Definition of South, Southern Changing?

In a rather odd feature, North Carolina-based Associated Press writer Allan Breed asks the question today: “[A]re we heading toward a ‘No South’”?

Things are indeed changing in the South. And so is the notion of what it means to be “Southern.” In this most maligned and mused-upon of American regions, the term conjures a variety of images. Magnolias, front porch swings and sweet tea for some; football, stock cars and fried chicken for others; lynchings, burning crosses and civil rights marches for still others.
We’ve had the Solid South, the Old South and the New South. But are we heading toward a “No South”?

As the South’s population booms – projected to comprise 40 percent of the nation’s population by 2030 – a new Associated Press-Ipsos poll finds that the percentage of people in the region identifying themselves as “Southerners” is slowly shrinking.

The AP-Ipsos poll conducted this past month found 63 percent of people living in the region identified themselves as Southerners. That mirrors a trend from a University of North Carolina analysis of polling data that found a decline of 7 percentage points on the same Southern identity question between 1991 to 2001, to 70 percent.

“Does it mean that being a Southerner no longer has any meaning? I don’t think it does,” says Larry Griffin, a sociologist at North Carolina who analyzed the AP polling data. “It just has a very different kind of meaning.”

Are the qualities that have long been ascribed to the South really true anymore? Are Southerners really more hospitable than other Americans? Does family really count for more down South? Are depth of faith, loyalty to home, reverence for history and sense of place identifiably “Southern” traits?

The South has become “sort of like a lifestyle, rather than an identity anymore,” James Cobb, author of the newly published “Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity,” would argue. “The things now we would base Southern distinctiveness on are so ethereal.”

And sometimes contradictory: In a region that once tried to break away from the Union, people are generally considered more patriotic than the rest of Americans; in a place where blacks were oppressed for hundreds of years, poll after poll shows them identifying themselves as “Southern” even more often than whites do.

“The South is a region of irony,” says Bill Ferris, co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. “It’s both un-American and deeply American.”