Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The phrase “region and race” evokes, in the American consciousness, the South. Regional identity in the United States, almost a century and a half after the Civil War, is still most often defined in terms of northern or southern identifications. While many geographical regions of the country continue to maintain a distinctive regional culture, despite the enduring American fear of an impending national homogeneity, the South has somehow become “the most regional region” ( Dew 1994 : 745). It is not that the South is the only place in contemporary America where one can find differences in speech, or food, or values, or how history is told; nor is it that these differences are necessarily more pronounced in the South than they are in any other region. It is that the American South continues to provide the mythic space for the working out of a national identity. And the South has provided that space precisely because of its continued connection to the nation's racial conflicts. As historian Grace Elizabeth Hale has said, “The American South has most often provided the metaphorical and actual settings, the playgrounds of the American racial drama, the locations of American racial meanings” (1998: 282). This is not to say that the South is more racist than the rest of the country. In which part of the nation we would currently find the most racism, or even how one would define racism ... log in or subscribe to read full text