Ever wonder what the Panhandle looks like? Well why not take a quick spin through Baker, FL — home of my grandparents Sylvia and Jesse Lundy?
Click on each picture below to see some interesting insights about each picture.
The recent post on obesity in the South seems to have sparked an interest in exactly why Southerners are more obese. In particular, the suggestive map showing that Southerners don’t exercise as much as the rest of the country caught people’s attention.
So digging deeper then, what might be some of the general causes for Southerners’ obesity?
Well, first lets start off by saying that Brian’s comment to the first post is correct: there has to be something explaining this beyond any over-simplified cultural argument. It seems foolish to argue that Southerners have a peculiar cultural trait where they celebrate poor health and obesity. Also, while the cultural love of fried foods has to be part of the story, this can’t be the end of the story. Even with poor education, most people at least know that fried foods aren’t good for you. So the answer to higher obesity can’t just simply be that Southerners choose to hurt themselves more than the rest of the country.
Looking beyond over-simplified theories, there are a number of other possible causes:
A "typical" gun owner
After Obama won the election, gun sales increased as much as 50%. Many people who I discussed this with live in Chicago, where handguns are banned, and where experience shooting a gun is in short supply. When it came out that I grew up shooting guns (and quite a good shot, might I add), I immediately heard people say “Of course you’ve shot a gun, everyone in the South owns a gun.”
Ah, how I love a testable thesis! 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.
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