2022 Community Theme - The South

Why “the south?”

I’ve been trying to find a broad topic to guide this space for a while, but couldn’t narrow it down. When asked what folks were interested in, community suggestions ranged from learning about my new home to sustainability in food. Each of those felt either too broad, too narrow, or just not quite right for me to work on consistently for a longer but also still limited period of time.

And then I started a culture war on TikTok (once I start talking in that vid captions should come up automatically on TT for anyone who needs them). As with all the internet dust-ups I get involved in, it was unintentional. I attempted to address a nuanced topic with my signature sass and then was quickly smacked in the face with how little social media discourse makes room for nuance. My video was an attempt to point out that takes on “the South,” a region with 100+ million people and 16 states (plus the District of Columbia), that rest solely on broad negative generalizations and stereotypes such as “it sucks” and “it’s backward” are often just disguised classism and elitism. I also think there’s often some racism thrown in there but I left that alone in my video for the sake of trying not to make people too defensive.