It's not your Mama's South any more

Is the South the only region that is never allowed to change?

One might think so after the avalanche of commentary since last November's elections, suggesting the South is a marginalized, conservative bastion, stuck in the past and out of step with the nation's political culture.

In a piece in yesterday's St. Petersburg Times, writer and NPR commentator Diane Roberts -- whose Florida roots go back eight generations -- looks at our nation's out-dated views of the South and how this skews our understanding of the region's changing politics.

Roberts' piece -- which is kind enough to extensively quote me and Facing South -- takes special aim at those who, whenever presented with evidence of the changing South, write off such instances  as "non-Southern."

For example, when President Obama won the states of Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, the "forget the South" crowd quickly changed the conversation by arguing these weren't really the South:

The "Southern" parts of the South seem to be shrinking, at least tothose who define "Southern" as white right-wingers who say "y'all."Virginia isn't Southern because of all those D.C. suburbs full oftransplants who don't hunt, don't eat grits and associate Manassas witha mall rather than a Civil War battle [...]

NorthCarolina isn't Southern because it's attracting Midwestern retirees,Latinos and tech types. Plus, there's the Research Triangle, theconstellation of great universities, labs and libraries so despised bySen. Jesse Helms. Real Southerners don't cotton to book learning.

Asfor Florida, it's full of Yankees, Spanish speakers and refugees fromthe snow-shoveling states ... Never mind that in social attitudes, race relations,spending on education, etc., Florida's peer states are not New York orCalifornia, but Alabama and Louisiana. Never mind that Florida was thethird state to secede from the union in 1861.

At this rate, theSouth could soon consist only of Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee andSouth Carolina -- minus Huntsville (too many rocket scientists), Memphis(too many transplants), Columbia (too many professors). Or maybe weneed to redefine "Southern."

But to redefine the South would be to admit that the region is changing and that our old stereotypes might not reflect today's realities. And if there's one place where the perceptions and prejudices of our nation's pundits are hard-frozen in time, it's the South, where change by definition appears to be considered "un-Southern."

As Roberts points out, the idea that every person who moves to the South from Detroit or Mexico City is somehow making the region less Southern is an exact mirror image of racists who long equated a Southerner with someone who was white:

For a long time (and still for some TV political pundits), "Southern"meant white. It often also meant socially conservative evangelicalChristians who love, as Rush Limbaugh said, "babies, guns and Jesus."Certainly there are still plenty of them underfoot: Florida's anti-gaymarriage amendment passed last November, after all. But what aboutAfrican-American Southerners, Cuban-American Southerners,Asian-American Southerners, gay and lesbian Southerners, SouthernGreens, Southern feminists, Southern Jews, Southern Muslims?

One doesn't have to go far to see this kind of prejudice in action: New York Times reporter Adam Nossiter didn't quote one single non-white Southerner in his seminal post-election piece dismissing the South's political relevance.

And that doesn't even include generational differences among Southern whites -- like the 56% of white youth in North Carolina that voted for Obama.

In reality, the South -- like any other part of the country -- has always been a dynamic, shifting and often conflicting blend of people and cultures. This seems to be lost on people like Tom Schaller -- the dean of the "write off the South" movement -- who in Roberts' piece is quoted as saying that the South "is losing its monolithic identity and the degree to which it does so is the degree to which it regains its political clout."

But of course, the South has never had a "monolithic identity." That's the language of Old South apologists who yearned to project an image of a South that was fixed, placid -- and importantly, white-controlled. The real South never lined up with that mythic imagery: it has always been a region of dramatic change and bitter conflict, from Civil Wars to farmer revolts, from labor uprisings to freedom movements.

The rapid changes now underway in the South -- seismic demographic, political, economic and cultural shifts -- are the latest chapter in this ongoing story of change. As I point out in Roberts' piece:

The South looks to the past, yes, but perhaps not as much as before. "To deny this," says Kromm, "is to say that the South is forever mired in history. But the South is dynamic." [...]

Or it may bethat Virginia, North Carolina and Florida aren't Southern aberrationsbut the beginning of a new New South -- that New South we've beenpromising ourselves since 1865. Kromm says, "There will be hiccups,there will be backsliding. The South will not be on a straight line upto enlightenment. But the overall trend is change. We are changing."