John Shelton Reed
John Shelton Reed
John Shelton Reedis a sociologist and essayist, author or editor of twenty books, most of them dealing with the contemporary American South. Reed has also written for a variety of non-academic publications such as The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the Oxford American. He was graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1971. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1969 until his retirement...
ProfessionSociologist
agree asking good people
The South: What is this place? What's different about it? Is it different anymore? Good questions. Old ones, too. People have been asking them for decades. Some of us even make our living by asking them, but we still don't agree about the answers.
groups
Southerners are also like ethnic groups in that they have a sense of group identity.
barbecue closest hundred miles southern wines
Southern barbecue is the closest thing we have in the U.S. to Europe's wines or cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes.
long tourists south
As long as there are Japanese tourists, there will be a market for the Old South.
southern looks stereotype
The nature of the South is changing faster than the stereotypes are. Much of the South now looks like San Jose. Is it still southern?
smile-more southerner
Southerners smile more than other Americans.
hero believe poor
But I still do believe that there are useful things to say about Elvis Presley, including what his own ordinariness as a poor Southerner says about 20th-century hero-making.
heart dixie pieces
Dixie has just fallen to pieces. There are little patches of Dixie. But even in the heart of Dixie - in Alabama - Dixie is slipping. They've stopped using the word in commercial listings.
nice successful thinking
I think there's a suspicion in the South of people putting on airs. You see it in most successful Southern politicians, but you also see it in someone like Richard Petty, who may be a multimillionaire stock car driver, but he's also beloved because he has a nice self-deprecatory way about him.
hate trying ends
I've occasionally wished I had Caller ID. Even telemarketers, I hate to hang up on them. I try to explain I'm not interested, but they have all these canned responses so I end up having to hang up on them anyway.
race care poor
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.
moving past yankees
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.
running jobs justice
There's an ethic that says: 'You don't run off to the church for the sacraments of salvation, you establish a personal relationship with God. You don't run off to the courts for justice, you settle it yourself. You don't run off to labor unions to sort out your work relations, you can take this job and shove it if you don't like what you're doing.
country school stock-car-racing
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.