Insolent NDN

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a friend about geographical identity. I assert that my primary cultural language is that of a woman of color from the Southeast. I feel most comfortable among that group, and that tends to be my homeplace speak, and everything else is variables of code shifting. Although, I have lived in both the Southeast and the Midwest for most of my life, I know where home is, and I know the bias and misconceptions that most people without color north of Kentucky seems to have about “Southerners.” I want to address this a bit because I think that using the Southeast as the proverbial redheaded stepchild of the country is disconcerting and is based upon stereotypes that allow any person without color not affiliated with the area to puff up in pride that they are somehow supah spechual unique individuals who don’t have a racist bone in their body because they live in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Yes, there is racism in the Southeast.

Fucking duh. I have been followed in more stores, called more derogatory epitaphs, threatened and stalked in North Carolina than I ever have in Ohio; but white North Carolinians also know what ndnz look like, so there’s is that. *smh* There’s overt and covert racism everywhere in this country; Ohio and Indiana were the hotbed of Klan activity following the Reconstruction period. People without color who consistently denigrate the Southeast as this horrid hell of racism while denying that people of color face racism in the most cosmopolitan cities in the Northeast need a reality check. I had someone tell me once that she didn’t understand why the majority of the Civil Rights actions happened in the Southeast; why didn’t folks just move up North where they wouldn’t face that kind of prejudice? *head to desk*

Further, there are a lot of people of color in the Southeast. First, there are indigenous people who have managed to hold on to bits and pieces of our original land holdings. There are mexican@ farmers and labors who have come to work the land. There is a thriving community of Black folks with myriad cultures that encompass all aspects of the African diaspora. There are subsets within subsets, pockets of communities that have persevered through wars, poverty, famine, institutional racism, institutional violence, the legacy of chattel slavery, the legacy of genocide and removal, and do not have any desire to move away from the land they have worked and the communities they have built. Yes, we face adversity, racism, personal and institutional violence, but we fight it, just like our sisters and brothers all over this country, all over this world, fight it.

To be a woman identified with the Southeast is not the same as being a “southern girl” or a “southern belle.” Women of color did not, and I’ll argue still do not, have access to that type of womanhood because the image of the “southern girl” and “southern belle” are based in direct opposition to what institutionalized slavery and genocide disallowed women of color: whole personhood. The dichotomy collapses if there is not a strong line dividing the two. Yet, it is not as if women of color had or have access to white-defined womanhood elsewhere in this country either.

It is not my intent to postulate that the Southeast looks like “let’s give the world a Coke” commercial, as that is laughably false. However, I do take issue with people without color using the Southeast as the example for: racist communities, racist peoples, racist institutions, racist culture, ad nauseam; there is actually a thriving Southeastern geographical culture comprised of people of color who consider themselves to be of or from the Southeast and have no illusion that the North or West would be less hostile to us with regards to race. Further, people without color who wish only to look at the Southeast need to check out the beam in their own eye before commodifying all of the Southeast into a caricature comprised of media stereotypes from Gone with the Wind, Deliverance, The Education of Little Tree, and CMT videos, as there are plenty of strong, educated people of color in the Southeast and just as many white folks playing at being good antiracists as you’d see in any other geographical province.