"Live" with John Shelton Reed

America’s most idiosyncratic yet iconic region—the South—has no interpreter who is more knowledgeable (or entertaining) than this Republican academic. 

 

He has been called “beyond doubt the most accomplished and influential living sociologist of the U.S. South.” Born in Manhattan, bred in East Tennessee, and for 31 years a professor at the University of North Carolina, Reed is the irreverent explainer of the South—to itself and to the rest of America. His more than a dozen books include groundbreaking sociological studies as well as the delightful 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South, co-authored with his wife, Dale.

 

Reed has one of the most unusual résumés in academe: In addition to being a professor he is also a barbecue judge, a country songwriter (his tune “My Tears Spoiled My Aim” was recently recorded), and has even appeared in a music video (“Teenie Weenie Meanie,” a tasteful vignette about a “midget lady wrestler”). Stranger still, Reed is a Republican in a famously Democratic discipline.

 

TAE associate editor Bill Kauffman spoke with John Shelton Reed at Reed’s home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

 

TAE: What is the South: Is it the states of the old Confederacy? A state of mind? A set of attitudes and traits?

 

REED: It’s all of those things. Geographically, it’s the 11 former Confederate states plus Ken­tucky and Oklahoma. But I’m less interested in the South than I am in Southerners, which is a different proposition. That’s a group of folks who self-identify with the region. A good first approximation is to let people be Southerners if they say they are.

 

TAE: How many residents of today’s South do?

 

REED: We’ve done survey research on that.

In all 13 states I just mentioned, a majority of people say they are Southerners, though in Florida the majority was just 51 percent.

 

TAE: How are Southerners different from non-Southerners?

 

REED: Religiosity and religious affiliation: the South is the one part of the world where most people identify with evangelical Protestant churches. You’ve got differences in attitudes toward violence and use of force: Southern households are half again as likely as house­holds in most other parts of the country to have weapons. The South is more conservative in political attitudes and values. In most cases it is true what they say about Dixie.

 

TAE: You’ve written that the South exhibits a “culture of vio­lence” and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. What do you mean?

 

REED: The South has historically had a homicide rate higher than the rest of the country. The kinds of homicides we’ve got more of are culturally understood, excused, and in some cases approved. They have to do with private redress of grievances. We have more homicides involving romantic triangles, more homicides that grow out of arguments and disputes. If you listen to country music, this is the kind of violence that is sometimes celebrated or at least presented sympatheti­cally. Someone’s got a grievance and is working it out. We don’t have more felony homicides: people killing strangers.

 

I’m not saying that high homicide rates are a good thing. But I am saying this is an extreme instance of the individualism and self-reliance that used to be American traits, and still are in some parts of the country, including the South.

 

TAE: Are Southern accents disappearing?

 

REED: They’re changing. They’re less dis­tinctive than they used to be. I heard a taped interview from the 1940s with a Confederate veteran: nobody talks like that anymore. Strom Thurmond was probably the last one.

 

The two big accent groups in the South are the lowland—Strom Thurmond—and the upland—Andy Griffith. A modulated form of the upland accent is expanding at the expense of the lowland: the accent you hear in Tennessee and Texas is the future of the Southern accent. It may be the future of the American accent: if you go in the military or listen to truck drivers on CB radio you hear more speech that sounds like it’s coming out of Texas or Tennessee. So accents don’t flow in just one direction.

 

Word usage is another thing. “Y’all” has been a Southern marker for a long time: it’s what people always say when they’re making fun of Southern speech. But younger non-Southerners are starting to say it.

 

TAE: Where did they pick it up?

 

REED: Probably rap music and athletes. It’s a useful thing. We need a second-person plural. Give it another 50 years and it may be an Americanism. I don’t see the British say­ing it. Speech is a complicated subject, but I’m confident that 50 years from now you’ll still be able to tell where someone comes from by listening to him talk.

 

TAE: You mentioned Andy Griffith. Have Southerners been ill served by television?

 

REED: Southerners certainly think we’ve been ill served by television! If you ask people what their grievances are as Southerners, you used to hear complaints about economic condi­tions and political power—that Southerners never got elected President. These days hardly anybody else does. But what people still com­plain about is that television and movies look down on Southerners. The thing is, Deliverance was written by a Southerner. Tobacco Road was written by a Southerner.

 

Television representations of Southerners have been either amusing hillbillies or vicious rednecks. The Gone with the Wind strain of elegant aristocrats has run out of steam. Not all media representations of Southerners have been unflattering. “Designing Women” put classic Southern social types in a New South Atlanta setting. And there’s a great movie called Mississippi Masala about an East Indian family that runs a motel in the Mississippi Delta. All over the South there are Patels running motels, you know. This is a Romeo and Juliet story with the Indian girl and Denzel Washington falling in love. That’s not your father’s South.

