--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Host: Support for this show comes from Strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place?
--:-- Host: Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer.
--:-- Host: Support for this show comes from Macy's. Layering is an art form. All it takes is a bit of intention, style, and of course, the perfect cold weather staples.
--:-- Host: So find the perfect look for you with the help of Macy's Fall Fashion Guide, Your one-stop shop for fall's latest trends and must-haves, curated by their experts. From leather to denim to cozy knits, find everything you need to piece together your new fall look.
--:-- Host: Explore the Macy's Fall Guide for yourself and shop in-store or online at Macy's.com.
--:-- Host: The least expensive option.
--:-- Host: These kind of just, all those colleges seem to be the same. The kick in the south are just a little bit more laid back.
--:-- Host: This is Explain It To Me from Vox. I'm John Flynn Hill and you guys, school is back in session.
--:-- Host: If you were a nerd like me or liked to party at college, also like me, this time of year is a good one for you. Heading back to campus, seeing your friends after the long summer, maybe even hitting a football game if you and your school were into that kind of thing.
--:-- Host: And if you're a student now, there's a good chance you identify with that last one. More and more Americans are choosing to go to school in the South, big state schools with huge football programs and Greek life.
--:-- Host: I had family in Tennessee and Alabama, so growing up we always watched Tennessee football and Alabama football and would go down and see our family.
--:-- Host: And I think when it was time to do the college process, I toured all the liberal arts colleges in the Northeast, and they all kind of seemed the same to me.
--:-- Host: I was looking for a school that was both accredited for engineering so that the degree would be respected, but also have a religious background.
--:-- Host: And that really narrowed my search down to a couple schools, primarily in the South.
--:-- Host: And what particularly drew me to go down South for undergrad was the fact that I wanted to be a part of a historic black college.
--:-- Host: And the preponderance of those colleges tend to be in the American South.
--:-- Host: Wall Street Journal reporter Doug Belkin covers higher ed, and he's seen a pretty big change.
--:-- Doug Belkin: The numbers of kids from the north heading south has increased, I think, 88% over about a decade.
--:-- Doug Belkin: Traditionally, there were some schools that attracted kids from the north, the elite schools like Vanderbilt and UVA and UNC.
--:-- Doug Belkin: That's expanded to the publics and the numbers are just have really exploded since the pandemic so the schools that have been really driving this clemson georgia institute of technology university of mississippi has really climbed university of tennessee at knoxville the number of freshmen from the northeast jumped to nearly 600 in a class of about 6800 last year up from about 50 in 2002.
--:-- Doug Belkin: Some of these schools, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, 11% of students are now coming from the Northeast. It was less than 1% two decades ago.
--:-- Doug Belkin: It's actually a big issue. A lot of the administrators we spoke to on this story said their biggest problem is handling growth, trying to keep up, trying to make sure that the infrastructure can match the expanding student body, which is not a problem that a lot of the northern states are dealing with.
--:-- Doug Belkin: So when did we see this trend start?
--:-- Doug Belkin: So this has been going on for a decade. But after the pandemic, it accelerated considerably.
--:-- Doug Belkin: And students were looking up north. They were seeing their older brothers and sisters and cousins sort of stuck in dorm rooms, being sequestered, lockdowns.
--:-- Doug Belkin: And in the south, they were more open with where you could be. The football games were going on. People up north were watching that happen on television, and they were jealous.
--:-- Doug Belkin: And these kids who were sophomores and juniors at the time said, maybe I should consider going south for school.
--:-- Doug Belkin: Obviously, college is also more expensive than it used to be.
--:-- Doug Belkin: What role is cost playing in all of this?
--:-- Doug Belkin: So the Southern Publix are just good deals right now. They cost in some cases $10,000 and $15,000 less than the flagships, even for home state kids up north.
--:-- Doug Belkin: So a number of the students we spoke to for this story said that finances made the decision for them.
--:-- Doug Belkin: One of the young women we spoke to wanted to go to Syracuse. It was about $80,000. They offered her a $15,000 scholarship. She got into South Carolina, and it was less than half of that.
--:-- Doug Belkin: And that kind of made the decision for her.
