40 Quotes by John Shelton Reed

Southern barbecue is the closest thing we have in the US to Europe’s wines or cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes.

We could say that people who eat grits, listen to country music, follow stock-car racing, support corporal punishment in the schools, hunt ’possum, go to Baptist churches and prefer bourbon to Scotch are likely to be Southerners.

I don’t think massification and globalization and all those other ‘izations’ are necessarily hostile to regionalism.

Why can I write ‘South’ with some assurance that you’ll know I mean Richmond and don’t mean Phoenix? What is it that the South’s boundaries enclose?

You ask people what their ethnicity is, and a lot of Scots-Irish people either don’t know or if they know it they just don’t acknowledge it. It’s not something they really identify with. They’re just plain old Americans, plain vanilla. I don’t think they are a self-conscious voting bloc.

If you care to define the South as a poor, rural region with lousy race relations, that South survives only in geographical shreds and patches and most Southerners don’t live there any more.

The South is like my favorite pair of blue jeans. It’s shrunk some, faded a bit, got a few holes in it. it just might split at the seams. It doesn’t look much like it used to, but it’s more comfortable, and there’s probably a lot of wear left in it.

Every Southerner, I think, knows people like Bill Clinton, maybe not quite as smart and maybe not quite as liberal, but kind of a glad-handing, country-club yuppie Southerner. The problem is we don’t have labels for middle-class Southerners.

Maybe we’ve been brainwashed by 130 years of Yankee history, but Southern identity now has more to do with food, accents, manners, music than the Confederate past. It’s something that’s open to both races, a variety of ethnic groups and people who move here.