 

TAE: Is The Dukes of Hazzard on your screen?

 

REED: The Dukes of Hazzard was set in Georgia, filmed in California, and showed a pan-Southern South that doesn’t exist any­where. One week Bo and Luke are wrestling gators in the Hazzard County swamp, and the next week they’re running moonshine through the Hazzard County mountains. There’s no county in the South that has both alligators and mountains. But that’s people’s image of the South, so they put it all in one Georgia county and let these two Yankee actors work it out.

 

TAE: What about “Hee Haw”?

 

REED: I’m fond of “Hee Haw,” but of course Ray Charles liked “Amos ’n’ Andy.” “Hee Haw” was basically a white-faced minstrel show.

 

TAE: The Burt Reynolds drive-in movies of the ’70s: were they as good as I remember, or do I idealize them through the haze of memory?

 

REED: That’s where The Dukes of Hazzard comes from. The early ’70s were a brief shin­ing moment in the history of representations of the South. The Civil Rights movement was over. Southern schools were suddenly more inte­grated than non-Southern schools. You had all these New South governors like Reubin Askew and Dale Bumpers. Sam Ervin was on television grilling Watergate sleazebags and standing up for traditional values. Jimmy Carter was get­ting ready to run for President. It was an unreal moment, and Burt Reynolds was part of it. Ten years earlier, he would have been in Easy Rider getting ready to kill Captain America, but here he is a role model—laid back, self-deprecating, the good side of the working-class white South­erner, which hadn’t been seen for some time.

 

I enjoyed the early and mid ’70s. I didn’t vote for Jimmy Carter but that was a good moment for the South.

 

TAE: How do you explain NASCAR’s appeal? Is any of it racial, since auto racing is the one major sport other than hockey in which whites dominate?

 

REED: I have a hard time understanding NASCAR’s appeal, despite the fact that I grew up 20 miles from the Bristol International Speed­way. I’ve only been to one NASCAR race in my life. It was a spectacle and vastly entertaining, but I don’t feel the need to go again. In time it may develop a biracial appeal, but you’re quite right for the time being. It’s like country music: a predominantly white enterprise. I don’t think that’s part of its appeal except in a roundabout way: working-class white NASCAR fans have an easier time identifying with the drivers because these are for the most part working-class white guys like themselves. I don’t think that’s racism.

 

TAE: You were born in Manhattan. Is that acutely embarrassing for a Southern patriot?

 

REED: Yes, deeply embarrassing. My father was a surgeon interning in New York City and I arrived there. It’s on my passport. There’s nothing I can do about it. He grew up in East Tennessee and we got back as soon as we could after World War II.

 

TAE: You’ve quoted Lord Acton that exile is the nursery of nationalism. You were educated at MIT and Columbia. Did they serve as a nurs­ery of nationalism for you?

 

REED: Yes. I got interested in the South when I left it. I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York City in the ’60s, the era of the Civil Rights movement, which I missed altogether down here. But I was constantly being called on to explain things or apologize for things. People kept asking questions about “you people.” So I started reading about the South to figure out where I was from and what “we people” thought about things and why.

 

TAE: The percentage of Southerners telling pollsters that they favored integrated schools went from basically zero to 100 in three decades. Was it just the brute force of the state that caused that change?

 

REED: Part of it is that people are lying. They were lying in the ’40s because the socially acceptable answer was to say you were in favor of segregation, and since the ’80s the socially acceptable answer has been to say you were not in favor of it. But even so, that’s the most dramatic turnaround I’ve ever seen in public opinion data. Two things were going on. First, people actually changed their minds. You could see it happening in the survey data in the early ’60s. It’s hard to believe this, but before the Civil Rights movement a great many Southern whites

had persuaded themselves that black folks didn’t object to segregation. The Civil Rights movement told people you’re wrong about that, so if you’re in favor of segregation after 1964 you’re in favor of imposing it on people who don’t want it, which is a different matter from endorsing a polite biracial consensus.

 

Another reason is that after it happened it wasn’t as bad as people thought it was going to be. I was in a segregated school in Tennessee in 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled against school segregation. It was shocking: Out of the blue you get this court decision that says you’ve got to change the way you’ve been doing things. Another researcher and I found that Southern white birth rates decreased nine months to a year after Brown v. Board of Education. People were shocked and stunned...

 

TAE: Into impotency?

 

REED: They may have just decided to wait and see what happens before they had any children. And when desegregation did happen, it wasn’t as bad as they thought it was going to be. And there were compensations: You got a better basketball team.

