slowly regain my southern accent when I’m south of the Ohio River, I still seem like an outsider. 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…

Although its history is too strongly influenced by the Spanish (and, interestingly enough, coalitions of runaway slaves, especially at Fort Mose), Jacksonville does share some southern traditions.

Apparently, one of them is to invoke honor to keep Nathan Bedford Forrest’s name on a High School.

Yahoo! Story about Nathan Bedford Forrest High School

Click to read more…

Jeff has really thrown down a gauntlet early in our blog’s providence by bringing up racism. He is right on at least one point. Racism is indeed a knotty subject. In the past roughly 60 years, attempts to strike at like the Gordian Knot of old have resulted at best resentment (affirmative action), or at worst massive legal battles invoking personal liberties and some of the most successful third party Presidential candidacies in American History (bussing, quotas, etc. in the former; Strom Thurmond and George Wallace for the latter). Click to read more…

Now I know the issue of racism is a bit heavy for one of our first posts.  Still, this topic is clearly something that a blog about the South must deal with.  So, in this first of two upcoming posts on the topic, I will address the issue of racism in the South.  (These are going to be longer posts unfortunately; as this is a knotty subject).

Let me start off by saying that there is no doubt in my mind that the South, including the Panhandle, is more racist than any other part of the country, and that it has a long history of racism.  Also, I cannot speak for the other contributors, but personally, I don’t buy arguments trying to limit the egregiousness of Southern slavery and racism by “putting it in a historical context.”  In my mind, the South was a driving force in the evil practice of slavery – and far more so than any other region of the country.  I also do not buy arguments about how “the civil war was really about economics” or other such nonsense – most of the confederacy supported slavery, was fighting to keep slavery, and one cannot separate this out from their other motives.

In short, neither I, nor this blog, are apologists for the South’s racism.  None of the authors here want any part of racism.  That being said, racism (like the history of racial struggles in the US) is complicated, and so I think it deserves attention beyond just the simple platitude that “the south is racist.”

Why is it more complicated than that?  Well, let’s turn to some numbers.

Click to read more…