urbanoia, horror movies, pork intestines, cultural scapegoats

[kaigou]

I've been sitting on this rant for awhile, but what-the-hell, I'm going to post. If you like to play the oppression olympics, don't read this. If you react favorably to the following statement: "immigrants have it the absolute worst in the US," then you probably won't want to read this, but maybe you should anyway. Just consider it walking the length of this post in my shoes, with citations.

Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1992.

One of Clover's chapters, Getting Even, discusses a concept she calls "urbanoia". She defines it loosely as the (horrorific/horror) archetype of the civilized city-dweller's feelings against/about the uncivilized (savage, primitive) country-dweller.

An enormous proportion of horror takes as its starting point the visit or move of (sub)urban people to the country. (The eternally popular haunted house story is typically set, if not in the country, then at the edge of town, and summer camps set in deep forests are a favorite setting of slasher films. ...) ...That situation, of course, rests squarely on what may be a universal archetype [in which the non-city] is a place where the rules of civilization do not obtain. People from the city are people like us. People from the country (as I shall hereafter refer to those people horror construes as the threatening rural Other) are people not like us.

She gives several examples of just how the rural Other is different: adult males with no immediate family connections, or extreme patriarchal rulership (with the occasional extreme matriarchal rulership), and abnormalities like "psychosexually deformed children", with "degenerate specimens [as] the material expression of family wrongness..."

She goes on to summarize the basic appearance of the rural Other, in terms of the standard elements of the genre convention:

...country people live beyond the reaches of social law. They do not observe the civilized rules of hygiene or personal habit. If city men are either clean-shaven or wear stylish beards... country men sport stubble. Likewise teeth; the country is a world beyond denistry. The typical country rapist is a toothless or rotten-toothed single man with a four-day growth. ... As with hygiene, so with manners. Country people snort when they breathe, snore when they sleep, talk with mouths full, drool when they eat. The hill people of The Hills Have Eyes do not even know how to use knives and forks. Country people, in short, are surly, dirty (their fingernails in particular are ragged and grimy), and slow ("This ain't the big city, you know, things take time," a local handyman drawls to our city heroine in The Nesting, and the city invaders of Pumpkinhead refer to the locals as "vegetables"). What is threatening about these little uncivilities is the larger uncivility of which they are surface symptoms. In horror, the man who does not take care of his teeth is obviously a man who can, and by the end of the movie will, plunder, rape, murder, beat his wife and children, kill within his kin, commit incest, and/or eat human flesh... No wonder, given their marginal humanity, country people are often nameless or known by cognomina only.

CP brought this book to my attention after I spent one dinner ranting -- and I don't mean the usual annoyed complaint-airing, I mean truly angry ranting... about a map. There are weeks where I should know better than to follow links, but I was curious, and that right there should've been a sign, but still: a map that assigns movies to states based on "one movie set there that seemed reasonably typical". (h/t: wordweaverlynn)

Some of them are relatively obvious: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Raising Arizona. Some of them require you be aware the filmmakers would be State Cultural Treasures (if there were such a thing): Maryland has Jon Waters (Pink Flamingos), Rhode Island has the Farrelly Brothers (There's Something About Mary), New Jersey has Kevin Smith (Clerks). Others have region as distinctive aspects of the film, like The Wizard of Oz for Kansas, Dances with Wolves for South Dakota, and A River Runs Through It (in which Montana should've gotten top billing, if you ask me, for providing such backdrops). A few make no sense to me at all, like Glory for South Carolina, a film that's about the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. So a big battle takes place outside Charleston... it strikes me as odd that a film "reasonably typical" about South Carolina would star, well, yankees. But anyway.

I didn't expect that many surprises, and you probably won't see too many yourself, if you go look at the map. While you're there, take a look at the state that's down near the bottom-right, in orange. Go ahead, I'll wait, just making conversation over here while you go see.

Shouldn't be a surprise, right? I mean, Gone with the Wind is the obvious shoo-in for "reasonably typical" -- it's certainly the one that's the best known. Yeah, it's a flawed movie based on a flawed book, even if it did provide the vehicle for the first black woman to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. But if we're talking about cultural impact or regional association, it's hard to beat that one. If more recent is necessary, then maybe Driving Miss Daisy or Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which aren't perfect either, but are at least a tiny bit less romanticized than Gone with the Wind.

Except -- are you back yet? -- none of the above.

Instead, the map-makers listed another movie.

Deliverance.

I really shouldn't have been surprised, y'know? I should be used to this, but instead, all I could muster were two words. Fuck. You.

How much longer, I ranted at CP, do I have to go through this shit? I didn't grow up with this treatment from other people -- not until moving to the DC area, that is -- but when I moved to New England in my mid-twenties, I really got it in spades. I was raised to be proud of my Southern heritage, which is as flawed as anyone's and has a long way to go, but the bad parts aren't reason enough to throw out the baby with all the cultural bathwater. I had a soft Georgia accent tinged with six or seven years of living in rural mid-Virginia, and my partner was from Mississippi.

Once, we visited NYC friends, who walked us through Manhattan (and I'll ignore the little jibes that made it sound like they thought we still didn't have running water south of the Mason-Dixon line). The real kick in the teeth was walking past a new restaurant -- very hip, at the time -- where people were lined up. It was for, I kid you not, Soul Food. That's the moniker given to Black American home-cooking, and some racist folks will insist that whites don't eat soul food because that's what black people eat, but the menus are identical. Basically, names aside, the menu was everything my partner and I grew up eating every Sunday dinner.

As we're walking past the line of people (with no intention of going in, thanks, I prefer the real thing), our friends -- note I say friends -- say, "You probably don't want to eat there, right? After all, you're not real Southerners. You have all your teeth!"

If it weren't for the fact that I was raised not to punch people on a public street, I seriously would've considered it.

I've known people who would probably cut out their own tongue before saying anything so rude to a PoC, or a visitor from another country, or a disabled person, or any other sub-set of humanity -- yet they have no compunction, upon hearing any faint hint of an accent in my voice, asking me if any of my cousins married each other -- if not asking outright whether my then-spouse and I were first cousins ourselves. Or asking my family has indoor plumbing, or if anyone in my family graduated from high school, if they're not making comments about people who talk slow must think slow.

I've even had people tell me to my face that I must be there to interview as a receptionist, and not as a professional IT person. After all, working in IT requires intelligence, and you can't be intelligent with a Southern accent. Barring the few who'd put a different spin on it, by suggesting I should be a secretary and bestow some of that "famous Southern hospitality" on some lucky office.

Yeah, I've got your famous Southern fucking hospitality right here, asshole.