--:-- Host: I wonder for the students that are from the North and go South, if there's any sense of culture shock.
--:-- Doug Belkin: Yeah, the kids did speak about that a lot. Almost all of it was in a positive sense.
--:-- Doug Belkin: Most of them, I think, found it charming and quaint.
--:-- Doug Belkin: They appreciate, I think there's a level of hospitality.
--:-- Doug Belkin: I know that's a cliche, but I think that came up a number of times with students and a sort of level of politeness that they seem to appreciate.
--:-- Doug Belkin: The young woman we spoke to said that the pace of life is slower in South Carolina than when she grew up in Long Island.
--:-- Doug Belkin: And when she goes to the grocery store, she has to sort of slow herself down, especially after she's just returned from New York and enjoy the experience of shopping and talking to the cashier and the other customers, that it's just not as fast.
--:-- Doug Belkin: But she likes that.
--:-- Host: Okay. So I know in a perfect world, students are thinking of academics when they pick schools.
--:-- Host: But I got to admit, I picked Howard.
--:-- Host: And part of the reason was I saw a lot of movies with HBCUs and it looked like a lot of fun.
--:-- Host: How much is this change driven by campus culture?
--:-- Doug Belkin: You know, these are schools where college football is big and there's a big, robust Greek life.
--:-- Doug Belkin: Is that a factor at all?
--:-- Doug Belkin: Huge factor, probably the biggest factor, right?
--:-- Doug Belkin: So football Saturdays, all the kids we interviewed for this story last year were all talking about how football is a religion in the South.
--:-- Doug Belkin: The Saturdays, you know, everything sort of stops, like the Sabbath, and people go to these games, and that's what's happening, and that generates a sense of community that's powerful and positive.
--:-- Doug Belkin: College football is a recruiting tactic. I mean, that's what it is.
--:-- Doug Belkin: People look at it as a sport, and it is, but it's a huge commercial for the university.
--:-- Doug Belkin: Who doesn't want to go to a school where everybody's screaming and yelling and full of school spirit?
--:-- Doug Belkin: So that's the starting point, I think, that, you know, the college football creates a virtuous circle for enrollment in marketing, and it always has.
--:-- Host: You've seen all of these sorority rush talks and these issues that are coming up around the sort of positive ends of fraternity and Greek life down there.
--:-- Host: And the schools themselves are reaching out.
--:-- Doug Belkin: They've done a lot of work and not just over the past few years but over a decade or more reaching out to Northern kids because there's a lot of money in New Jersey and in New York and in Connecticut.
--:-- Doug Belkin: And so they're smart. They go where the money is. They try to tell kids, this is what we offer. It's still going to be cheaper. Come check us out.
--:-- Host: Up next, the online trend that has students rushing down south.
--:-- Host: Should never stop suspecting anything.
--:-- Host: How can you not be funny crawling around on a coffin?
--:-- Host: No, that's true.
--:-- Host: Catch Only Murders in the Building official podcast. Now streaming wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Host: And watch Only Murders in the Building. Streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+.
--:-- Host: For bundle subscribers, terms apply.
--:-- Host: This episode is brought to you by eBay.
--:-- Host: We all have that piece. The one that's so you, you've basically become known for it.
--:-- Host: And if you don't yet, fashionistas, you'll find it on eBay.
--:-- Host: That Miu Miu red leather bomber, the Cousteau Barcelona cowboy top, or that Patagonia fleece in the 2017 colorway.
--:-- Host: All these finds are all on eBay, along with millions of more main character pieces backed by Authenticity Guarantee.
--:-- Host: eBay is the place for pre-loved and vintage fashion.
--:-- Host: eBay. Things people love.
--:-- Host: Hey y'all, this is True Southern Accent, and this is Alabama Accent versus Mississippi.
--:-- Host: Okay, so more students from across the country are going to the South for college.
--:-- Host: And before the break, we heard some of those reasons. Politics, cost, and also maybe a hashtag.
--:-- Host: I knew you wanted try-dough when you walked in.
--:-- Host: Hey, good friends.
--:-- Host: So today is day four of Alabama Rush.
