in defense of the American South
When I went to teacher orientation in Baltimore, it was full of Southerners. We came from Tennessee, Mississippi, South Carolina and Florida. It was nice to see one another and press people on exactly what county someone's from because you actually know it. It was cathartic to talk about what dehumanizing salary scale or new law or state-mandated curriculum we dealt with, to talk about straws on the backs of camels. Everyone had their own personal straws.
Our district is well paid, in a blue state, and has a strong union. Even good things take adjusting to, and as I went through orientation I kept thinking I misheard things. 4 classes maximum a day? My facilitators for the orientation took my surprise in the two ways I have found that people treat ex-Southerners up here: actual compassion or a smug, selfish, "welcome to actual civilization" attitude. I still encounter that last one when I tell people I moved here from Florida. It's an easy, low-hanging joke of a place to some. Yes, it was crazy down there. And yes, it was beautiful. I loved my home and my neighbors. My family immigrated to the region and never left. I have lived in three different states, cities, college towns, by springs and the ocean. I love the South. I did not want to leave until I was pushed out. And my heart is still cracked.
I went on a two-week trip to those three states last month. I flipped past hundreds of contemporary Christian and right-wing talk radio stations on my AM dial, looking for independent college radio stations (like this one in Greensboro, NC. I took back roads with dirt roads on every side, each with a sign pointed to a Primitive Baptist or AME Church. I walked around South Carolina and found some very neat headstones I wrote about here.
I went into a local grocery in rural Florida and saw green peanuts up front - these are the ones you boil fresh with salt alone, not the dry ones that come out slimy and purple in gas stations and roadside stands with "cajun" seasoning. An employee looked me up and down and said they had bushels in the back. My heart fluttered - even after a year in a "yankee" city I still culturally pass as someone trying to boil a bushel of green peanuts. If I could have fit them in my host's fridge, I would have.
I listened to my nibling talk about wanting to work for the EPA, despite their fairly conservative parents (who I can have good faith conversations about policy with). My parents' generation all lamented the insanity of the current administration, and my dad told me he had registered as a Democrat and refused to fly the American flag because it "meant something else now." A friend told me how she went to Minnesota for trainings in organizing and had managed to get her mom to help her film ICE stops and get footage to victim's families.
I went to art shows. People were playing music. A friend set up a studio in his house and hung taxidermy on his wall. His fridge is a mix of notes from family and friends in Arabic and a shrine to his love of being both Southern and Syrian.
I went to a college town, worried I would see the kind of learned helplessness that state's administration was really trying to hammer in. I didn't. My old non-profit is clicking along okay, and hiring. The people who could be pushed out, perhaps people like me, were pushed out, and the people who stayed were not going to budge an inch out of a mixture of spite and love for place.
I have attended a regional burn in Georgia off and on for a decade. It's an affirming experience even just to have to go by the car lot, and see how many of those giant trucks with Georgia tags are driven by fire-spinning circus girls with horses or contractors witch passion projects of welding giant geodesic domes. I love the late nights, running our Discworld-themed camp's bar full of Tennessee accents and fake fur and musings on Marx and Batman Forever. Southern freaks are my people.
I had some dark moments on this trip - seeing openly racist behavior from white people feels wild after living in a Black-majority city for a year. I went out for dinner at a club I grew up in, and it felt like White Lotus. Where all the women could be Victoria Ratliff(still one of my favorite Parker Posey characters, up there with her role in Best in Show) and the eyebrows were all frozen and nobody in the whole building had ever lived in another town.
Getting people organized is harder there than in Maryland. I think it has to do with the much earlier destruction of union culture. Organizing requires dealing with annoying people, and union members know and expect that. I think that friction disappeared so long ago that people just don't know how to tolerate one another in the process of achieving a goal. It's a path the rest of the world is sliding towards, they're just further down the slope. People don't know what winning feels like, so it feels impossible.
It's so easy for people to sit smugly online in Oregon or New York and type that all the "good people" just need to leave the South already to "punish" the "bad people". As if we don't actually love our communities and want to change them. As if we aren't deeply interwoven into families and faith communities and art scenes. As if we aren't in love with the springs and the alligators and the tillandsias hanging on pine branches over the black rivers. As if people can just be uprooted from place to allow bigots to run rampant and continue to harm the most vulnerable among us.
And those bigots are not always strangers. Sometimes they are people who will actually listen to what we have to say, even. (I am cis and have a lot of privilege, so yes, I engage them and push them and plant little seeds for them to see their own cognitive dissonance). The rest of the country has plenty of bigots, too. The people of the South who are doing work to change things do not need to be punched down on by internet strangers for having hope in broken places.