So, back to Deliverance. Clover discusses it at length, which I won't quote here. I'll just say that of the non-Southerners I've known, far too many (and one is too many, but I don't even have enough fingers and toes for the times I've had to put up with this shit) think it's funny to quote from that movie. For the specifics of Clover's analysis, however, the underlying crux of city vs country is economic as well as cultural, using money to "humiliate country people... to commit an economic and environmental" rape of the country-land.

Horror movies, Clover suggests, to either greater degree (a la Deliverance) or lesser, are pretty consistent about pivoting on this tension and resentment. It can be economic (as when city-dwellers show up to pave over natural areas to build shopping malls, thus destroying the very beauty that attracted them to the rural area in the first place, while earning them money that's denied the local folk). It can be class-based, as when it's rich city-dweller versus poor country farmer. It can be even simpler than that, as civilization (city) set at odds against the primitive (country).

But there's something else going on underneath this archetype-stereotype. Clover dissects it neatly, drawing a line between the Indian (redskin) in the western genre and the country-folk (redneck) in the horror genres:

The [western] genre rests... on a land seizure of fantastic dimensions. Although we all inhabit, as Michael Rogin has put it, a "society built on Indian graves," the original audiences for [movie Westerns] as children and grandchildren of the settlers in question, would have had an immediate stake in an account that in one stroke admits the land theft and even the genocide (the Indians in these films being depicted as decimated, displaced, and ragged band whose sad leader is given to intoning speeches about the white man's treachery) but in the next attributes to the Indian characteristics so vile and deeds so heinous that the white man's crimes pale in comparison. The modern urbanoid film is no less brazen in its admission of urban crimes against the country (dammed rivers, stripped forests, dirt-biked and snow-mobiled wilderness, mercury-filled lakes, irradiated rangeland) and by extension against those who have been economically dispossessed in the process. In both cases -- urbanoid horror and settler western -- it is as though the demonizing mechanism [of the Other] must begin by acknowledging that which must be overridden [that is, the wrongs against the Other].

This is not to say, nor does Clover say, that the transformation of redskin to redneck is a one-for-one in terms of actual victimization (so, please, no oppression olympics). The movement from the Western genre's Other to the horror genre's Other is simply one of analogous role: being the primitive Other. The difference is that while politically and socially and ethically, there are (obvious) issues about pop/cultural representations of Indians, there isn't, for country folk. Or, in Clover's words:

[It] is not just the demonizing mechanism that the city-revenge films have inherited from the western. It is the redskin himself--now rewritten as redneck. If "redneck" once denoted a real and particular group, it has achieved the status of a kind of universal blame figure, the "someone else" held responsible for all manner of American social ills. The great success of the redneck in that capacity suggests that anxieties no longer expressible in ethnic or racial terms have become projected onto a safe target--safe not only because it is (nominally) white, but because it is infinitely displaceable onto someone from the deeper South... [emphasis mine]

This sense of blame was nowhere as evident as during the years I lived in New England. It was not uncommon -- in fact, it was common enough that the partner and I had to joke about it between ourselves, or go mad from the frustration and bitterness of getting the attitude shoved into our faces regularly. People who considered themselves educated, cultured, open-minded people, would inform us point-blank that we came from a bigoted, racist place -- and then turn around and in the same breath speak derisively of porgies, spics, kikes, and other racist terms, so many racist terms that half of them I hadn't even been aware anyone used outside of old books.

(The informing-us would be, I guess, like the socio-cultural version of mansplaining. What would that be, sociosplaining?)

Frankly, sometimes it wasn't just implied, it was outright stated so baldly that I was too taken aback to even muster a response: to be told that the benefit of having a Southerner in the room is that everyone else gets to feel like they're not actually as bigoted as they might fear. The message: the rest of the country is willing to tolerate my extended family and socio-cultural background because we make everyone else look good in comparison. It's like a national version of the old joke about Alabama's secret motto: "At least we're not Mississippi." For the US, the secret motto of everywhere outside the Mason-Dixon line, it seems, is: "At least we're not the South."

I'm not saying I don't struggle with the same ingrained racial tensions as anyone else raised in the US. I'm not saying the South doesn't have its share of bigots. What I'm saying is that there is no place in this country that you will not find bigots, but the only place for which it's socially accepted -- expected, even -- to mock is the South.

Ah, now, we do all mock different parts of the country, don't we? Yes, this is true. But there's a big difference between someone mocking Californians by quoting from, say, Fast Times at Ridgemont High or mocking someone from Minnesota by quoting from Fargo... versus quoting Deliverance at someone from Georgia. Who, I should add, has family that does live in the rural southern part of Georgia, as well as the rural north-central part, at the headers of the Appalachians. Consider the context of the movie quote in which someone asks me about squealing like a pig: it is worlds away from mimicking the police-woman saying, "ya, ya," or some stoner ordering a pizza in the middle of English class.

The thing is, you hear this shit enough, you get this pop-culture horror-movie redneck-version enough -- not just in horror movies, but in television, and books, and radio, and conversations on the street -- and you can't get angry. You're not allowed to get angry. You're not allowed to get defensive. Why? Because the immediate and consistent reaction is: you wouldn't be angry if it weren't true. Ahah! That question about marrying your first cousin must've hit a nerve! Ahah! That question about whether your parents are inbreds who can't read more than their name, must be true! Ahah! That question about whether your grand-parents were card-carrying members of the KKK must be true! Or else why would you be so defensive?

You know what? I fucking loathe people who say that shit to me, but like Clover states far more coherently and succinctly than I've ever managed, in the US, to say such things to someone's face solely because of his or her Southern accent is considered a-okay. Even in environments where discrimination or harassment would be anathema if done to someone on the grounds of skin-tone, religion, ethnicity, orientation or just about anything else, it's perfectly acceptable to make fun of my Southern accent. I've been in business meetings where coworkers have mimicked my Southern accent in the most painfully bad Gone with the Wind-styled faux-drawl, to the point that despite much preferring the soft drawl in my voice and my family's voices, I erased my own accent rather than go through that again. By the time I left New England, no one knew I was Southern, not if I didn't say anything about my family's location, because it was the only way I had to fight back.

Not much of a fighting-back, is it, to erase your own socio-cultural background. Still, it beats having people ask me if, upon finding out I brought my lunch to work, whether it's chitlins.

Coworkers and managers and otherwise seemingly culturally-sensitive friends... asking me whether I'm eating chitlins. Or making fun of me for liking grits. (And then calling me uncultured for retorting that cream-of-wheat is considerably more disgusting by far.)

