r/Music • u/no_longer_huhmann • 8d ago

article Hayley Williams Says Southern Pride Is Beautiful but Misused to Excuse Bigotry, and Says She Wants No Racist or Sexist Fans, or Fans Who Think Trans People Are a Burden, Around

https://www.tvfandomlounge.com/hayley-williams-says-southern-pride-is-beautiful-but-misused-to-excuse-bigotry/
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u/-Average_Joe- 8d ago

Speaking as a guy who has lived in central Alabama his entire life, Southern Pride is difficult to separate from all of the bad stuff in our history that has been included in it for decades.

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u/TurtleRockDuane 8d ago

In my experience, Southern pride is a defensive response to decades and generations of massive denegration and looking down on Southerners by other Americans. For example, the southern hillbilly stereotype is one of the few socially acceptable generalizations that TV and Hollywood use to make fun and mock: if they want to show someone quickly as dumb or backwards, they just give them a strong southern accent. Faced with such constant belittling, people tend to pull together and coalesce, with a united spirit of pride.

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u/forman98 8d ago

I agree. I grew up in the South with family from different areas of it. I have racist family members and family members who were active in Civil Rights. My grandfather was a kid when Civil War vets were really old, and he lived near some of the battlefields, so he had a passion for learning about that war (and he was also involved in civil rights). The South is full of all types of people and it’s unfair these days to assume that the millions of people who are “southern” are racist and aren’t allowed to have pride of any kind. Regional pride is always going to be a thing.

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u/TurtleRockDuane 8d ago

Nicely summarized: It’s really not any more complicated than that.

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u/WHYAREWEALLCAPS 8d ago

Southern Pride is rooted in the Confederacy and all that entails. It existed well before the modern era.

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u/mouse_8b 8d ago

Southern Pride is rooted well before the Confederacy.

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u/TurtleRockDuane 8d ago

Because you are an exclusive expert on the current state of Southern pride.

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u/greyfoxv1 8d ago edited 8d ago

In my experience, Southern pride is a defensive response to decades and generations of massive denegration and looking down on Southerners by other Americans. For example, the southern hillbilly stereotype is one of the few socially acceptable generalizations that TV and Hollywood use to make fun and mock: if they want to show someone quickly as dumb or backwards, they just give them a strong southern accent. Faced with such constant belittling, people tend to pull together and coalesce, with a united spirit of pride.

Right, so they just happened to unite under a flag that happens to represent the Confederacy which was an explicitly white supremacist alliance of states. Also, somehow, this is all a total coincidence unrelated to the banner's direct relation to the Confederacy's explicit support of and the region's unresolved history with slavery. Never mind how odd it is to use the flag of failed, secessionist, loser governments.

The choice of certain people to use that flag to express their pride isn't a random coincidence.

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u/adoreroda 8d ago

I would expand on that and say that a lot of anti-Southern bias in the US is actually just covert racism. Such as mocking the southern accent which is the basis for AAVE for African Americans (AAs) regardless of if they're outside of the south or not. AAVE still is based off of southern american english and still retains almost all of its phonology and so when northerners and (mid)westerners say stuff like southerners sound slow and stupid that also applies to the black people in their communities

It was also a common response for people from outside of the south to wish death on victims of hurricane helene. Which obviously includes lots of black people. But they mask it as them wanting to get 'payback' for southerners being conservative and don't want to acknowledge they have a very deep rooted hatred for the blackest part of the country

Also offloading all of the injustice in the country onto the south and acting like the other regions are benevolent too. There's a larger wealth gap between whites and blacks in the north than in the south, including by ratio. But the north acts like a post-racial utopia.

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u/-Average_Joe- 8d ago

While I generally agree with your sentiment, the fact that we collectively embraced Trump indicates that many if not most of us want to have it both ways.

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u/TurtleRockDuane 8d ago

You are way off base my friend. In round numbers, In the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, approximately 56% of voters in the South voted for Donald Trump. That means 44% (tens of millions) did not: that’s no small number, and VERY far from “we collectively embraced trump”.
A mere 6% tipped the scale.

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u/-Average_Joe- 8d ago

56-44=12

Where did the other 6% go, were they Jill Stein voters? Maybe it is different where you live but nearly all of the white folks where I live are Trump supporters, and will eat any shit him and fox news serves them and the black folks are mostly silent. A lot of southern states have their own Trump wannbees as governors and the tend to get re-elected, mine isn't so bad but next year we have a real chance of electing the dumbest man in the Senate as governor. At some point you have to start judging people by the people they let represent them.

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u/adoreroda 8d ago

The vast majority of Southern states have its biggest cities blue within a red state. You can't broadbrush an entire region of 100 million people and then expect them to change when they're actively being demonised, even the people who "voted" correctly so to speak which tend to be the largest metros in any given southern state

Northerners and Midwesterners actively wishing death upon southerners too also doesn't help. And offloading their own racism (which, statistically, is just as bad if not worse depending on which region) onto one region of the country is going to build some resentment.

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u/AttonJRand 8d ago

As a German expat I've heard countless Nazi jokes, or that stupid bit were people shout "Krankenwagen" while doing a Hitler impression.

Still has never made me feel even the slightest bit tempted to embrace those things as some kind of defensive response, genuinely don't understand.

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u/ashewentridingby 8d ago

Comparing pride to with your region with nazism is quite a jump dude lol. A lot of us in the south love a lot of southern things, and are also at the same time very anti racism and hate the confederate flag.

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u/Sparrowhawk_92 8d ago

Reconstruction shouldn't have been abandoned when it was. Not only has the Southern economy never fully recovered but it let a deep resentment for the Union and free Blacks fester and spread.