--:-- Host: What's in my Rush bag? Pack my Rush bag.
--:-- Host: But hey, if y'all like watching it, I'm not complaining.
--:-- Host: If you've been anywhere near an algorithm at the beginning of the school year these past couple of years, there's a good chance you've encountered hashtag rush talk.
--:-- Host: It's also attracting the attention of TikTokers around the world.
--:-- Host: Trying to say it's fun to be a young woman. It's fun here.
--:-- Host: Videos of girls trying to join sororities, often blonde, dressed to the T, and hoping to get into the house of their choice.
--:-- Host: And people are watching.
--:-- Host: On TikTok, there are over 1 million videos with the label.
--:-- Host: As your official Demo Rush price breakdown for us, friend, we got another one.
--:-- Host: Let's get into it.
--:-- Host: You can't talk about booze, boys, beliefs, ballots, and bucks, yet each of these girls has on a $1,300 outfit.
--:-- Host: If you missed it, that's a Ray Rice Ravens jersey in the background of this Alabama sorority TikTok. Ray Rice.
--:-- Host: Now, I'm very familiar with the South. Basically, all my family is from there.
--:-- Host: But I'd never seen anything like Rush Talk before.
--:-- Host: To find out where all of this comes from and why so many of us can't look away, I talked to Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: She's the author of the book Southern Beauty, Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: She herself is from Mississippi, and I started our conversation asking her what makes Rush Talk different down there.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: I mean, lots of schools have Greek life, right?
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: Well, the Southern schools have become sort of like the Olympics of sorority rush.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: They're the apex.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: And what has happened is there has always been a large and active Greek life on most flagship Southern campuses.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: And the student body makeup has changed in the past 20 years.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: For instance, the University of Alabama, where many of these videos are originating, used to be mostly students from Alabama.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: There's a moment of nostalgia right now for the nation as a whole, but also for white Southerness and for this sort of experience of being pampered and special, this sort of golden time of your four-year college career as this moment that it's proving very attractive to out-of-state students.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: And they come down, and part of what they try to do is approximate what they see as the ideal white Southern womanhood performance during Rush.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: How did we get these sororities? Like, what is the history behind them? How did they start?
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: So sororities started because they were excluded from men's literary clubs.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: This whole system is about exclusion, about rising in your own status.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: But to do that, it's necessary to exclude other people.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: Well, so when they were shut out of men's literary clubs, women on some college campuses, and a couple of them started in the South, in Georgia, formed their own literary clubs.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: Their debates were not about politics, but they were more about social issues.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: And some of the same prescriptions about womanhood were upheld through these groups.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: You write in your book that rituals like Rush are these performative symbols of the South.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: What history is it that they're invoking exactly?
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: They are invoking the privilege of the plantation.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: You know, the white Southern woman was the emblem of the white South and its rationale because she was supposed to be endangered.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: And this sort of, again, feeling protected and special and on a pedestal in a certain way in the contemporary milieu is attractive to many of these young women.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: You know, there's a real emphasis in Southern history with the notion of purity.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: And this plays out in all sorts of ways.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: And it's one thing that you see being evaluated by sororities is whether someone has a good reputation.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: So don't think that just because you can buy, you know, a boatload of David Yerman bracelets and have all the right couture that that's enough.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: Because it's not.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: And a lot of what goes on in Greek life is about attracting the right fraternities that you will be adjacent to for that sort of mating and marriage project.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: So I actually wrote about it on page 50 that actives, the ones rushing these potential new members, look for a certain look.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: Put together cute but conservative at ease attractive but not flashy not too much makeup Not attempting to look older Not sexy Definitely not sexy I don't want to see anything that I shouldn be seeing during Rush, noted one Alabama active, because what we are looking for is a lady.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: And that pretty much sums it up.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: There are traditionally white Southern sororities that will admit here and there a member, a person of color, but it's not like they're going to admit a critical mass.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: There's a tipping point.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: And those houses are meant to be for the daughters of cotton planters, not cotton pickers.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: I want to get into that money piece as well.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: You know, some of the big trends for these videos are things like, you know, outfit of the day or get ready with me.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: And the fashion is not inexpensive.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: You know, these women are wearing outfits that cost thousands of dollars.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: Could you talk a little bit more about the role that class plays in this vision that we're getting of online Southern womanhood?
