Southerner

See also: southerner

English

Pronunciation

Noun

Southerner (plural Southerners)

  1. Alternative letter-case form of southerner (native or inhabitant of the south of any region).
  2. (US) Someone from one of the states which seceded in 1861 and briefly formed the Confederate States of America, or, more broadly, from some neighboring states as well (but excluding geographically-southerly states like Arizona); compare the South.

Usage notes

For some white, male authors, this term has an implicit racial marking. W. J. Cash wrote in 1941 "of the chip-on-the-shoulder swagger and brag of a boyone, in brief, of which the essence was the boast, voiced or not, on the part of every Southerner, that he would knock hell out of whoever dared to cross him." As Ineke Bockting wrote,[1] "Trying to deconstruct a set of myths into which he himself was born, Cash did not always succeed in going beyond his own white, male perspective. [] When Cash writes about the importance for ‘every Southerner’ of the ‘boast, voiced or not,’ that he would ‘knock hell out of whoever dared to cross him,’ John Shelton Reed argues, ‘plainly, Cash did not mean “every Southerner” to include Southern blacks and Southern women. For a woman to reveal that attitude would have been unladylike; for a black to display it could have been fatal [] ’"

Another example is found in a 1948 resolution of the Alabama State Democratic Executive Committee, which asserted "That the Democrats of Alabama would be most deeply hurt, shocked and disillusioned should any attack upon racial segregation be adopted as a plank in the 1948 party platform [...] Such an action by the National leadership of the Democratic party could but force every Southerner into the undesired position of determining which is the greater loyalty, that to the South, or that to the party."

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References

  1. 1995, Character and Personality in the Novels of William Faulkner: A Study in Psychostylistics, page 251
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