Why we're still struggling to understand the American South

We who are born in the South are marked by it. As African American painter Romare Bearden once said, “I only ever left Carolina physically.

Like Bearden, I left the American South at a young age, only to return to Birmingham, Alabama for holidays and vacations. But I also carried it with me everywhere. It was in me, in the way my mother socialized me to behave and dress, and I always saw myself in relation to my home place. The South was where I felt legible and connected.

As a kid in Massachusetts, I often felt defensive about how people disparaged the South. “Racist,” “backward,” “ignorant,” “violent” – these were terms that rolled off their tongues with no self-consciousness. They talked about being afraid of going to the South. Others made fun of me when I would come back after the holidays with the sounds of the South on my tongue. In these moments, my New England peers revealed a bigotry of the very sort they claimed to reject.

In truth, I experienced much more racism in New England than I ever did in Alabama. It was in Massachusetts where I was called slurs, threatened, and told I was in the wrong neighborhood. There was a smugness about it, too. Their assumption of being superior on “social justice” masked a willful disregard for the inequality in our midst.

But in Birmingham, I always felt a palpable defiance to any lingering presence of Jim Crow. It was like a forcefield around me, and I knew that anyone who dared harm me or the other children in my family would have hell to pay. It was a hard-earned sensibility, grown from the grief of bombings, lynchings, beatings, shootings. It was a disposition backed up with weapons and heart.

Graciousness and home training are paramount for Southerners, but there is also a toughness that comes from our history. And this is part of what I carry. It is what has served me in unwelcome places time and again. It is the source of my confidence in a profession in which Black women are still woefully underrepresented.

My latest book, “South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation,” is an encounter with the South. I ask the reader to travel with me, meeting a rich assortment of people and confronting how the South has always figured centrally in this country. It is where the American story began, and its abundance has fueled American prosperity.

I have often said that the South has done the dirty work for the nation, and I mean that quite literally. It has everything to do with the region’s loamy black and red clay soil and what it yielded. It has to do with the abundance of its natural landscape, where it seemed like anything could grow.

The European settlers came first to what is now the South. It is quite likely the first “Thanksgiving” was in Virginia. For the Early Republic to be established, the Southern state had to pay the Revolutionary War debt. That’s why our capital is in the upper South, Washington D.C. The United States became a global power because of the prosperity grown from Southern crops, particularly cotton. And Southern prosperity was inextricably linked to the enslavement of people of African descent. Push ‘em out, grind ‘em down. That was the choreography.

We simply cannot tolerate a sanitized national story any longer; one where we speak about the brilliance of the separation of powers, federalism and the expansion of democracy without talking about who was forced to suffer, with no say in the matter, for those things to be dreamed up and implemented.

The oil in Texas is what allowed us to become a car culture. Those mines in the Mountains have powered our conveniences. Our relatively comfortable lives in the States are not just the consequence of innovation and invention; they are a product of Southern manual labor.

But we must also go beyond telling a more truthful history. We need to take an honest look in at the ways that history has shaped our present-day living. The South’s central role in the country’s development also gave the region a leading part in its legacy of oppression. As a country, we are still so flippant about pushing people out of their homes through gentrification, foreclosure and eviction; working them half to death for a pittance (or effectively nothing if they are in prison); and failing to include so many of our most diligent workers in our political institutions, whether because of immigration status or poverty or past incarceration.

We learned the worst of what we do today from historic habit. The lesson: “It doesn’t matter how much people at the bottom suffer, as long as they serve the visions of those who are at the top of the social hierarchy.” And it must change.

Some of you might be thinking, “Wait a minute: You began by saying you wanted to defend the South from its stereotypes, and here you are describing brutality that is distinctly Southern.”

It is true, so much of the worst cruelty in U.S. history has taken place on Southern soil. But that history doesn’t belong only to the South. When one realizes that Wall Street began as a slave market, that the White House was built in part by enslaved people, that U.S. wealth and power depended on the South and the violence that happened there, you see the responsibility can’t lie with that region alone. Distance doesn’t reduce implication. And this is what I mean when I say that the South did the dirty work for the country. It handed over its wages of sin to the country’s acclaim.

Despite the stereotype that the South is backwards, it continued to be on the vanguard of American 20th century identity and culture. We have many national habits that are rooted there, whether it is wandering through grocery stores packed with every possible variety of snacks, or Walmart aisles with anything you could imagine; drinking soda; scarfing down fast food chicken; buying goods from Amazon (the brainchild of a Houstonian); or watching reality TV.

Take, for example, the popularity of TLC, which began as a learning network geared toward Appalachian residents who often didn’t have access to much formal education. It has morphed into a platform for Americans to watch exaggerated versions of our habits of excess. Almost invariably, Southerners become the most popular reality show superstars. We are good raconteurs, and we hold onto our humor to keep from crying. That makes the South both entertaining and honest.

The South is a region where people are disproportionately poor and vulnerable. Southerners make less than other Americans for their labor. It is a region where people often have more faith in God than in policy, even in the direst of circumstances. At times, a prayer can be more reliable than a Senator. For someone like me, the South’s politics are often depressing. But its culture is healing. It is the region that has given birth to every classic form of American music, with its plaintive and soul-stirring ways of describing hard living and resilient love. Perhaps most significantly, the South is the region that ignited the imagination of people across the nation and world with both its Black freedom and labor movements.

I wrote “South to America ” because it is important for me to tell the story of the region and the nation truthfully.

The South is not some strange, backwards, “other” land. It is the heart of this country. It has always set our national pace, while holding both its shame and its promise. If we can tell the truth about how central it is, Americans in other regions can cease to use it as a repository in which to dump national shame. Only then can we pursue the goal of being in right and respectful relation to one another.

So that’s what I’m asking us to model here.

Please join me at LinkedIn News’ Big Ideas Book Club , where we’ll discuss themes from “South to America” over the next few weeks. We’ll also have a live discussion on February 28 at 8pm EST, where I’ll respond to your questions. You can RSVP here .