But getting angry just gets you laughed at even more, because if you try and protest -- that there are good things, damn it, about being from a rural background, in the end, it doesn't make any difference what argument you use. The stubborn strength of the Scots-Irish background that brings a strong Calvinist work ethic, the frugality of people who immigrated here and were welcomed and/or allowed to settle only in the most inhospitable places, an inventiveness and determination hiding within that cultural frugality, the strong bonds of extended family that treasures connections out to seventh and eighth cousins, the value and importance of owning land and holding onto that land as the root of all wealth... these things don't exist only in the South. They do exist nearly anywhere you find large, extended families whose cultural roots lay in agricultural-based lives. But they're not a positive, that is, they don't work as a defense if you try and retort that it's not a bad thing being Southern.

Because the minute any defense seems likely to persuade any listening audience, whomever began the mocking will shut it all down: your family owned slaves.

It's like a variant on Godwin's Law, except for the fact that no one mocks it for the false dichotomy that it really is. (If you want the history of what I mean, do searches on "slave states" and look for just when, exactly, slavery actually ended -- not abolished, but actually ended -- in northern states; if you want a sense of the racism that exists independent of any three-letter-named group, do a search on "boston school desegregation" to learn how the South was the only place where desegregation was made law, while the rest of the country -- especially New England -- continued de facto segregation until the mid-70's.)

Maybe I should call it Godwin's Law, Reversed: where the first person to throw around mention of slavery wins the argument, by pre-empting the second person's right to any refutation. Or maybe I should just say, it's a total shut-down that works so long as you fail to remember (or refuse to acknowledge) that when it comes to the history of slavery, segregation, prejudice, and bigotry in the US, there are no innocents, and any accusation is really just pot meeting kettle. Ancestry in this country means there's a good chance either there are slaves in your family tree, or slave-owners. Possibly even both.

Still, knowing that doesn't change the fact that it works, and it works because when it's used, the Southerner is outnumbered, and isn't going to be defended. Why would anyone defend the Southerner, and lose their own moral high ground, and the pleasure of scapegoating?

This is also why one of the first major arguments I had with CP, when we were dating, was when he made some throw-away comment about how he has little concern for issues of Civil War or Reconstruction, seeing how his family/s didn't get here until the 20th century. I just about went ballistic, because it doesn't matter. To become a citizen means to take up the burden of the country's history, because history doesn't stop. There is no point where you can say, "people who came after this point are no longer indicted." History begets culture, and culture begets patterns, and citizenship now means adopting those complicit patterns. This is how newcomers can pick up US-racisms, the same way they pick up Halloween customs. It's part of acculturation. You don't have to have owned slaves, or been a slave, to be complicit in continuing the damaging patterns of the past.

In fact, to claim you are exempt in some way is even more offensive, to me, especially when it's an exemption claimed by someone who was mocking Southerners only a few minutes before. It's taking the usual hypocrisy of non-Southerners -- "your family owned slaves" -- and ramping it up to a degree that words can't even begin to comprehend. Maybe because fury and frustration have so totally blown out the circuits.

(Needless to say, CP has learned that this is not a suitable way to approach the topic with me.)

Incidentally, finding the link for the movie-map coincided with participating on someone else's post, in which I mentioned -- and then was soundly mocked about -- enjoying cabbage and pork intestines (a Chinese dish), especially (as I noted in my comment) because such a dish shocks Anglo friends. I was mocked for being (roughly, I paraphrase) a privileged USian taking advantage of Othered food. That interpretation was partly my fault, because I gave no real context, and the sole reason for leaving it out is encapsulated in this post: because I honestly did not believe, and still do not believe, that just because I was participating in a conversation about Othering-food that I would not be Othered in turn.

Because, y'see, I know when it comes to Othering my social background, it's okay. I'm not PoC, I'm not a (recent or even in the last century) immigrant, I'm not a protected group. Hell, I'm even privileged! Which I am, in many ways; I'm just privileged in a way that also means I have to swallow my fury whenever I get used as the example of "someone who comes from a really racist place". Or as someone who can't be who I am because I have all my teeth. Or someone who must just be hiding any relatives who married other family-members.

I'm privileged, but with a side-order of scapegoating... and along with that comes a whole passel of cultural connotations about food. It just gets tiresome, because it's pervasive, to the point that I've even had newly-immigrated coworkers repeat cultural assumptions about Southerners. It never occurs to them that it's not okay, because USian pop culture makes it apparent in tons of ways, from movies down to stupid beer commercials, that it's a safe target. So I get: grits are what poor people eat. Do you also eat collard greens? That'd be a 'mess' of greens, right? What about chitlins? You eat pork rinds, don't you! Admit it, you like pickled pig's feet. Stated outright or merely implied, there it is: that's what poor country folk eat. When a newly-US PoC asks this of a white person and everyone else around the table laughs, the message is clear: it's okay to say these things. It's welcome, even expected! Even if the person you're asking is sitting there feeling humiliated, because it's all a joke and it doesn't matter that someone isn't laughing.

So, insert everyone else's laughter here, while I'm thinking: my grandparents worked hard to grow their own food and put it on the table, fuck you. So I didn't grow up with some fancy multi-spiced dish like what you're used to, it was good honest food. It's also food that I can't mention loving because that opens me up to this kind of shit.

The only place anyone stops short of mocking is when it's a food their culture also enjoys. I've never had an Indian friend make fun of the fact that I love okra, as it's also a staple in many Indian dishes. I've never had a Chinese friend make fun of eating pickled foods (like pickled watermelon rind), as many Chinese dishes also pickle in nearly an identical manner to how my relatives pickle their food.

But chitlins, now, there's a loaded topic, and in ways a lot of non-Southerners don't even realize, because my family didn't call them chitlins, but chitterlings. It's for the same reason that side of the family doesn't like to have their "honest food" confused with "soul food", because that would mean someone might think they eat the same thing as black people. I never said there wasn't any racism in my family, or in the South, only that everyone has it to some degree, anywhere, and that my family is no different, no matter how much I was raised to not make such racist distinctions myself. I mention it here only because I was in high school before I found out that "chitterlings" and "chitlins" are the same freaking food -- and even that, I only found out due to someone else making fun of me for supposedly eating chitlins/chitterlings.

What are they? Pork intestines.

Yes. Same thing that I love eating when it's a Chinese dish. But see, when I eat the Chinese dish, Anglo friends are startled, often even a little impressed. What they are not is ridiculing me for unintentionally letting on that I'm actually just very good at 'faking' how to use a knife and fork, or that they'd never realize I was Southern because I actually know words with more than one syllable. (Yes, I've had people say that to me.)

