So recently, I have become addicted to the entire “Life Series” by David Attenborough (e.g. The Life of Birds, The Life of Mammals, The Living Planet, Planet Earth, etc.).  While watching this whole series I’ve had many revelations about the nature of life on Earth (this is truly a transformational experience for those who take the long journey of watching the whole series).  One such thought, however, struck me when considering mammals…

Human Evolution

It is generally believed that mammals use 80-90% of the food they eat in maintaining their body temperature.  This is indeed a costly adaptation, but one which makes us (and birds) always ready to get our bodies moving when danger, or mates, or food comes around.  However, I thought to myself, what effect must air conditioning have on mammals?  Or, more importantly, could the greater prevalence of air conditioning in the South, be making Southerners especially fat?

Well, a little digging on the internet shows that I’m not the first first person to think of this.  Researchers at the University of Alabama Birmingham have considered the same possibility.  They do not offer much in the way of evidence, beyond the suggestive comment that the South has seen both the highest rise in air-conditioned homes and also in obesity rates.  But given how much of our energy is expended in maintaining our temperature, it seems likely that the temperateness of Southern homes and buildings must be playing some part in their not burning as much fat.

Interestingly, they also suggest another alternative factor which may be influencing Southerners’ obesity: the decrease in smoking rates (because people coming off of smoking often want to compensate for the loss of stimulation by eating food).  With higher rates of smoking in the South, it wouldn’t be surprising if a greater number of people coming off of smoking would find comfort in food.  This would probably still hold, even though rates of smoking have decreased less in the South than elsewhere; because of the much greater number of total smokers living in the South.

So a good friend sent me a post from The Economist about an interesting (non)controversy in the upcoming Obama presidency.  Apparently, there has been some murmuring that Obama is neglecting Southerners in his cabinet appointments.  This (supposedly) is surprising, giving a several-decades-long trend for Southerners to be disproportionately represented in Presidential and Congressional politics.

Capitol Building

Now, in terms of staking a claim on this debate, I completely agree with the short piece from The Economist.  People are neglecting a lot of Obama appointments that are clearly southerners.  So really, from the perspective of the substantive debate raised (i.e. “Is Obama neglecting southerners?”), I think the answer is simple: he isn’t neglecting southerners.  However, what this “debate” does raise are a couple of other interesting questions:

1) Why are some people so quick to discuss the decline of the South in politics?

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Most US regions have historic racial divides; but few have been as staunch as the political and economic system that began in the 17th-century South (at least if Lawrence’s excellent installment on early Southern history is to be believed). This division between black and white southerners constitutes a central axis in the history of the South, and has defined most the region’s important historical events.

Mmmmmm.... cultural influence....

But after surviving abolition, emancipation, and Civil Rights, a new development might finally undermine this old Southern dichotomy for good: immigration. While most Americans think immigration is isolated to places like New York, California, Texas, or South Florida; few recognize that a new wave of immigration is shifting away from these traditional gateways into more unlikely places.

Now it’s important to not overstate the issue – Mississippi is not a “majority-minority state,” like California – yet, even on a smaller scale, immigration is having a noticeable impact on some places in the South. Consider North Carolina. Between 1990 and 2000 the state experienced 274% growth in the percent of the population that was foreign-born. Below, you can see the growth in all state’s whose foreign-born pop.’s doubled between 1990 and 2000.

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I’ve been doing some recreational reading here while visiting family in Florida (by the way – Lord I had forgotten how much happiness the Sun brings me).  Right now I’ve been reading The American South in the Twentieth Century and I came across a passage worth sharing.  I’m not sure how much I would agree with the rest of John Shelton Reed’s work (this is just a short anthology piece); but I think this passage sums up the spirit of what we’ve found at the Guide:

To allow that southern culture has changed, is changing, does not mean that it is disappearing as a variant on the American norm (whatever that might be).  It is difficult to summarize the facts of southern cultural difference, however, because nearly every logical possibility of what could be happening is happening.

For example, most of the recent economic and demographic change in the South has been a matter of the South’s converging on nonsouthern patterns (and the same could be said, in general, about changes in race relations), so those “southern” characteristics that were, in fact, the characteristics of poor, rural, poorly educated folks are plainly on the wane.  But other longstanding cultural differences are hanging in there.  For instance, attitudes toward the role of women have been changing everywhere, but the South remains relatively conservative on this score.

Some regional differences are getting larger: the South is more Baptist now than it was a century ago, for instance; regional differences in churchgoing are larger than they used to be; southerners are now more economically conservative than they were a generation ago.  And they’re more likely to say “fixing to” and “might could.”

