All this talk of us "overcoming the divide" missing the point?

[terrell9584]

I wonder if they have missed something important. I am a native of Mississippi. The national perception of Mississippi is Bible Belt, redneck state that is uniform throughout. However, Mississippi can be divided into a few regions.

The Delta is the most obvious one, consisting a poor black majority, a large number of whom subsist only on government subsistence and of the rich white planters. The Delta also has a far different religious cast than the state as a whole, being primarily mainline Protestant as opposed to Evangelical with a substantial white Catholic community in Natchez and other areas towards the southern end.

The Coast is fairly easy. Coastal Mississippi is for all intents and purposes an extension of the two cities to the west and east: New Orleans and Mobile. Where you are on it depends which of the larger cities has more influence but the constants are that the coast is predominantly Catholic, celebrates Mardi Gras has a culture that is primarily "Louisiana" in orientation (same for Mobile), and really only has in common with the rest of Mississippi the flag, support of Mississippi college teams and of course, being under the state government. It is also home to one of the larger by proportion Croatian communities in America and they've been there a long time. I myself am a Slovonian.

Northeastern Mississippi is a subsidiary of Appalachia. It also represents where most of the leadership of the Mississippi legislature resides. Still a stronghold of the old one party Democratic south. Few Blacks at all.

The Pine Belt is an area in the Southeastern part of the state. Also largely white. I only consider Hattiesburg peripherally Pine Belt, as it is a college town (though rural areas of Forrest County fit it well), far better counties that represent it are ones like Greene and Perry. Also, objectively speaking, you would have to consider Washington County, Alabama (next to Greene) to be an extension of the Pine Belt

Jackson is basically it's own town though it is primarily a mixture of general Mississippi and the Delta, the general Mississippi I'll touch on later.

You have DeSoto which is becoming exurban south white Memphis. You have a number of majority black counties like Noxubee in the eastern part of the state that are really extensions of Alabama's Black Belt. And then finally you have general Mississippi.

General Mississippi is anywhere from between 30-55% black depending on the county. Strong Bible Belt area. Poor. Generally rural. General uneducated. And it is the Mississippi that is most often portrayed (negatively) when national stereotypes of Mississippi are formed. It basically takes in that huge center area of the state buffetted on all sides by the special regions I marked off.


And there is a point to this. National media assumes Mississippi to be a monoculture, monotone state. I just blew a big hole in that. So if there is not even a cultural continuity or unity within the arbitrary borders of a state like Mississippi (which admittedly does have a large amount of solidarity outside of the outliers) how the hell are you going to expect it in the rest of the country, when we have probably hundreds of localized cultural areas? Or can we even?


Because that's what all the hatred, red state vs. blue state, etc is about. It was about the culture wars. It was about multiple competing visions of how the culture of the nation should be trying to oppose their values on the rest of the nation. I can tell you something as someone who was raised as a Slovonian Catholic on the coast. The rest of Mississippi doesn't really like us. They take our casino money but they don't like us. Truth be told, we don't like them either and really don't group ourselves with them. And this is just within the state of Mississippi itself.

On the coast people really don't have a visceral anti-Delta hatred. We don't care. Some of our people end up marrying into Delta families (especially Natchez and Jefferson as of late) but otherwise we just could care less. However, in general Mississippi and Northeast Mississippi especially the people there absolutely detest those in the Delta and that hatred goes back to antebellum times, analgous to the general highland-lowland rivalry common to almost every Southern state with both lowland and Appalachian areas. And a component of it is racial. They don't like the blue blood whites for economic reasons and they view the poor blacks as "leeches"

And I should also point out that I oversimplified the Delta as the southern part really has a lot in common with a few neighboring parishes in Louisiana (to the point where it could be its own region) and then there is a general Delta that conjoins with that in Arkansas and Tennessee as you move farther north.


But to not write a novel I'll finish with my point. Are we asking too much with this bridging the divide thing? In the 2008 primaries we saw on both sides votes predicted while it was competitive in large part due to demographics. It was no secret why Huckabee fell flat in Charleston, SC just as it was no secret why Clinton got 75% or better in most Appalachian counties (including those in NE MS and ethnic voting behavior seems to be back on the upswing (if it ever really died). And it also belies the point that in Mississippi you have cultural regions that are multi-state.


So is it asking too much that we be totally united as a nation or have a common purpose? Are we even a real nation?. Many theories posit multiple nations within the United States. And ultimately can we continue to expect a nation as culturally diverse while surprisingly geared towards Balkanization as America has always been to continue remaining a united nation forever? Because let's face it, the only thing that unites Americans as a whole are national symbols, the fact that we live under the federal government and popular culture. Not all that different than Mississippi as a whole really.