I didn't go into that context, though, because outside of talking with other Southerners in a Southern-only space, I'm sick of always tensing for more snide comments masquerading as pop-culture humor. So instead I got mocked for being someone using the 'exotic other' (or whatever the phrasing, I can't recall now) as a way to make myself feel better, and all I wanted to say was: fuck you, I like the dish... but I like even more being able to eat something without listening to someone insult my entire family.

Also, I really like cabbage and pork intestines because a good friend introduced me to it, so whenever I eat it (or any of the many other favorite-childhood-dishes she introduced me to), I think of our friendship. Even if I am, at the same time, gloating a little for eating something that (outside of the spices, fine, Southern cooking isn't quite that complex, being based on British cuisine which is, well, not much of a complex cuisine) is effectively a near-likeness to a dish I grew up with yet doesn't come with so many loaded negative socio-cultural implications.

[If you're ever wondering about the tone when I speak of things like biting forks, it's because I have been trained from nearly birth to have as impeccable table manners as possible. Given how many people would like to believe that knives and forks are alien beings to mountain-resident Southern families, it's become a major defense mechanism. It's also why I tense up at any comments about my chopstick skills; anything remotely like a criticism sounds too similar to the usual ramp-ups to more insults about generic-Southern lack-of-civilization, lack of table-manners.]

Thing is, while being demonized in pop-culture, it's still not something that gets any credit for the demonization. You learn pretty fast, once you step outside of the South, that no one sympathizes. No one cares. Everyone's too busy making themselves feel better by dint of not-being-Southern, that they have little to gain (and, more than they'd admit, to lose) from giving you even an iota of dignity. When you add in, as Clover notes, the aspect of being "(nominally) white", that white privilege appears to create an override in other people's minds: it's okay to mock you, because you're not a protected class.

I get that I'm not a protected class (in terms of skin-color, at least). I'd just like to hear a little less about squealing pigs and marrying cousins, so I could stop feeling that defensive edge whenever I see someone's eyes light up because I slipped up and let the accent leak back into my voice.

---

There's one last thing, and this is just to demonstrate to anyone still skeptical about the pervasive Deliverance stereotypes, and how they've transcended horror-movie fare to permeate just about every aspect of our pop-culture.

Readers, I bring you Avatar: the Last Airbender.

That's right. The series that brought us strong female characters! The series that brought us an entire leading cast of people of color! The series that elevated and respected a complex world of diverse Asian-derived cultures! ...and it also brought us a Deliverance reboot, right there in the middle.

Season two, the episode titled "The Swamp", and we meet a group of waterbenders. See if any of this sounds familiar, because to my eyes it's a freaking checklist. Predominantly male, check. Apparently shiftless, check. Drawling slow talkers, check. Dressed in primitive (bark and leaves) garb, check. Note on this one: nearly all other in-story cultures met are shown to be civilized to some degree, with complex and stylized clothing, advanced architecture and engineering, but not the swamp waterbenders, who are barely dressed at all. Ah, and buck-teeth, check. Shortened cognominic names with no surname, check.

Oh, and the icing on the goddamned freaking cake? The swamp waterbenders kidnap the two lovable animal sidekicks and are going to eat them, if not for Aang et al rescuing the critters in time. The only thing missing is incest, but we've got the eating-of-taboo-animals right there.

And this in a series lauded for its sensitivity to cultural issues?

I'd say that's a pervasive -- and perceived-as-safe -- stereotype, when it can even show up in a children's cartoon and no one says a word.

Then again, why bother? Most of the people I've met who say such things really do believe it. Not that it's really any better to tell someone that, actually, your mother has two grad degrees and your father has four, and your sister attended one of the most prestigious schools on the eastern seaboard. It's just like the comment about having all your teeth, if a variation: "oh, well, see," you'll be told, "I was talking about all those other Southerners, not like you, you're obviously different."

Yeah, well, fuck you and your goddamn Deliverance-for-Georgia map.

---

A footnote from Clover's passage on the demonization-transfer of redskin-to-redneck, which might be interesting to ponder, if you're interested in such pop-culture topics. (The original, per usual footnoting, has no paragraph breaks, but I've added some here for the sake of onscreen legibility.)

[Michael] Rogin has argued that the history of demonology in American politics comprises three major moments: racial (Native Americans and blacks), class and ethnic, and cold war. Of the first two, which bear most directly on the revenge [horror] films under discussion here, he writes:

The expropriation of Indian land and the exploitation of black labor lie at the root not only of America's economic development, but of its political conflicts and cultural identity as well. A distinctive American political tradition, fearful of primitivism, disorder, and conspiracy, developed in response to peoples of color. That tradition draws its energy from alient threats to the American way of life, and sanctions violent and exclusionary responses to them. Class and ethnic divisions define the second demonological moment. The targets of countersubversion moved from the reds and blacks of frontier, agrarian America to the working-class 'savages' and alien 'reds' of urban, industrializing America. The defense of civilization against savagery still derived from repressive conditions of labor on the one hand and from internal, imperial expansion against autonomous communities on the other. But the terms of the struggle shifted from racial conflict to ethnocentric class war (Kiss Me Deadly, p. 1).

"Ethnocentric class war" is very much alive in recent horror. A number of commentators have noted the tendency of popular culture to understand the Vietnam war in White-Indian or White-Black terms (Harlan Kennedy in "Things that Go Howl in the Id," for example, or Newman in Nightmare Movies or Gaylyn Studlar and David Desser in "Never Having to Say You're Sorry"), but the displacement of ethnic otherness onto a class of whites--to my mind far and away the most significant "ethnic" development in popular culture of the last decade--has gone unnoticed. Southern Comfort (1981) goes so far as to blame the entire Vietnam experience--from initial involvement to failure--on the "redneck".

For a "scapegoat" analysis of Texas Chain Saw Massacre (which also gestures in the directions of the Indians), see Christopher Sharrett, "The Idea of Apocalypse in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre." The film Pumpkinhead gestures towards the blackness as well as the Indianness of the redneck subtext when it has one of the (white) city youths explain to his girlfriend why he has brought a rifle: "Because yo' never know what yo' goin' to find in the jungle--yo!"

---

This is not to say I walk around, primed and seeking insults about Southerners. I don't need to read into anything to find insults, not when most of the time such are pretty straightforwardly blatant. Most of the time, really, I'm working to ignore the various examples I see. In comics, in television shows and commercials, in movies, in books, in people's reactions. Some of it, I know I share (in terms of annoyance and frustration) with others whose dialect marks them in the eyes of some other group -- like the person who commented a bit ago that going into London means dealing with some bozo hearing the Irish accent and promptly trying to 'do' the person. Yeah, I get that, too. I know exactly how offensive it is, and it's why I feel incredibly hypocritical whenever my step-mother mimics the lilting accent of southern Sweden. Different language, and that could be me you're mocking.