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: Well, so it's interesting because I think the people who have successfully turned themselves into influencers probably aren't paying a dime.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: They're getting these clothes donated to them, sent to them by these brands that want the exposure of getting a million views from this Rushie putting her reels on TikTok.
--:-- Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd: But for others, yeah, that gets back to that conformity issue because it's a certain look that I just described.
--:-- Host: Good morning. Today's day five of Bama Rush.
--:-- Host: Day one of Sisterhood. We finally get to wear dresses.
--:-- Host: My shoes are from Steve Madden.
--:-- Host: My necklace is Pandora.
--:-- Host: My earrings are Paz Boutique.
--:-- Host: My shoes are from Michael Kors.
--:-- Host: My dress is Anthropologie.
--:-- Host: David Ureman. David Ureman.
--:-- Host: So this is from Neiman Marcus.
--:-- Host: These are David Yerman, David Yerman.
--:-- Host: David Yerman, E. Newton.
--:-- Host: Neiman's and... David Yerman.
--:-- Host: David Yerman.
--:-- Host: I feel like I ate this one up.
--:-- Host: And that's where that capitalism comes in.
--:-- Host: You know, you have this free market of femininity, basically.
--:-- Host: People, I'm no economist, but in the economy of Rush, it is a blood sport.
--:-- Host: And even though they are smiling and acting happy and like they're your best friend, These young women are not the other young women's friends because they're all competing with each other.
--:-- Host: When I did Bama Rush, I was like, I don't want my race to be too big of a factor in this.
--:-- Host: And it wasn't until one house made sure it was.
--:-- Host: I don't know about you guys, but Rush Week is so hard.
--:-- Host: Actives in the houses would be promoting their favorite Rushies.
--:-- Host: First, they would use posters, like poster boards, all over the house with the pictures of these girls that they wanted.
--:-- Host: They were from their hometown, and she's so cute, and y'all are going to love her, and all of that.
--:-- Host: And then they went, of course, to slideshows, you know, the old Kodachrome, Click Forward, and then, of course, PowerPoints.
--:-- Host: And now that's sort of no longer necessary because the girls are beaming their message directly to the sororities for better or worse.
--:-- Host: Coming up why the south has always had something to say and why the rest of us are starting to listen.
--:-- Host: Imagine fast hydration combined with balanced energy perfectly flavored with zero artificial sweeteners.
--:-- Host: Introducing Liquid IV's new energy multiplier sugar-free.
--:-- Host: Unlike other energy drinks, you know, the ones that make you feel like you're glitching, it's made with natural caffeine and electrolytes, so you get the boost without the burnout.
--:-- Host: Liquid IV's new energy multiplier sugar-free hydrating energy.
--:-- Host: Tap the banner to learn more.
--:-- Host: This episode is brought to you by FXX and Hulu.
--:-- Host: An all-new season of Futurama is back, blending heartfelt moments with razor-sharp of humor while accidentally saving the day.
--:-- Host: The Planet Express crew is back, defying gravity and common sense.
--:-- Host: From the creator of The Simpsons comes 10 new episodes where the romance is hotter, the threats are bigger, and the action hits harder.
--:-- Host: Don't miss the all-new season of Futurama.
--:-- Host: Watch it Mondays on FXX or streaming on Hulu.
--:-- Host: I just talk country. I'm a Georgia peach.
--:-- Host: Everywhere I go, they know where I'm from.
--:-- Host: It may seem like Southern culture is newly dominant.
--:-- Host: According to Bloomberg senior reporter Amanda Moll, it's actually been a long time in the making.
--:-- Amanda Moll: But before we get into her reporting, there was one essential fact I needed to know about her.
--:-- Amanda Moll: Where'd you go to college?
--:-- Amanda Moll: University of Georgia. Go Dawgs.
--:-- Amanda Moll: Once we got the niceties out of the way, I asked Amanda, what's new about the way the South has trickled into American culture at large?
