kojikun wrote:characterizing Southerners as grit-eating, inbred morons. I do NOT eat grits!)
::chortle:: Thats so great. XD
BTW, you cant be racist towards a southerner, unless youre claiming that by having a southern accent you are of a different race then northerners.
You're right.
I should have been clearer. I was thinking of the generalizations people often make of people in a certain area, but I have found that in the case of the Southern US, that often takes the form of racism. Take, for example, all of these myths:
guys like "Billy Joe Bob" like to fuck animals, and he married his little sister after his big sister asked for a divorce;
in secluded areas, there a lots of guys running after Ned Beatty types yelling, "Squeal like a pig!";
that we're all dressing up in sheets on Saturday nights, burning crosses, and raising hell about the evils of non-white people, occassionally shouting seig heil, white power!, or some other such inspired maxim;
that we all like to fire rifles in the air and yell YEEHAW!, etc.
On a certain level, you could really just call it regionalism
But I have heard that spun into some pretty mean racial stuff when people tack on things like how pale these mountain boys are, or particularly when someone assumes Southern somehow correlates to Klan membership.
The main problem is that, with all of the cases listed above, these myths are only referring to
white Southerners. I've never known black people to join the KKK (which is bigger in the South than other areas of the States), I've never heard jokes about black people inbreeding simply because they lived in a given area, or anyone other than whites being regarded as backward mountain boys, and at least for the most part, I don't hear people joking about black people having compound names like "Jane Dawn Crystal Jabberlicker." And I don't hear people laughing at non-whites who like to go hunting as a rule either.
If these things were color-inclusive, they wouldn't be racist...they'd just be some dumb jokes about Southerners. But they single out whites, at least in
most cases, as the dummies fucking farm animals and family members prior to the weekend Klan Ho-Down.
See what I mean? It's difficult to just call it flat-out racism because it doesn't include
all white people, but it is a hateful sort of thing that's readily propagated through all forms of media. Hell, I remember when ENT debuted, the first negative thing I read about it was "Trip Tucker's accent makes him sound so stupid."
I guess Faulkner was a dumb fuck too
Thats why I hate it when people say that antisemitism is racism, because they only further the belief that semites (or indians, arabs, etc) are a different race. There are THREE races, characterised by bone structure and genetic diversity, here (listed in order of decreasing genetic diversity):
African/Black/Negroid, Asian/Mongoloid (including native americans, and polynesians), Caucasoid (including white/italic europeans, semites [hebrews and arabs, etc], Indians, and also Aborigines in Australia).
[/qutoe]
Yes. As I just did, it's really just a descriptor to use in lieu of something goofy-sounding like "regionalist," and to avoid going into the litany you see above
There is also the predivergent group (or possibly postdivergent remixture, but this is unlikely) known as the Khoisan, or by the older name Hottentot. They possess features of all three races and cannot be classified as any one race.
Interesting.
Oh, btw, grits are okay. I don't have grits often, maybe twice a year with an old-style breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and pancakes.
But I swear, every time someone in my family travels outside the South--and truth be told, I
don't think have that bad of an accent...ask Connor--some asshole starts in about eating fucking grits. I don't go to Minneapolis and dog some "yankee" about how I bet he likes bratwurst. I don't pick on my best friend's grandparents in Wisconsin about liking Swiss cheese, either...so I don't want folks doggin' us "rebels" about eating grits or drinking iced tea. All are silly generalizations and not even funny anymore.