Nor is this necessarily oppression olympics, because I'm fully aware that stripping off my own accent, and learning to mask my background by emphasizing my years in the Mid-Atlantic over my years in the Deep South, by never mentioning exactly where my grandparents or cousins or aunts 'n uncles live... that all I have to do is excise this cultural chunk, and I am stealth!American! I am generic Mid-Atlantic, sans accent, and as long as I don't show any fury when listening to someone mock another Southerner (who has not thus stripped his/her cultural weight), then no one will know.

Of course, I hate myself when that happens, but at least I'm not the one getting bullied, right?

In that sense, I know that this ability to pass as a non-scapegoat is something a lot of other cultural or racial members don't have. Me dropping an accent is practically patty-cake compared to what it'd take to change your eye shape, or your skin-color, or your hair-color, or your sex, or your sexuality, or your weight, or your age, or whatever else causes you to get the worst of an -ism. I'm aware of that. I'm aware that comparatively speaking, I should probably shut up and accept that this is just part of the way my country has chosen to work through the aftermath of a vicious and divisive Civil War and the racism before during and after and the turmoil of Reconstruction and then Civil Rights and all the other attendant experiences. It needed a scapegoat to shift the blame for having said and done all that was said and done, and my socio-cultural background was the easiest target. Perhaps there's benefit, somewhere, in having a scapegoat; perhaps it lets the overall culture blow off steam, sometimes? Perhaps there's some goodness, in the long run, that I can't see from where I stand.

But none of that changes the fact that watching those Avatar episodes really freaking hurt.


NOTE: if you are considering a comment in which: you say that you, personally, have Southern friends and they make jokes like this all the time, I won't reply because (a) this post is NOT ABOUT YOU and (b) you're blurring ingroup/outgroup humor and maybe you need to think about that more. If you raise a defense via attacking on the topics of slavery, slave-ownership, redneck-analogies, or how Others have it worse, I will DELETE your comment as oppression olympics and/or derailing.

Comments

[rogue53]

I hadn't really thought about this, my parents were way before their time in the fact that no one ever got ridiculed for anything (black, white, red, north, south... you name it, they refused to find anything bad, unless the person was bad) and beside, if you are into genealogy, well, how many of us are just from the northern states? Yes, some of mine are, but we're still tracing the ones from down South (missing one generation). And I am currently married to a farmer and amazingly enough, a lot of my ancestors were farmers. So, I now wonder just how everyone sees me? Of course, I am willing to fight (verbally, of course) if anyone ever went so far as to make fun of where I live, but, still...

And in this day and age, do we need to have more sensitivity training about our own country? Maybe we do.

And I KNEW there was another reason to not like Avatar.

[kaigou]

The thing is, I really did like a lot of Avatar. But those episodes... just really, really disappointed me. I think even moreso because the rest of the series was (or was showing potential for) so much awesomeness. To have fail right there -- and worse, to have fail that no one else seemed to see for the fail it was -- just really... sucked. Not that it was surprising, but still. It sucked.

[axelrod]

Thanks for pointing that out in particular, since of course I totally missed it. And A:TLA is a bit of a sacred cow, so of course no one's going to want to hear it critiqued ...

[kathmandu]

I think part of the shock-reaction by Westerners to Chinese food comes down to less-that-apt translations: food being translated using words for non-food. Intestines, practically by definition, are something We Do Not Eat. Cabbage and sausage casings, or cabbage and chitterlings, would be a different prospect.

[kaigou]

Perhaps... but from what I've seen, "chitlins" is something that most Americans seem to treat as something We Do Not Eat (Because We Are Not Ignorant Backwoods Yokums). I'm sure if we called "intestines" by their Latin name (or something equally fancy) then no one would think twice, and in fact would consider themselves quite cultured for eating the latest thing... even if it really is just chitterlings.

Reminds me of my sister's comment after a date, in high school. She and her boyfriend had gone to some restaurant downtown, and my sister had escargot. My mom (who knew full well my sister knew, but was teasing) said, "you mean snails."

My sister replied, "They taste better when you call them escargot."

[axelrod]

I've heard food like shellfish and lobster were once peasant food.

[brainwane]

Thank you for writing this. I have probably unthinkingly made fun of Southern accents and foolishly othered Southerners in the past, but I believe I stopped when I grew up a few years ago, and your post makes me sad and ashamed that I've ever done so. Thank you for sharing your anger and pain.

Also, Michael Rogin was a professor of mine at Berkeley and I miss him, so I was glad to see you citing him.

[kaigou]

Rogin sounds like a pretty interesting person. It must've been cool to hear his lectures.

As for Southern accents, I think Hollywood plays a big part in making the fun acceptable. As long as the stereotype exists -- especially of "the Southern woman" -- it will continue to be an issue. What's ironic is that I was never comfortable in the South because I really don't fit/behave like a Southern woman should. Too brash!

[tiercel]

This is one of the many reasons I'm never leaving NC, and even here we have to put up with jokes from all the idiot Yankee newcomers.

[kaigou]

Now all you have to do is turn off satellite radio, turn off the television, never see a movie, and don't open a comic book, and you'll be set! ...although honestly, sometimes I suspect no Southern jury would convict anyone who finally had had ENOUGH with the visiting tourists who loudly mock the accents among each other while standing within earshot of you.

I suspect there's an entire dissertation waiting in the wings on Fredericksburg, Virginia (and any other mid-sized towns of its ilk) -- selling its tourist trade based on being a "last bastion of the confederacy" (as a historical point). It increased the town's foot-traffic and affluency, thanks to all the tourist money, but at times it sure felt like we were mid-creation of a caricature that in the long run would only damage how others saw the town's residents (and by extension, anyone with similar traits/speech patterns).

[axelrod]

Thanks for this post (says the New Englander currently living in the Mid-Atlantic). A lot of stuff I wasn't aware of. I like Southern accents, and I'm sorry you got so much shit for having one that you had to erase yours and that you choose to keep your geographic & cultural origins a secret to avoid others' bigotry.

Living in other countries (Italy, Israel, & England)* has made me sympathetic to people who speak differently or who are speaking in a language that isn't their native language and also I just like language generally and enjoy variations in vocabulary and pronunciation and so on. But I sure as hell have stereotypes about the South, and for that matter the Midwest.

