Living in Hellspace

A thing that bugs me: when I hear colleagues from other regions (generally northeast/coastal and urban) say something to the effect of how awful it must be to live in the conservative hellspace of the South.

Sometimes this gets said to me, in (I think) a gesture of sympathy. Oh, you poor thing, having to live in that intolerable place. This I can more easily accept with some grace.

More often, though, the sentiment gets said by people (often people from New York) recoiling in horror at the thought of living where I do. "The job market is bad enough," one ABD grad student told a panel through tears, "and it's worse when you're queer. Like, I cannot live in the South. Not in Trump's America. I just cannot."

And I think, What am I, chopped liver? 

I have to wonder what this person's image is of where I live and where they get that image. Best-case scenario, this person grew up in the South and knows whereof they speak. No doubt, some people have bad childhood experiences with southern culture, queer folk especially. For those kids who dream of getting away getting away getting away--more power to 'em. I can endorse, "I just cannot go back to the South."

But I sense that this suspicion comes mainly from folk who don't have much first-person experience in the South (or in the rural parts of their own areas, for that matter). They're reacting out of fear, having absorbed the worst news that media has to offer as representative of the whole.

My father, a native of Lafayette, jokes still that when he entered the service (Air Force, late sixties), his buddies would ask him constantly about alligators. "Yeah," he'd say, "most mornings my mom would have to get the broom and shoo one or two gators off the porch so my sister and I could go to school." Mind you, gators in the back yard are occasionally a thing in some parts of Louisiana, but they're not the norm.

Similarly, I imagine lots of northern people picture the Deep South as blanketed with guns, confederate flags, and burning crosses. Every third white person owns a KKK hood. Segregated water fountains lurk within every building. LGBTQ people are hunted like deer (queer deer).

Now, the South is no paradise for progressives. Louisiana just passed its own version of that Handmaid's Tale abortion law. We're number 2 in incarceration (disproportionately African-American). Our state support of education and health care is abysmal, and our health and education rankings reflect that.

But it's not literal hell. It's full of amazing, wonderful people--some of whom vote for policies and people I ardently oppose. People love this place--even progressives. Even some LGBTQ people. Even people of color. Even people who are all three and more!

And even if I don't love it wholeheartedly 100% of the time, when I hear someone dismiss the South as radioactively off-limits to reasonable, right-thinking folk, I feel angry, hurt, and confused. Like I'm less of a person--less of a good and thoughtful person, at least--for living where I do. Or like I'm preemptively untrustworthy due to contamination from the Southern-ness. Or that I live in an entirely different world from this person who can dismiss a whole segment of the nation.

I know there's more generous readings of such sentiments by people against the South. But it helps me to get the grump out before I shift into chary spirits.

More tomorrow,

JF