You're not from around here, are you?

The other day, a Northerner friend of my wife said, “Something I find surprising about people in the South – they don’t know who they are.” My wife said she knows who she is; she is from Texas. “That’s not what I mean,” the woman said. She gestured at another woman. “Carol is Italian. I’m Italian. If you are Italian, you grew up in an Italian neighborhood, just like Germans grew up in German neighborhoods and Poles grew up in Polish neighborhoods.”

In the South and in areas heavily influenced by the South, such as Northeast Texas where I grew up, there was town and there was country. I grew up in the country and cannot speak of town living with complete accuracy, but I do know the separations in town were: rich and poor, black and white. Poor blacks and poor whites did not live in the same part of town. Big towns and cities in the South might have had additional separation of Greeks, Italians, Spanish and Eastern European, but on the whole where somebody lived depended on income and not old European prejudices. We had new American prejudices in their stead.

Another difference between Northerner and Southerner has to do with religion. It’s a given with Italians and Poles that Roman Catholicism dominated almost all those ethnic neighborhoods. Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox were dominant religions in those neighborhoods. Jewish neighborhoods were Jewish.

That might seem an “Of course they were” to a Northerner, but it is a fact of further separation. Ask a Southerner what he or she is, the answer will be Baptist or Methodist or Church of Christ, Church of God, Church of God in Christ, African Episcopal Methodist, or a couple dozen more, with nothing to do with neighborhood.

Most Southerners are Scots Irish, Scot, Irish or English ancestry, and that is the major reason for the Northerner-European outlook and the Southerner-British thought.