Why can I write ‘South’ with some assurance that you’ll know I mean Richmond and don’t mean Phoenix? What is it that the South’s boundaries enclose? John Shelton Reed Read Quote
If you care to define the South as a poor, rural region with lousy race relations, that South survives only in geographical shreds and patches and most Southerners don’t live there any more. John Shelton Reed Read Quote
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. John Shelton Reed Read Quote
The South: What is this place? What’s different about it? Is it different anymore? Good questions. Old ones, too. People have been asking them for decades. Some of us even make our living by asking them, but we still don’t agree about the answers. John Shelton Reed Read Quote
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. John Shelton Reed Read Quote
But I still do believe that there are useful things to say about Elvis Presley, including what his own ordinariness as a poor Southerner says about 20th-century hero-making. John Shelton Reed Read Quote
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. John Shelton Reed Read Quote
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. John Shelton Reed Read Quote
The South is like my favorite pair of blue jeans. It’s shrunk some, faded a bit, got a few holes in it. it just might split at the seams. It doesn’t look much like it used to, but it’s more comfortable, and there’s probably a lot of wear left in it. John Shelton Reed Read Quote
Any Southern nationalist movement, especially one that wraps itself in the Confederate flag, is going to be viewed with suspicion, given the historical record. John Shelton Reed Read Quote