--:-- Amanda Moll: I think that the process of the South becoming more salient and more dominant in American culture, and especially in American pop culture, is, you know, a process of decades and decades and lots of sort of structural and legal changes, both in the South and in the country at large.
--:-- Amanda Moll: So the level of saturation we're at right now, I think, is unique.
--:-- Amanda Moll: So over time, the South has grown in the American imagination.
--:-- Amanda Moll: What first made that possible?
--:-- Amanda Moll: Well, I think in the 1960s, you see the sort of like twin occurrence of political evolution and logistical evolution, technological evolution.
--:-- Amanda Moll: The political aspect is, of course, the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Act, which ended Jim Crow in the South.
--:-- Amanda Moll: And then you also have the practical shift, which is air conditioning.
--:-- Amanda Moll: So in 1956, you get sort of the advent of the American Highway Program, which builds interstates that connect places and parts of the country that were previously difficult to travel between.
--:-- Amanda Moll: And that really helps the South.
--:-- Amanda Moll: The South was sort of like industrially underdeveloped relative to the Northeast and the Midwest.
--:-- Amanda Moll: So the advent of the highway system made it a lot easier for the South to interact commercially with the rest of the country, made it a lot easier for the South to interact commercially with itself.
--:-- Amanda Moll: And the end of Jim Crow and the advent of air conditioning made it more possible for lots of different types of businesses to think about the South as a possible location, made it possible for more people to think about the South as a place that they might want to live.
--:-- Amanda Moll: This change across time that has led us to where we are now, where the population of the South has been growing for decades and is still growing.
--:-- Amanda Moll: Okay, so another thing is that Southern states started offering advantages to businesses.
--:-- Amanda Moll: What are those advantages and how have they changed the culture down there?
--:-- Amanda Moll: You see these state governments across the South and this is especially true in Florida Texas Georgia the states in the South that already had significant populations and significant cities
--:-- Amanda Moll: You see state governments start putting together tax rebate packages, incentive packages, where they pitch themselves both to the sort of business community at large and to specific employers.
--:-- Amanda Moll: One way you can really see this happening is southern states pitching themselves as a union unfriendly alternative for car manufacturing.
--:-- Amanda Moll: So you see that especially happening with southern states attracting foreign car manufacturers, avoiding paying the higher wages and offering the better working conditions of the Midwest and Northeast, which had been traditionally areas of car manufacturing.
--:-- Amanda Moll: Could you talk about the movie business as well?
--:-- Amanda Moll: I feel like every time I watch a show or movie, there's that thing at the end where it's like made in Georgia.
--:-- Amanda Moll: Yeah, this is the car business and the movie business are both great examples of how this like similar playbook works sort of like across industries.
--:-- Amanda Moll: Netflix has a huge complex in Atlanta.
--:-- Amanda Moll: A lot of Marvel movies over the past decade have been filmed in Georgia.
--:-- Amanda Moll: So they pitch themselves basically as locations where you have a lot of different like outdoor landscapes in those states that can stand in for a lot of different places.
--:-- Amanda Moll: You have the opportunity to move to those places to get the tax incentives, which can be millions of dollars per production.
--:-- Amanda Moll: They can really change the nature of a movie or TV show's budget.
--:-- Host: I want to get into the cultural impact.
--:-- Host: So you open your piece with OutKast at the 1995 Source Awards.
--:-- Amanda Moll: For those who don't know, tell us that story.
--:-- Amanda Moll: Well, you know, 1995 was a fascinating year in hip hop because you were in the middle of the East Coast, West Coast conflict.
--:-- Amanda Moll: And things were just tense.
--:-- Amanda Moll: And when OutKast won the award and got up, you know, people were booing, people were upset.
--:-- Amanda Moll: And then Andre gets on the mic and goes, close-minded folks, you know what I'm saying?
--:-- Amanda Moll: It's like, we got a demo tape and don't nobody want to hear, but it's like, did the South got something to say?
--:-- Amanda Moll: That's all I got to say.
--:-- Amanda Moll: What I call in my piece, the greatest called shot since Babe Ruth.
--:-- Amanda Moll: And he couldn't have been more correct.
