Living in the South as a Northerner has taught me about the two regions and the strange divide between them.
First, I never called myself a “Northerner” before I came to Louisiana. In fact, I had never used the words “the North” or “Northerner” outside of the context of U.S. history lessons on the Civil War. Though I now use these terms as parts of my everyday vocabulary, I’m reminded of how unfamiliar they once were every time my friends and family from home laugh at me calling them Northerners.
My surprise at my new identity as a Northerner upon arriving in Louisiana likely stems from the fact that, prior to moving to the South, I thought very little about my own regional identity. While I loved the Northeast—its nature, its seasons, its cities, its people—I was thrilled to be coming to LSU and didn’t feel particularly tied to my home region. Living in a new part of the country was an exciting—though slightly intimidating—prospect.
Deciding to come to LSU made me better understand how the people around me viewed the South. Several people asked me, with genuine concern, why I was leaving the Northeast for a region of the country they regarded as an entirely different, and much worse, world. People unloaded every negative adjective they could think of to describe the South: backwards, uneducated, racist, ignorant.
Though I had heard similar negative sentiments about the South throughout my life, I was still surprised by this reaction and confused about where it came from. What I think many Northerners fail to realize is how harmful this regional divide is not only to Southerners, but to themselves.
The detriment of these attitudes to Southerners is more immediately obvious.
The apathy expressed by many Northerners, primarily those with platforms, when disaster strikes the South is deeply troubling. Many seem to write off red states as deserving of devastation simply based on where their electoral votes went in the last presidential election. It is unimaginable that people can look at the destruction caused in Louisiana over the past two hurricane seasons and say something like, “Well, maybe you shouldn’t have voted for such bad politicians.”
Though these are extreme examples that do not represent the majority of Northerners, they demonstrate a pervasive underlying division that infects much of Northern views of the South. Viewing millions of Americans as the “other” based simply on geographical location or the designation of their state as red has dehumanizing consequences in both rhetoric and government policy.
These Northern attitudes are not only harmful to the South but destructive to the North.
Many Northern politicians embrace the aesthetics of progressivism but not its values. They know the right words to use and will offer endless platitudes in support of social issues, but, at the end of the day, fight to maintain the status quo that launched them into power. These politicians believe that since they are not explicitly racist, their support of racist policies is acceptable, and since they talk so much about the little guy, that it’s all right for them to take money from massive corporate donors. And when their constituents dare to be upset or unsatisfied, they can point to the villainized picture of the South they painted themselves and say, “You should be grateful.”
In many ways, the South serves as a convenient scapegoat for Northern problems. Without it, Northern politicians may have to look inward and address the faults in front of them. Though the North and the South share common problems and many of their residents have common social and class interests, the two regions are often portrayed as irrevocably different.
That image of an unbreachable divide between the North and South only serves bad-faith leaders that would prefer Americans spend their time divided among one another than bound in solidarity toward common goals.
Claire Sullivan is a 19-year-old coastal environmental science sophomore from Southbury, CT.
