What’s Wrong With Being From the South? Just Ask an Academic in the North

Chronicle illustration by Scott Seymour, original image from Alamy

When I arrived at the University of North Carolina as an undergraduate in 2004, I had a meeting with a professor who soon asked where in the state I had grown up. I remember the moment distinctly because she was surprised that someone like me — gay, dressed entirely in pastels and white linen — came from such a place. My county had a particularly terrible reputation thanks to a billboard on U.S. 70 welcoming drivers to the home of the Ku Klux Klan. The billboard was unavoidable for families driving east to the beach, and it remained in place into the late 1970s.

Considering this reputation, my professor’s first question was, “How did you escape?”

The word “escape” has stuck with me. She meant no harm, of course (and was one of my favorite professors), but it was my first of now countless experiences with the stereotypes applied to my place of birth. At Chapel Hill, and to an even greater extent later at Harvard, I heard that I must be one of the “good ones” who had escaped a place known for racism, ignorance, homophobia, bigotry, sexism, and any other social ill that comes to mind. In the well-educated Northern imagination, the rural South is a vast, forbidding wasteland of poverty, prejudice, and despair.

That kind of crass regionalism creates well-earned suspicion of ivory-tower elites. The stereotyping works in both directions. Each sustains the other, leading to electoral results that help neither the professors up north nor the pig farmers where I grew up. Regionalism creates openings for populists to exploit and worsen these divides. These attitudes pit rural against urban, college-educated against non-college-educated. If those of us in academe are truly so smart, we ought to be the ones taking the first step toward bridging this divide.

Unfortunately, the opposite is occurring. In the age of Trump, anti-Southern attitudes seem to have crystallized and worsened throughout higher education. Any Trump-voting area, in fact, seems to be fair game for ridicule. These attitudes undercut the efforts of those seeking to advance the rights of marginalized groups in regions of the country where evidence-based scholarship might be needed the most.

Of course, critical stereotypes of Southerners are (and always have been) part of the Northern DNA. We Southerners often do ourselves no favors in this regard by supporting bills promoting discrimination against LGBTQ people, or punishing corporations for withdrawing their support for the National Rifle Association. Yet these are typically the stories that make national headlines, stories that I find eagerly discussed on campus as they confirm existing biases. In history-of-education courses, we learn that the movement for public primary education did not take root in the South until after the Civil War. It took private funding from Northern philanthropists to create the first schools for African-Americans in the South.

These are facts, histories that bear repeating. But they also oversimplify the South as hopelessly mired in the past, a stereotype now aggravated by the election of Trump, the avatar of white resentment against social change. The default stance in today’s academy is to conflate a whole host of issues — white resentment, gun worship, religious fundamentalism, racism — and apply that uniformly to millions of people. It is far easier to blame our current situation on faceless, ignorant masses elsewhere than to consider how often we in academe practice what we claim to abhor — gross generalizations, oversimplification, and evidence-free claims — against broad swaths of the country.

It is strange to me that so many academics cannot see when they show prejudice against the rural, the religious, and the less formally educated. We are trained to recognize systematic bias in terms of race and gender — but we remain too often unaware of our geographic prejudices. These prejudices are casual and rampant, and undercut the credibility of much good work. Too often I find myself in academic settings where the white working-class phenomenon — the Trump-voter stereotype — is taken as fact at the expense of more evidence-based conversations about the suburban affluent, where many academics grew up and Trump voters are also concentrated. They’d rather not think about the Trump voters in their own backyard.

Intellectual laziness is on the rise with disturbing results. After the mass shooting in Las Vegas, I spoke with a student who was bothered that she felt no sympathy at first for the victims. As we talked, she began to realize the rash of assumptions she had made about them: If they were attending a country-music concert, they must have voted for Trump, which meant they loved guns and thus deserved death. It’s an extreme example of our discourse of dehumanization — a vivid one in my memory. But it isn’t rare for me to hear similar assumptions expressed by students or faculty members, often without the critical self-reflection.

To be a rural Southerner at a Northern university is to be in a state of constant contradiction. Some of us left the South because we are gay, further contributing to the perception of an entire region as virulently homophobic. Yet this tension makes us well positioned to ask how academe might better speak to all regions of the country. It’s a question that all academics — not only Southerners in the North — should be asking.

Adam Kirk Edgerton is a Ph.D. student in education policy in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.