--:-- Amanda Moll: And this, in my mind, is sort of the cultural story about America had already started to shift a little bit toward the South at that point, because of the sort of rising importance of hip hop in the country's pop culture really had an opportunity to stake a claim for themselves.
--:-- Amanda Moll: And that's what Andre did.
--:-- Amanda Moll: And he couldn't have been more correct.
--:-- Amanda Moll: You had this huge explosion in Southern artists, not just from Atlanta, but from Virginia Beach to Houston, basically, all across the South, sort of changing the face of American music.
--:-- Amanda Moll: You know, I think some people forget this, but when Justin Bieber got, who was Canadian, got discovered on YouTube, he moved to Atlanta to work with Usher's people.
--:-- Amanda Moll: So, you know, Black musicians across the South had such a huge impact on like decades and decades of American pop culture.
--:-- Host: I'm interested in knowing more about how the South has impacted music.
--:-- Host: I mean, you know, we have Southern hip hop.
--:-- Host: I just think of the impact of Gucci Mane a lot.
--:-- Host: But also country is a hugely popular genre right now.
--:-- Host: How has the South impacted mainstream American music, you know, since since that time?
--:-- Amanda Moll: The rise of Southern hip hop and the subsequent rise of country are sort of two sides of the same coin.
--:-- Amanda Moll: I don't want to say that like the sort of embrace of country is entirely reactionary because I don't think it totally is.
--:-- Amanda Moll: But I do think that some of the interest in like explicitly white Southern culture that has happened in the past few years is a reaction to the sort of omnipresence of Black creativity and Black Southern creativity in creative spaces and especially in music.
--:-- Amanda Moll: I think that, you know, when you look at someone like Morgan Wallen, who is enormously, enormously popular among listeners and has also been in the news for doing explicitly racist things.
--:-- Amanda Moll: So in this video that TMZ obtained, you can hear Wallen using the N-word on ring doorbell video from a neighbor's home.
--:-- Amanda Moll: CMT, country music television, has just removed the new video from one of its biggest stars.
--:-- Amanda Moll: Jason Aldean's song, Try That in a Small Town, raised eyebrows months ago for lyrics that critics described as evocative of racism and retaliation.
--:-- Amanda Moll: And then you also see some of the biggest pop stars in the world, Beyonce, obviously, sort of, yes, with Cowboy Carter sort of re-embracing her heritage as a Southerner and sort of questioning some of the tropes and the aesthetics and the sounds of white Southern music.
--:-- Amanda Moll: Which is, of course, there's no real such thing as white Southern music.
--:-- Amanda Moll: It's very hard to look at the South and go, OK, this is white Southern culture and this is Black Southern culture because there are just so many cultural overlaps over time.
--:-- Host: How does this, you know, new embrace of the South make you feel as a Southerner?
--:-- Amanda Moll: You know, I'm sort of of two minds about it because I think that it's good for all Southerners if people are more interested in the South.
--:-- Amanda Moll: I think that it's good for like Southerners of all stripes, of all races, of all backgrounds, that if people look at the South more as a legitimate part of the country and less as like sort of a backwater where people are sort of like subhuman and inferior.
--:-- Amanda Moll: It's also just strange.
--:-- Amanda Moll: It's really uncanny to see people sort of embrace the aesthetics of the South without, like, really contending with what the South is and what it has been and what it means at all.
--:-- Amanda Moll: Because I think that, like, I think that most Southerners do that.
--:-- Amanda Moll: Like, some of them might come to conclusions that I don't agree with.
--:-- Amanda Moll: But like, I think that being from the South requires you to interface with the region's history in a way that like the rest of the country sort of gets to skip if they so choose.
--:-- Host: We need some help from you.
--:-- Host: Next week, we're talking about horror films.
--:-- Host: They're doing great at the box office right now.
--:-- Host: If you like scary movies, tell us why.
--:-- Host: And tell us your favorite.
--:-- Host: Don't be scared.
--:-- Host: Give us a call at 1-800-618-8545.
--:-- Host: Or send us a note here.
--:-- Host: Listen to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members.
--:-- Host: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
--:-- [Theme music fades in]
