My American South

This week I read this really phenomenal essay by Kiese Laymon about growing up in Mississippi and it made me think about what my experience was growing up in Virginia. It was an experience I couldn't really come to terms with until I left and came to Chicago. These two years in the metropolis of the midwest have given me perspective on the place I call home.

Frankly, I used to hate the South. In high school I remember in my sophomore telling a girl who had family in Alabama that I hated the South that the South was full of racists that I wanted nothing to do with it. For me the South was somewhere far away from Warrenton Virginia where I had lived my entire life. The South was this constructed reality where the civil rights movement had happened. The South had nothing to do with me. I was from Fauquier County, not the South. I didn't particularly associate myself with Virginia even being my home.

However, there is something about leaving home that makes you realize you have one. I was unaware largely that I was from the South until people started identifying that about me in college. I think had I stayed in Virginia for college I would have never had to confront this whole reality because I would have still been able to be from Fauquier County. But in Chicago I was from Virginia and simpler yet, I was from the South.

At first I didn't really accept it. I clung to statements about being from northern Virginia or that I lived close to Washington D.C. but every time I said that I knew it was bullshit. I had grown up being told that this was real Virginia and Fairfax was a suburb of D.C. I lived in the Mosby Heritage Area. The Civil War was all around me and it was obvious which side people were on. So after coming home for Christmas for the first time I finally accepted that I was from the South just as my classmates had said.

I think the reason I didn't want to accept my own geographical origins is because I had gotten the idea in my head that the South was this intolerant place full of racists and bigots and that is not at all what the place I was from was like. My childhood did not teach me how to hate. It did not teach me intolerance or racism.  I just couldn't believe that someone else from my home could have had an experience that would have taught them to hate like that. When I was growing up tolerance and love were reinforced daily. Race was not a concept in the American South I grew up in for a number of reasons but my family and the community that raised me are an important part of it. I remember my father telling me about a bar fight he got in when someone insulted a young african-american woman who was with him. He tells the story with grandiose details but the message I always took away was that injustice was worth fighting even if he's bigger than you and your evening is going to end bleeding in the back of a taxi trying to use whiskey to sterilize your face. My mother raised me intertwined with the black community from the school she worked in and the quality of someone's character was never once brought into question because of their race.

I just didn't get race. And I still don't get it. Racism confuses the fuck out of me because I will never be able to process how in the hell the color of your skin makes you a different person. Shit. My hair is red doesn't mean anything about who I am.

I have come to realize that I am not from the American South that's full of ignorant white trash. I am from a place with a rich history and though some of it is marked by the horrors of oppression and injustice my experience was not that. It took me a while to realize that the American South where everyone is an ignorant racist is not a place I've ever been and it is most certainly not where I'm from. I'll admit there are ignorant racists in the South but you can find those types of people regardless of where you go. So I hope that people take the time to think before they start generalizing and orientalizing the southland that they don't know too much about because like any place or people, it's complicated.