Among other things, I'm embarrassed that so many Northerners seem to think that slavery didn't happen in the North and racism has been negligible or something, and that people don't move around. I was born in California and grew up in Connecticut, but I know for a fact that some of my ancestors owned slaves in Virginia, and there are tombstones in an 18th/19th c. graveyard in my hometown in CT that were pointed out to me as belonging to slaves. The attempts to lay the blame elsewhere are (sadly) not surprising, but certainly discouraging.

I've heard that Northern accents in England receive the same sorts of attitudes that Southern accents do in the US - don't know much about what the attendant stereotypes are, but I know that stupidity is one of them. My impression is that accents and regionalism and classism and so on in the UK are pretty complicated ...

Oh, and if you haven't watched Supernatural fyi there's at least one episode where they take all the negative Southern stereotypes to the max - there may be others but obviously I'm less likely to notice offensive things than you are.

*Though in Italy and England I had people tell me how much they like US accents (i.e. the "standard" US English I speak). Which was unexpected and sort of weirdly Othering - probably my only experience being exoticized in any way, actually. I did get laughed at for some of my US vocabulary and pronunciation in England - I learned to say "trousers" instead of "pants" really fast.

[kaigou]

I've heard that Northern accents in England receive the same sorts of attitudes that Southern accents do in the US - don't know much about what the attendant stereotypes are, but I know that stupidity is one of them.

I wonder how long that's been true? When it comes to white culture, there are a lot of things the colonies inherited from the UK, in terms of bigotry transferred from there to here... and the majority of the more rural and inaccessible parts of the Deep South (esp. the mountains) were settled/influenced a great deal by folks from the Borderlands (lowlands Scotland and northern England). You can even still hear it in the speech, in some regional phrases that are continuations of 17th-cen and 18th-cen Borderlands slang. In the lowlands/Tidewater areas of Virginia, you can still hear a Scottish accent if you go off the main roads and have a chance to talk to some of the older folk -- going "ooot to the hooose", for instance.

One thing I intensely dislike about national/nation-wide broadcasting -- especially in terms of news -- is that it's causing a lot of regional accents to slowly fade, or mingle, or meld. Okay, I don't mind the mingling, because that's still a retained accent... but when accents disappear completely, I see that as something to regret. Those accents are an indication of the region's history (like in Minnesota, hearing people say 'ya' instead of 'yeah')... which just highlights, I guess, the deep-down conflict I felt/feel about working so hard to erase or null my own accent. It feels, sometimes, like I'm consciously giving into the same 'equalizing' pressures, but for a worse reason, and worst of all, doing it willingly/purposefully, so there's even more of a sense of betrayal.

The whole displacing-blame thing definitely adds a complicating factor to what's already a difficult topic -- race -- in the US, that's for sure.

You rant-sneezed, and now I've caught it.

[(Anonymous)]

I admire your ability to remain articulate in the face of profound asshattery. I'm generally quickly reduced to "GAAAHHHH" by it.

The Clover sounds as deft and nuanced an exegesis of the perennial demonization of the rural Other in the american psyche as one could hope for. Paired with your equally adroit "Yeah, I've got your famous Southern fucking hospitality right here, asshole" I think the bases are covered. It's heartening to see this so often forgotten/elided/ignored place on ye olde twisted cultural hegemony map being discussed.


"People who considered themselves educated, cultured, open-minded people, would inform us point-blank that we came from a bigoted, racist place -- and then turn around and in the same breath speak derisively of porgies, spics, kikes, and other racist terms, so many racist terms that half of them I hadn't even been aware anyone used outside of old books."

And here we see the lovely way in which not only is the 'redskin-cum-redneck' the universal scapegoat, the " 'someone else' held responsible for all manner of American social ills," "The South" as spatial imaginary becomes the site onto which the urban/north/choose your adjective subject can conveniently project their *own* racism, thus 'ridding' themselves of it and allowing them to go merrily on believing they are Enlightened.

Ah, displacement. It doth make me want to barf a little.


--jouissens (from Livejournal)

Re: You rant-sneezed, and now I've caught it.

[kaigou]

I'd have to say it's only in the past year or two that I've managed any kind of true articulation, at least on an extended public (should we consider the internet 'public'?) level. Ironically, it's only now that I'm back to living at the fringes of the South and are surrounded by people who are either migrated Southerners or people who consider themselves sort of like a 'neighbor' to the South.

Getting that required heading west, I've found, not north, because the latter plunks you down in the former 'Free States' and then you're back in the whole tangle of displacement... western states seem to be slightly less wrapped up in distinctions -- that is, heading west of the South, and there's still the blame-game, but less need (from what I see) for the usual defensiveness of "just so you know, we are NOT them" as though the listener might not be clear where the lines are drawn. The subcultures in the former Free States have a lot riding on justifying that history, to be blunt, while many of the western states adopted the attitude (being, well, a lot of settlers who were either North or South) -- but they don't seem as hung up about the idea that anyone might mistake them for being Southern, or too-geographically-close-to-Southern, as though "being Southern" is something contagious.

Anyway. No, the majority of my adult life, I haven't been articulate about it. To be honest, nearly every time I've gotten the attitude/comments, the only thing I've ever really done is just stare in shock. The very notion that someone could look at me, know me, know of my educational and career background, my skills, hell, even the things I mention about my sibs or my parents (like the multiple advanced degrees)... and then ask me about having all my teeth? Those kinds of comments so clearly required denying the reality I thought was patently obvious that it frankly felt like I'd just stepped into an alternate dimension, and had about as much coherent thought as anyone would have upon finding the sky had just turned fuschia and the grass was now purple: that is to say, probably none. Just a gibbering kind of bubbling-disbelieving-laughter mingled with astonished hurt.

I knew it was displacement. But it took interacting with bigoted Bostonians on a regular basis to realize that displacement/projection could be so strong that the person projecting could actually stop seeing the reality of the person in front of them, in favor of their own prejudices.

[nagia]

This post has filled a tiny hole in my heart. I am a native Tennesseean, and it's taken me long enough to stop being so damned ashamed of the South and where I'm from and what my accent sounds like. (The relatives who had a John Deere-themed wedding cake, I'll probably always be ashamed of. I draw the line at John Deere.)

Y'know, I once visited some relatives in Tacoma. One of the clerks in a coffee shop asked if I'd had to buy shoes special for the trip. As if not only do we here in the south not have indoor plumbing, but we don't wear shoes? And he even asked in a serious tone. I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. I also wanted to run off with his tip jar -- tell him I needed the money to buy socks or something.

I hate that whoever came up with that "map" thought that this tired, dead-horse joke was fresh and "cute" enough to include. Yes, yes, the south once owned slaves and southerners talk funny and that makes them unpredictable and scary. We get it. Can we move onto more interesting things now, like movies that actually fit the states? (I mean, seriously, almost as bad as Deliverance is The Evil Dead for TN. I don't even... it's barely set in TN, and certainly is no more about it than Glory is about SC).

