As a Category 4 hurricane barreled toward my hometown Wednesday afternoon and I anxiously refreshed my weather updates for the hundredth time that day, an interaction I found in the New York Times comments section struck me dumb.
As one commenter called for non-partisan empathy, another from Portland replied “I’m afraid I have run out of cheeks to turn.”
Was this anonymous person really suggesting that they couldn’t muster any empathy for the victims of a natural disaster? That they couldn’t turn the other cheek because the victims could possibly be conservatives? That my dad’s life, my home, my friends’ homes and countless other places suffused with 16 years of memories were all worthy of destruction simply because they happened to exist in a red district?
I was infuriated because this comment was addressing my life directly — but it was far from the first callous liberal comment about the South I’ve come across on the internet, and certainly far from the worst.
In May 2020, popular liberal personality Charlotte Clymer drew fire for retweeting “*sips coffee*” on an article about a spike in COVID-related deaths after Georgia’s rushed reopening. Just like the NYT comment, Clymer’s smugness transformed real deaths into a cruelly politicized “I told you so.”
The same “woke” liberals who criticize conservatives for not caring enough about refugees, single mothers or migrant workers will say “good riddance” when Southerners die. They’ll tweet “#BlackLivesMatter” but act like a hurricane in Louisiana is some sort of moralizing karmic lesson, conveniently forgetting Black lives account for 32.2% of our state’s population.
They reduce entire communities down to voting trends and stereotypes and will justify each Southern death — each suffocating patient or victim of disaster — as one less vote for Trump.
Their hypocrisy disregards the diversity of the South. It’s not just racist skinheads married to their first cousins; it’s Black families, Vietnam War-era refugees, Northern transplants, Central American immigrants and so, so much more.
Beyond the fact that even the most ardent Republican doesn’t deserve a drowning death, it’s worth noting that the political attitudes of the South are far more nuanced than is widely believed. According to the Pew Research Center, Louisiana identifies as 41% Republican and Republican-leaning — the same proportion as Colorado. Gerrymandering and voter suppression, more than the beliefs of the Southern constituency, have consolidated power in the hands of the Republican Party.
Most disturbingly, such flippant remarks from Northern liberals target the South’s most vulnerable populations. Low-income patients, who abound in southern states, are four times more likely to be hospitalized from COVID-19 than other patients; similarly, the worst victims of Hurricane Laura are the poor who were financially unable to evacuate their uninsured, flood-prone homes.
Affluent Northerners in liberal enclaves can easily vilify the South because to them we’re more symbols than we are humans. I hope that the next time someone from Portland dismisses my hometown as a lost cause, they realize they’ve probably interacted with more morally bankrupt individuals — the super PAC donors and the bought lawmakers, the avaricious CEOs and lobbyists — than nearly anyone in Lake Charles ever will.
Cécile Girard is a 20-year-old psychology junior from Lake Charles, LA.
