News-Record.com

I saw this comment in the LTE section today from a regular contributor towards a letter writer:

"Another homophobic, racist, redneck, myopic, narrow minded, uneducated, toothless moron who resides in a trailer on the bottom of the economic scale trying to put prayer back in the schools and bring back the Jim Crow days."

If you tolerate trash like that, why do you worry about the letters you print that generate such responses?

You have to understand that most Yankees came down here to get away from Italians, who were in turn diluting our culture.

Yeah, that's just what all you Southerners want is for us to go home so you can be left alone to go right back chasing after your sisters and cousins and stuff and killing yourself smoking everywhere especially in restaurants where you're probably eating stuff like fat back and pigs feet and stuff.

We ouughta just leave and let you have at it.

I had hoped for more mature discussion on this subject. Seriously.

The South didn't exist until it thought that Yankees were ruining it. From abolitionists and carpetbaggers to industrialists and immigrants, Yankees constitute the threat necessary to the maintenance of southern identity. Minus Yankees, there is no South.

This letter is another iteration of the theme Henry Watterson articulated in 1887 when he said that the South would become nothing more than a "geographical expression" (and for reasons not dissimilar to the ones noted in the letter). In 1972, John Egerton worried about the "Americanization of Dixie," and 35 years later, people are still worrying, still conjuring a South as an antidote to the ills of Yankeefication, globalization, and time-space compression. There is a fascinating book on this subject forthcoming from LSU Press entitled "The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction." Look for it next spring.

That said, the letter is correct in one particular: Yankees should go home.

Putting "yankee", "yankification" or any variant of the word "yankee" on par with the "n-word" is beyond silly, and certainly not worthy of a discussion in the local paper of record. There is such a thing as regional differences, which survive despite efforts by the political correct crowd to squelch any speech they believe remotely sounds intolerant. People in the North, or Yankees, do things different then we do things her in North Carolina. If you don't believe me, just ask one of the thousands of New Yorkers who have moved here in the last decade. Some of them, fleeing high taxes, outrageous housing costs and crime, come here and want to create something akin to what they just left because that is all they have known. I think that this is what the gentleman referred by "yankification."

Furthermore, I don't believe that the word "redneck" is really a disparaging term, at least since Jeff Foxworthy liberated it twenty years ago. According to the bard, redneck means "a glorious absence of sophistication." The word "redneck", however, should not be confused with "white trash" which is perjorative and pertains to an entirely different segment of society.

Allen, you are making a mountain out of a mole hill.

Paul:
Actually, I was only seeking more input because a number of angry readers complained about the letter.

Allen, I know the letter writer, and he is a northern expatriate. This diminishes in a sense any offense that was intended by his choice of words.

It is not clear to me that the word "yankee" is inherently pejorative. The context in which it is used, however, can make it pejorative. I don't think Peter's usage was, but obviously some must disagree-- or perhaps they resented the message in his letter.

I've been here in Greensboro most of the last twenty years, but New England Yankee rock walls and maple syrup are my bones and blood.

That doesn't mean I have not enjoyed Southern charms, including my wife's many. I think what some, including the letter-writer, are annoyed by is the occasional curtness with which those from my neck of the woods can treat an everyday business dealing. In a restaurant or shop, for instance, we weren't expected to put on our Sunday best Monday through Friday. And we don't wait in lines well. This annoys my wife, too.

The Union Army of the Potomac was a bit better, though, at waiting. When my wife and I stood at the Angle at the high-water mark of Pickett's Charge, a stop on our first drive north for her to visit/meet my family, we realized destiny is a game of inches. But for some Yankee patience with scarce ammunition after the biggest cannonade on US soil, we'd have been from different countries.

I wonder whether my child could claim "dual citizenship". My sister married a Japanese national, so her child is entitled to both identities (and my sister is Korean-born herself!), and the little 22-month-old is learning two languages quite easily! So far, I think I have heard "dye-eee-aaah", but I don't think it is specifically aimed in my direction.

From the responses on the blog to the LTTE, I don't think a majority of the readers were offended.