[kaigou]

Oi, I have never actually seen the Evil Dead, so hadn't a clue as to whether it fit. You'd think, given the existence of UT and Elvis and Dolly Parton, that there'd be at least one movie that's solidly Tennessee. (Instead, I google and find a lot of movies filmed in Tennessee that don't actually take place in Tennessee. Say what?)

One thing, ironically, that was good out of living in New England was that the constant jibes and reactions pushed me into a place of having to recognize my pride in my family and my background. Okay, it also put a big chip on my shoulder, but that chip is bolstered by a kind of furious backlash. A'course, this is tempered by the fact that a major chunk of my family (esp. on my father's side) has a mile-wide streak of blatant racism running through it, and how can I be proud of such bigotry. So some compartmentalizing is going on... but I guess, you get enough of shit like the shoe-comment or the be-a-secretary-comment, and either I had to learn to live with the humiliation, or I had to put my chin up and silently dare someone to say that crap about me.

I guess you could say I ditched any last vestige of being a Proper Southern Lady (as my grandmother tried so hard to teach me) and let out my Inner Bastard ... but in doing so, discovered that I'm damn proud of being Southern. Even if this does mean accepting that most of my relatives are convinced I'm an alien or was switched at birth, because I display so few personality traits, or even speech patterns, that are obviously gendered-female-Southern. Strange, hunh?

[cleverthylacine]

I don't actually think a John Deere cake or a hunting cake is any worse than a Star Trek cake or whatever--it's all about the people getting married, and if John Deere is something that's a big part of their life rather than something the groom forced on the bride or vice versa, go them.

There have probably been stupider weddings.

[(Anonymous)]

So true. I absolutely did not realize how pervasive this crap is until I met my SO, who is Cajun.

[kaigou]

And the Cajun, like the Appalachian, seems to get some of the worst of it -- especially with all the connotations about 'swamp-dwellers' and 'backwater' and whatnot.

[cleverthylacine]

Thank you for this; it is so disheartening when I get tired and open my mouth and suddenly people act like my IQ dropped 20 points because my accent's back.

[kaigou]

Oh, absolutely about the shift in reactions. Even now, some words I just can't say in a flat-manner -- that is, the multiple-syllables and swing of my father's Georgia accent or my grandmother's Mississippi accent show up... and it's like a neon sign went on over my head that says, "Stealth!Southerner, now revealed!"

But on the other hand, maybe posts like this can start a slow swell of Southerners banding together to point out to the rest of the nation that maybe it's time we stop this shit. Even if that does mean forcing the rest of the nation to recognize its own complicity.

EDIT: wtf html?

[taithe]

Because, y'see, I know when it comes to Othering my social background, it's okay. I'm not PoC, I'm not a (recent or even in the last century) immigrant, I'm not a protected group. Hell, I'm even privileged! Which I am, in many ways; I'm just privileged in a way that also means I have to swallow my fury whenever I get used as the example of "someone who comes from a really racist place". Or as someone who can't be who I am because I have all my teeth. Or someone who must just be hiding any relatives who married other family-members.

I'm privileged, but with a side-order of scapegoating... and along with that comes a whole passel of cultural connotations about food. It just gets tiresome, because it's pervasive, to the point that I've even had newly-immigrated coworkers repeat cultural assumptions about Southerners. It never occurs to them that it's not okay, because USian pop culture makes it apparent in tons of ways, from movies down to stupid beer commercials, that it's a safe target. So I get: grits are what poor people eat.

I hope you don't mind that I take your post and think about it from an academic perspective. Currently in one of my classes I'm studying the concept of Otherness from a philosophical-anthropological slant. The points you raise here about being placed in a category of "Other" yet being unable to complain due to perceived "privilege" is rather fascinating and also extremely dismaying.

I'm tempted to use your experiences as a starting board for my paper on creating Otherness and the mythos behind the "wild, uncivilized country-dweller". I'm currently reading a book called The Idea of Africa by V.Y. Mudimbe and some of the theories he works out relate to the pervasive narratives present about the South because similar (although distinctly different) narratives are insidiously present within the concept of Africa. He articulates possible explanations for why the idea of Africa is rationalized and used commonly by Westerners (although I'd argue based on my cultural experiences that it isn't just the West that maintains this idea). Both the "South" and "Africa" are kind of lumped into monolithic mythologies and I would like to study how this myth-making began regarding Southerners.

If you feel offended at the thought of me using your post as a beginning for an academic concept paper, especially regarding a topic that is extremely personal, please let me know. I will not use any of your anecdotal information, but I may vaguely refer to your post as a source of inspiration if given your permission.

~*

As a first generation immigrant, I was surprised how easily everyone in school (especially teachers) sort of slotted Southerners together into the caricatures that you see in the likes to Avatar. Even the history books portrayed the South with images of big bad slave states and backward conservatism. What was disturbing was the implied condoning of certain acts during the Civil War since, obviously, the North was trying to free the slaves and were the good guys. The rather blasé attitude toward Sherman's March to Sea made me go wtf as a kid. I had read about Stalin's policies before arriving to that particular section in my 10th grade history and wondered why no one else in class was disturbed by the scorched earth concept. I ended up delving into literature, particularly African American literature later that year, which illustrated that no, the northern states weren't as progressive and more accepting of minorities as you'd think and the aftermath of the Civil War had been pretty fucking bad.

Also in regards to oppression olympics -- what an unusual term. I'm a bit puzzled as to why people would hijack a commentary relating toward a specific type of cultural oppression by using the "others have it worse" rationalization. I get a bit of this whenever racism is discussed. Arguing about severity or whose oppression was worse seems rather missing the point. I remember trying to explain to my mother the historical oppression of blacks in the United States and her interjecting that Asian immigrants had just as horrible treatment from white folk and even worse once black people starting attacking East Asians. :| It makes it difficult to establish any kind of constructive discourse. I see this "you can't talk about being marginalized because you're privileged" attitude being the same kind of Missing the Point only the recipient has additional shame and guilt. It just doesn't make sense to me why it's appropriate to ever say that.

I wish it was possible that people would feel more comfortable discussing this sort of thing. The intensity of your post and the comments above indicate that this is a kind of issue that needs to be talked about because really, it's not okay to belittle or patronize other people based on X trait. I'm wondering if your friends who made those jokes could be made aware of how hurt you were?

Honestly, I don't see any goodness about having Southerners as scape-goats. Rather than blowing off steam, it seems to allow more discrete forms of racist or narrow-minded thinking even among people who consider themselves educated and tolerant.

tl;dr excellent post. You've opened up some interesting points of discussion.

