The topic of this post is PRIVILEGE

[handprinted]

If the word "privilege" scares you, it might be best if you skip this.

I came across a really interesting post on Feministe this evening that discusses regionalism (preconceptions based on region) and confronting one's own biases and prejudices. Reading the comments, particularly those by readers who admitted their own transphobia, made me think

Comments

[astaria51]

I think this is super interesting. Very few people think about regionalism - and the way it ties into classism and, in some cases, racism - but it is a big issue in our country.

Jessi can pass for non-Southern, too, although the more outside the South she gets the more she tends to bring up the fact that she's from the Atlanta area (even though she prefers cold weather). For that matter, most of the people I've met from Georgia don't have noticable Southern accents, and I think that's representative of the reputation that the South has in our country.

Similarly, my mother was taught as a young girl to hide her New York accent (which now reveals itself only when she's talking to other family members from NYC, much like the way Jessi's only comes out with long exposure to other family from the area or when she's VERY upset/tired), because people would think badly of her.

I think this has to do with the class status of the people living in these areas, just as much or more than it does the politics of the area. Why else hide a Brooklyn/Bronx, certain kinds of Boston, or Chicago, accent - accents picked up primarily in working class areas of those cities? All of those are liberal areas, but because of their class status and diverse population, they're looked down upon, and all of those accents are often traded in for the news-anchor, mid-Atlantic sound.

It's interesting to think about. Tangent: I hate the dying out of dialects in this country. It makes me think of the way Scots was forbidden to be spoken in Scotland (similarly to Irish Gaelic in Ireland, and Welsh in Wales) during most of the last century. It bugs me the way certain grammars are defined as "correct" and others as "illegitimate".

But the way we're headed, someday everyone's going to talk exactly the same. And no one's will get to have any of those lovely shocking experiences of relocating to a different state and, for example, going downstairs to a hotel breakfast buffet that consisted mostly of eggs, grits, sausage gravy, biscuits and bacon, being totally baffled and eating grits with maple syrup because I didn't get it; or having the whole world be giant, thousand-person Baptist and non-denominational churches ("non-denominational? ...but that's not possible!") with not a Catholic or Jew in sight; or having friends fight over whether chili should be eaten over spaghetti or not or whether you call soda "coke" or "pop" or "soda".

And that'll just be sad.

[handprinted]

I find it interesting that most of the people you've met from Georgia don't have noticeable Southern accents. When I'm at home, I tend to emphasize my own accent a little more when I'm interacting with people out in public based on the idea that people like other people who are similar to themselves. I know I tend to find it a little jarring when I interact with someone who doesn't have an accent.

I think you're right, that regionalism certainly ties in with classism and racism. So many intersections; so many traffic metaphors.