For decades, Southerners have been stereotyped as rednecks, and I’m tired of it. What makes it worse is that the media have done nothing to change these stereotypes.
Look at the movie “Forrest Gump” starring Tom Hanks. His character was an idiot. It was a great movie, but the South was portrayed as a place where everyone is a stupid racist.
“Midnight in the Garden Of Good and Evil” was another movie that did no justice to Southern culture. The people of Savannah were presented as snobby socialites who were uneducated and drunk. As a person whose entire family is from Savannah, I can tell you it is a very different place.
One of the country’s great columnists, Lewis Grizzard, is from the South. He wrote for the Chicago Tribune and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution before his death. He was raised in rural Georgia and attended the University of Georgia.
In one of his many columns, he wrote, “Much of it is the same old tripe, with the worn references to Bubba, the Southern accent, General Sherman and Petticoat Junction.”
The late Grizzard, like the rest of us Southerners,was tired of being ridiculed. The people of this country have the wrong idea about what the South is like and what it represents. So, I’ll fill everyone in.
The South is a place where manners still exist, where people say “Yes Ma’am” and “No Sir.” It’s a place where strangers say hello to each other as they pass on the sidewalk, where store clerks ask if they can help you.
The South is a place where family comes first. It’s a place where Thanksgiving, Christmas and birthdays are huge events, with lots of fried chicken. It’s a place of tradition, a place where Sunday dinners, church with the family and weekend fishing trips are important.
The South is a place where, during the fall, college football becomes a way of life. We tailgate, barbecue, drink and play football in the parking lot before the game.
We raise our children, not to be racist, but to be polite, productive members of society. We teach them morals and values. We teach them to be proud of their accents and way of speaking, to be proud of where they come from.
We do have places like Hahira, Georgia, where people are outnumbered by farm animals, and we have places like Purvis, Mississippi, where “hill” is pronounced “heel.” We also have places like Atlanta, where CNN is based, and Austin, Texas, where Michael Dell of Dell Computers lives and runs his corporation.
The South is a different type of place. But, it’s not what the media portrays it to be.
We have our small towns with two stop lights and our big cities with millions of people, just like everywhere else.
We don’t eat dirt, we don’t shoot trespassers, and we don’t drag ourselves out of the backwoods to go to work every morning. We do have paved roads, we do have indoor plumbing, and we do have literacy.
Our way of life is different down here, but we should not be ridiculed for it. Grizzard said it best, and spoke for Southerners everywhere when he wrote, “I’m an American by birth, but I’m Southern by the grace of God.”