[kaigou]

In re paper: quote as you like. Also, based on Clover's footnotes and quotes, I'd say Rogin's work (on the blame-shift from ethnic/race to Southern/primitive) might be a good source. Another academic field might be Southern Literature (sometimes called Literature of the Deep South, or Local Color Fiction), since its history often studies the stereotypes/perceptions that got their basis & traction in that genre.

I'm a bit puzzled as to why people would hijack a commentary relating toward a specific type of cultural oppression by using the "others have it worse" rationalization.

Because to admit that Southerners have a right to be angry about being characterized (or should I say, caricatured) means -- I think -- admitting that someone could be privileged in one way, while still ostracized to a degree akin to PoC/minority groups. It's one thing to ally yourself with another minority, because you can say you have shared experiences. To ally yourself with what's apparently a majority/privileged group is tougher. A lot of conflicting emotions when it comes to someone able to "erase" minority-markers (and thereby 'achieve' privilege). Those who can't would understandably feel angry (because they don't have that option), while those of us who can feel a deep-down shame.

There's already the guilt forced on the Southern accent as a marker of rebellion against This Great Nation, with the shame of being a Loser (as though it's bad to rebel, but worse to fail) sprinkled on top. There's the sense -- created by twenty-plus years of martial law masquerading as 'Reconstruction' -- of having been colonized and re-structured as thoroughly as any imperial colony, and yet supposedly we're all part of the same nation.

Being Southern outside of the South means having to face the question, at some point, of: are you happy about being an American, or are you hiding this family history of having had -- for nearly a generation's worth of time -- the experience of being told you're unAmerican and therefore deserve to be second-class, disenfranchised citizens in your own nation?

(It makes me wonder why there haven't been more connections drawn between treatment of Japanese citizens during WWII, and treatment of Southern citizens post-Civil-War: I think it could be argued that both were disenfranchised as a way to 'split off' a population that was seen as "too close" to the original/threatening evil. Draw a very thick line in the sand, and that way the rest of the country won't be affected by the contagion.)

One thing that complicates all this: the majority of these experiences were almost entirely unknown to me until I left the South. I saw television or movies, but could ignore those, because I (generally) knew enough people to know the movies/television were lies/exaggerations. I didn't get the in-your-face treatment until I travelled elsewhere in the US, and then I got it with both barrels.

What that means, though, is that if I stayed in the South, I would've been reasonably high-privileged (at least in terms of skin color) and outside of my own parents' beliefs that we should work, as allies, towards reducing racism... I probably never would've experienced ethnic-based racism, first-hand, myself. Which might be a good reason for Southerners to never leave home.

Me, though, I left because I'm not a very good Southerner. I don't use women's speech patterns, I can do the courtesies and I know the rules but I'm not very good at hiding the fact that I think many of them are pretty stupid rules, I don't speak softly and I didn't do cotillion and I thought boys from old families had all the attraction of wet bread dough. I'm only marginally feminine, with little interest in even trying. To be a good Southern woman? ... as an ex once put it, "a true Southern woman is one who can tell you to go to hell so sweetly you look forward to the trip."

And all that admission probably emphasizes how the application of a narrow stereotype can even alienate people within the sheltered (Mason-Dixon Line) community/subculture. From early childhood I already knew (and was frequently told) I didn't fit in that narrow scope... yet that stereotype was one imposed, via a form of colonization, during Reconstruction. Rather ironic that I also became such an advocate for Being Southern... despite not really 'presenting' a Southern-stereotypical face.

If you want/need additional being-Southern anecdotes, just let me know and I'll post an open call. I seem to have a higher-than usual number of Southerners on my flist/s -- and if nothing else, we're very very good at networking. Given how many people I've met online that I've then determined are probably eighth or ninth cousins... there's one benefit of being able to name your family going back at least six generations.

[billie]

I thought this post was incredibly interesting.

I can't offer much on the topic of "Southern-ness" -- I'm not even sure I could recognise a southern US accent as anything but "American", but I get that subset of -ism I can't complain about:
I'm German. Yeaaah. I've had people ask me "so, is Hitler like, you guys' idol?", or end a perfectly pleasant conversation with "...after all, Germany and Japan have been good friends for quite some time", or tell me that it's not unfair that my father's family was chased off the land they'd owned for generations and forced to learn and speak another language (and ONLY that language) because this bit of earth now belongs to another state ... and anyway, they must've done something to deserve it.

I'm working myself into an angry rant here, so I'll cut it off, but -- I think I get it, and will take even greater care with types. I also need to think about how these things apply to Germany and the German language.

Long story short -- thank you for sharing this, I enjoyed reading it very much.

[kaigou]

A side-thought: both the American South and Germany did, in the aftermath, accept themselves as being at fault (as a 'group', in a sense). I wonder if that sort of movement -- which, yes, is valuable and important to beginning the process of rebuilding/restoring communications with other groups -- also opens the door to these reactions by other groups. Those who may not want to go through the same soul-searching as is required by group-members who've accepted fault and/or made retribution may defend themselves (against seeing any blame in themselves) by continuing to shift blame onto the faulted-group. I mean, whether I like it or not, whether it's comfortable to admit or not, the fact is that for both the US Civil War and for Germany... there are a lot more factors at work than just "these are guilty people", like it's in some kind of vacuum. There's a lot of wrong done, and it applies to a lot more than just this one group, yet having one group take blame means the rest can wash their hands.

The questions you get aren't all that off from what Southerners will get: "so, you miss owning slaves?" and comments about the South rising again (or just as bad, rising again and failing anyway). Like either of us were even alive when our respective groups committed, and accepted blame for, the various crimes, whatever they were. The thing is, if another (non-Southerner) is going to tell me that I must still accept blame and/or work to provide retribution for something my great-great-grandparents did (own slaves, or even just live in a slave-owning society)... then it's an issue of carrying sins of the father. I get that. I think what you and I are twigging on is that this is also essentially hypocritical -- that another would accuse us per sins-of-the-father while simultaneously denying that that the person him/herself carries no blame for previous generations' complicity.

But I think the worst part is exactly what you put a very fine finger on: that the assumption throughout (up to and including such offensive comments) is that by dint of our inclusion in a group, that we -- even personally -- did something to deserve it.

If you did think at length about how such notions apply to Germany, I'd be really interested in reading. Obviously it's a human pattern to play this scapegoating game, and maybe we (personally, and group-wise) might learn from each other of ways to combat it, and to start undoing it. Or at least begin to understand, as a first step towards undoing the patterns.