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I came across an article recently, in Journal of Forestry , that presented an interesting puzzle: in some places in the South, African Americans can be up to 50% of the population living near a national park (e.g. Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest); however, their usage rates for these parks is just ~1%.

White People Enjoying Sequoia National Park

Making this story more complicated is that another minority group, Hispanic Americans, use the national park system far more frequently.  In many respects, Hispanic Americans share commonalities with African Americans (both have roughly similar income and education levels, both are minorities, both have apparently been shown to use public park lands in similar ways, etc.) — yet the two groups have markedly different usage rates for national parks.

In areas where Hispanic Americans live close to parks, they show up at these parks in percentages that reflect their share of the local population.  However, as discussed above, this is not true of African Americans.

So why don’t black Southerners use the parks they live near?

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In case you’re wondering, this post has nothing to do with the vaguely racist Disney movie featuring “Uncle Remus” singing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”  Rather it’s a collection of Jeff’s favorite southern songs.

Uncle Remus

Although the three of us have tried to remove a lot of our Southern background; nothing seems to stick with a person like the music from whence they hail.  And maybe that’s a good thing in this case; seeing as how most of the country’s great music ultimately came from the South. (Although truthfully, so does some of the country’s worst music.  Still, what kind of music does the the North got? Punk? How about the West?  Cowboy songs? It’s no contest, really.)

Anyway, without further ado — here is my top 5.

This is going to be hard given how many southern songs I like.  Still, here’s a representative sample:

1) Johnny Cash – Folsom Prison Blues

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2) The Freedom Singers – This Little Light of Mine

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3) Jerry Lee Lewis – Honky Tonk Rock’n'roll Piano Man

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4) Fats Domino – Jambalaya

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5) Allison Krauss – Oh Atlanta

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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.

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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?

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.

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When I meet new people here in Chicago where I live, I often feel like I’m in an AA meeting: “Hi. My name is Brian, and I’m a Panhandler. I’ve been southern for 25 years now.” As the supporting yet slightly pitying looks dart back and forth and the polite applause dies down, I have to ask myself, “Will I ever NOT be a southerner?”

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t want to be southern. I ask this question as a start to understanding what it means to be southern, what other people seem to know about me when they divine that I’m from the Panhandle of Florida and NOT from Miami, and to discover what it is that is perceived to be so different about the South compared to the rest of the country. 

Thus The Panhandler’s Guide. Through this blog my two partners in intellectual me-search and I will try to expose what it means to be from, and to be in, the Panhandle and the South. We want to tackle this challenge through a mixture of empirical data and good old fashioned unsubstantiated anecdotes from our own lives to help get that “rich description” anthropologists are always going on about. 

You may at this point be wondering about my credentials. Am I the quintessential image of a grits eating, pick-up truck driving, overalls wearing, church going, tobacco picking, banjo playing good old boy? Well, no. But I’m not the opposite, either. In the South I’m not quite Southern enough, but in the rest of the country I’m enough Southern to be typecast as such.

I was born in the Florida Panhandle. My parents moved out of Miami in the late 1970s as refugees from the race riots (like the Arthur McDuffie Riots) towards a more picturesque and simple life, in the fashion of “The Waltons” or “Little House on the Prairie.” They stopped in Tallahassee for a few years before purchasing land in the small town of Live Oak in Suwannee County. In 1980, Suwannee county had 22,287 residents (we’re in the data section now, by the way) and ranked as 46 out of 67 counties by population – meaning 21 counties had even fewer residents. This, dear reader, is a rural area: 33 people per square mile, which is 36 times less dense than Miami and 386 times less dense than the city of Chicago.

My mother was a nurse, and my father began as a school teacher and then ventured into running a series of his own businesses beginning with weaning calves and selling them as mature cows, and then operated a mobile sawmill (jobs which, by the way, were wildly unpleasant for me at the time but great icebreaking stories now). Both enterprises failed to gain fiscal traction, and so we relied almost exclusively on a nurse’s salary until I was finishing high-school, remaining in the mobile home that was originally meant to be temporary. I mention this to allow the reader to place me in class terms: I, unlike seemingly every undecided voter in America, could only aspire to be middle class, and this economic identity colors my view of the world as I work on my Ph.D. at the upper-class private University of Chicago.

And, for any readers who were misled by the title of this blog, the focus of this site is the Florida Panhandle and is about neither the culinary instrument nor destitute beggars.

Not yet, anyway.