I was shocked to see that self-centered perspective finally said directly.
I’ve encountered this interpretation before, just never stated explicitly. I didn’t want to reply publicly under my real name, but I’ll reply here, because this has gone on long enough.
So to the South, I say:
I am an American like you, not some foreign invader trying to dominate and ruin your way of life. We move to the south because we are all Americans and don’t know you hate us, don’t know you think your culture is under attack for having to coexist with us, don’t know we’re your enemy in your version of American history, don’t know some distorted version of a 150 year old war is still so salient, don’t know you see your culture as fundamentally at odds with the rest of us. We are Americans like you, and we thought you saw us the same.
You talk about how great your region is, how relaxed and friendly your lifestyles are, how pretty your landscape is, how mild your winters are, how important your history is to the story of America, and we think, “oh, that does sound nice, I would like to live there too.” But that’s not the reaction you wanted, was it? We misunderstood. You wanted your greatness to be acknowledged and celebrated by others, to be evangelized and exported, to bring in tourism money but for us leave and spread the gospel of the great South when we return home. You wanted to influence the rest of the country, the world, but you didn’t want to be influenced yourself. We misunderstood terribly.
But how could we have known? At first you were nice. Some cultural differences need to be navigated, some problems are observed, some culture shock existed on our end, but that’s to be expected, right? No one’s perfect. We know diversity means some inevitable misunderstandings and minor conflicts, but it can be worked out, we’ve done this before, with wave after wave of immigrants, so surely we can do the same between people already American. Sharing the best of us helps each of us improve our weaknesses, right? We’re all still one country, right? We have stereotypes about each other, but we have stereotypes about everyone, it’s not some personal thing with us “northerners” specifically, right? Right…?
It’s only after we make a life there for ourselves that your “Southern Hospitality” falls, that the full brunt of your true feelings about us, your true perspective of your relation to the rest of us becomes clear and we see the cracks in your claims of a pleasant lifestyle, the lies, the self-delusions. Maybe we were deluding ourselves, us, the supposedly rude “Yankees” trying not to be too judgmental. But you know your culture’s better, more moral, from more respectable heritage, having been here so long you forgot who you once were, only “American” remains in your ancestral memory. You are pure. So of course you think we, with our derived accents and our hyphenated-American ethnic qualifies, are less than you. Who’d have thought a white American could be a victim of xenophobia in the epicenter of white America?
And yet here we are, disoriented and alienated, simultaneously privy to the racism and xenophobia we as white people all try to keep hidden, while also being treated as one of those unwelcome foreigners to your perfect white culture. You don’t know what to do with us and we don’t really know what to do with you. We weren’t expecting this and you don’t seem to realize it. But we’re not the same, and in your hierarchical system that means we can’t be your equal. You can’t fathom that our lives are motivated by our own self interest to make our lives better, that our culture’s not just a twisted version of your own ideal one. No, you and your culture, the shining beacon in the world, must be our motivation, everyone’s motivation, and lack of immediate assimilation to your superior way of doing things is proof that we hate you, that we came to destroy that beacon. Everything we do is motivated by you, everything revolves around you. Change and difference is bad, cultural exchange is evil because you are already perfect. We see it in you choice of leadership: a narcissist in chief for a narcissist culture.
Many resent you now, hate you now, I resent you and hate you now, those feeling themselves you take as proof you were right all along. But that’s also what you wanted; you set us up to fail so you had more evidence of our hateful, inferior nature. We should have known since you’ve been doing the same to your African-American population from the beginning, but unfortunately, racism isn’t unique to you, so we didn’t see it in time.
But this is our home now too, and we work to fix it. You blame us for pushing unwanted social change, but we see plenty who were already here who want to fix it too. We see anti-black racism’s presence ever more strongly now, we see the other native Southerners, like your own LGBT community, First Nations people, non-Christians, people and their families who have also lived here their whole lives like you, but who have not benefited from your “generations of doing things this way.” They have as much if not more of a say in this than we do. Some of us leave, but this is the place they know.
Any hostility I have towards you now is not preconceived prejudice that I brought with me from the evil north – despite what you think, I had no animosity going in. I was too young to know any better. My feelings now are entirely a reaction to how you’ve treated me, a reaction to your assertions of your cultural superiority and my cultural inferiority, your inability to recognize you are capable of having flaws like the rest of us, your resistance to exchange, to learning how other cultures, other Americans, have adapted to things that are new to you. I can leave, but we’re connected, we share this country, this continent, this planet, and that’s what you wanted, isn’t it? For everyone to be connected to and influenced by you? You now need to learn you have no right to a top position, no right to harm others. You have to learn that receiving cultural elements from others is not domination, its growth. You have to accept that you are not perfect and have things to learn.
As much as you forget, we are all Americans.
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