 

After desegregation had taken place, this tem­peramental conservatism says it’s working okay, don’t wrench things around and go back to it. There’s also a generational component: younger Southerners were more accepting of deseg­regation than older ones.

This is what survey researchers calls cohort succession: people dying off are different from the people entering in.

 

TAE: Do most blacks in the South regard themselves as Southerners?

 

REED: They do now. If you asked what “South­erner” meant 100 years ago to most Southern­ers, it meant an ex-Confederate who stood up for “Dixie” and venerated Robert E. Lee. That means a lot of people living in the South, especially black folks, aren’t Southerners. Years ago “Southerner” almost invariably meant a white Southerner. One exception was Booker T. Washington, who made a point of talking about himself as a Southerner.

 

That changed in the ’60s. The University of Michigan does something called a “feeling thermometer” which measures how warmly people feel toward politically significant groups. In 1964, blacks in both North and South were much cooler toward Southerners than whites in the same regions. By 1976 there’s no racial dif­ference. Blacks in the South were, if anything, warmer than white Southerners toward “South­erners.” What happened in those 12 years? The Civil Rights movement made fundamental changes. White Southerners’ image had changed: the most prominent white Southern politician in ’64 was George Wallace. In ’76 it’s Jimmy Carter. The meaning of “Southerner” changed so that by 1976 blacks understood it included them. You get more and more Southern black politicians—Andy Young, Harvey Gantt, Doug Wilder—referring to “we Southerners.”

 

TAE: Are black-white relations in the South better than elsewhere in the country?

 

REED: I think Americans are understandably tired of hearing white Southerners talk about how good race relations are in the South. But by any measures I can lay hands on, they’re at least as good in the South as in other parts of the country with substantial minority populations. They may be better in Vermont or Montana, but who cares? No blacks want to live there. Some­thing like two thirds of the black office holders in the country are in the South, and Mississippi has more than any other state.

 

TAE: You’ve said the Confederate flag should be retired from public places. Why?

 

REED: I’ve got absolutely no problem with folks who want to fly the flag, put it on their license plates, tattoo it on their foreheads. They’re entitled to under the First Amend­ment. But when it comes to putting it on the state flag as they did in Georgia and Mississippi and flying it over the state house as they did in South Carolina and Alabama, that’s a recipe for conflict. The state flag ought to be a symbol of unity, and the Confederate flag does not evoke warm feelings on the part of a substantial frac­tion of the population.

 

TAE: You’ve suggested the dancing pig for a new Southern flag.

 

REED: Barbecue joints are one of the few places in the South where you get all kinds of people: black and white, bikers and lawyers, Christians and cowboys, all appreciate good smoked pork. So dancing pigs, which you see on barbecue joint signs, would make a great flag.

 

TAE: The South was long regarded as a con­quered province, but has it turned the tables on the North, what with NASCAR, Wal-Mart, and the ACC’s poaching in the Big East?

 

REED: People keep talking about how the South has taken over the country. Certainly we’re starting to pull our weight, but we’ve got a way to go before we take over. The South had a third of the nation’s population but half the new jobs in the ’90s. Per capita income is not up to the national average but it’s gaining.

 

TAE: What’s your favorite city in the South?

 

REED: For eating, New Orleans. For music, Nashville. For hanging out, probably some place on the Gulf Coast. Charleston and Savan­nah are great cities. I like some of the odd ones like Pensacola.

 

TAE: What is your least favorite?

 

REED: Places that are ashamed of being South­ern annoy the hell out of me. I usually have a good time in Atlanta but from time to time Atlanta is that way. The 1996 Olympics were an opportunity to show the world what the South had become and Atlanta wanted to pretend it’s not in the South! I have a friend who was in charge of hiring the caterer. He was going to have barbecue and Southern food, but the folks who ran it said no, we can’t do that. They hired some outfit from Buffalo that served hot dogs. It was a missed opportunity in many ways.

 

TAE: Is the term “redneck” a slur?

 

REED: It didn’t used to be. Originally it was an affectionate term for the Southern rural com­mon man who worked in the sun and got a red neck. Governor Robert Taylor of Tennessee used to talk about “my beloved rednecks” and he relied on their votes to get elected. But it’s become an epithet. It’s best to avoid it unless you’re using it fondly to describe somebody you know very well.

 

TAE: Rural Southern whites are the one social group that can be mocked with impunity, aren’t they?

 

REED: They may not be the only one, but yeah. Remember back in the ’92 election talking about the “Bubba Vote”? You didn’t hear about the “Tyrone Vote.” There’s a license to mock work­ing-class Southern whites. Brother Dave Gard­ner had the right response: he wanted to start something called the National Association for the Advancement of White Trash. Just make fun of it. We don’t need an anti-defamation league.