[stevebreeze]

1. the biggest divide we have to overcome is economic not geographical

Often even within the same areas you have wide variances in income and wealth. Gated community's almost next door to lower middle class ones.

Hey why don't we bring back progressive taxation. That is after all the issue the Progressive movement started from.

[terrell9584]

3. That may be true

and I support progressive taxation but it misses my point entirely.

The question I'm trying to pose is whether or not the United States is really governable as a democratic unit anymore due to cultural issues. And those cultural issues are big. In my native area everyone and their mother owns a gun. People think nothing of advertising AK-47s in the paper and you can buy weapons AR-15s in many hunting/sporting goods stores in the area. Then you take an area like San Franscisco where no one owns a gun and view all guns as tools of evil.

And you can take this to abortion. In Catholic Biloxi if you get an abortion you're better off not telling people or if you do you better portray yourself as a repentant victim and believe it or not, despite it's supposedly liberal reputation, that is very true of New Orleans true. Because if that kind of thing comes out you're ruined socially. In San Francisco they just don't care. It's a different culture. And it applies to everything.


And the reason this is important is because time and time again Americans have shown that when the times get tough they tend to retreat back into their communities and their own idenities. It is what explains the the 2008 primary results. It is why after the most liberal decade in America's history at that time (1920s) the country made a hard turn towards "traditional values" with growing prejudicial sentiment in the 1930s. It wasn't a coincidence that the religious right had its gestation in the social and economic upheavals of the 60s and 70s.

I don't argue that we can't have a common national economic system and governance over it as a nation. What I am positing is whether or not we should reasonably expect to go beyond that in terms of national unity.

[Warpy]

2. I know that driving back and forth across the country, I looked forward

to the minute that NPR station in Oxford would come in. It's a very good one and any state that can do that right has something going for it.

Mississippi has always suffered from piss poor WASP leadership, kept in place by a population that is still furious about losing the Great Unpleasantness. Once that population wakes up sufficiently to recognize the heirs of the plantation robber class are not their friends, the state will improve vastly.

Now Alabama, they're just scary.

[terrell9584]

4. And you oversimplify Alabama too

Alabama also has multiple regions too (with at least 3 off hand I can think sharing territory in Mississippi). No state is a monolith.


And Mississippi doesn't really have WASP leadership anymore. Most people wouldn't consider Evangelicals WASPs and Evangelicals really don't have the power here anyone thinks they do. This is one of the only states with marijuana decriminalized. Now, it is true that they legalized gambling primarily to avoid a federal audit of state finances.

Much of the current crop of Mississippi leaders were people who were raised either middle class or poor and who made it through their own hard work and a little luck. Mississippi legislature (and therefore state government) is run by white Democrats from NE Mississippi.

And you also missed my point. I used Mississippi as a device to make a point about America.

[Warpy]

6. You have to realize I drove the length of Alabama

during all the Judge Roy Moore hooplah in late 2003. It was scary.

[terrell9584]

8. I have to ask what part

Because I can assure you Moore is not well received in heavily Catholic, Mardi Gras celebrating Mobile nor in all those ritzy suburbs around Birmingham like Mountainbrook.

[jotsy]

5. The contrast of variety has its challenges, yes.

There is potential for vibrant composition which can easily clash if we fail to conduct ourselves with caring, common sense, and tad bit of cautious optimism. The things that make us more the same, I believe are much more binding than our perception frames. We adore our children, want to honor our parents and define our presence. If we spent more time concentrating on our similarities instead of our differences, these growing pains of becoming a 'global community' wouldn't be so challenging.

Do not underestimate the desire or ability of the PTB to create and make the most of what division does exist.

[RKP5637]

7. Vladimir Putin once predicted the US would end up eventually regionalized, because

there are too many differences. At the time, I thought the remark was over the top. Now I often wonder if he was ahead of his time. It seems so many in the US have no desire anymore to work together, or is it the media only gives attention to the outrageous to attract viewers and fatten their bottom line, but at the same time further dividing the country. It seems each day the dissonant behavior in this country becomes greater and greater IMO. And the divide in many areas of the US grows and grows.

[howard112211]

9. There is no "divide" between the left and the right. The right simply hates the left

and does anything to sling mud at the left (which is actually the "center" and the left in our case). The left occasionally fights back but most of the time suffers from "battered wife syndrome" and tries to reason that if only we were nicer to the right they would stop being who they are (which is ridiculous and gets interpreted as weakness by the right).