Words matter. These are the best John Shelton Reed Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Barbecue is the third rail of North Carolina politics.
I don’t think massification and globalization and all those other ‘izations’ are necessarily hostile to regionalism.
I do believe states’ rights was a sound doctrine that got hijacked by some unsavory customers for a while – like, 150 years or so. I’m professionally obliged to believe that knowledge is better than ignorance, but some kinds of forgetting are OK with me.
I think there’s a suspicion in the South of people putting on airs. You see it in most successful Southern politicians, but you also see it in someone like Richard Petty, who may be a multimillionaire stock car driver, but he’s also beloved because he has a nice self-deprecatory way about him.
Southerners are also like ethnic groups in that they have a sense of group identity.
Country music historically has been sort of middle-aged people’s music.
Maybe we’ve been brainwashed by 130 years of Yankee history, but Southern identity now has more to do with food, accents, manners, music than the Confederate past. It’s something that’s open to both races, a variety of ethnic groups and people who move here.
The nature of the South is changing faster than the stereotypes are. Much of the South now looks like San Jose. Is it still southern?
Any Southern nationalist movement, especially one that wraps itself in the Confederate flag, is going to be viewed with suspicion, given the historical record.
Southern barbecue is the closest thing we have in the U.S. to Europe’s wines or cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes.
Every Southerner, I think, knows people like Bill Clinton, maybe not quite as smart and maybe not quite as liberal, but kind of a glad-handing, country-club yuppie Southerner. The problem is we don’t have labels for middle-class Southerners.
I can see why many Southerners, black ones in particular, don’t like the implication that Southernness and the Confederate heritage are one and the same, because they’re not. On the other hand, there are people who want to extirpate that completely and want folks to spit on the graves of their ancestors.
I’ve occasionally wished I had Caller ID. Even telemarketers, I hate to hang up on them. I try to explain I’m not interested, but they have all these canned responses so I end up having to hang up on them anyway.
Southerners smile more than other Americans.
We could say that people who eat grits, listen to country music, follow stock-car racing, support corporal punishment in the schools, hunt ‘possum, go to Baptist churches and prefer bourbon to Scotch are likely to be Southerners.
