The United States Is Southern Now

From booming metros to culture-defining exports, the South has quietly become a powerhouse.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
America is Southern Now by Amanda Mole read by Stephanie Spencer.
At the nineteen ninety five Source Awards, Andre Benjamin, you
may know him as the rapper Andre three thousand, got
up on a stage at Madison Square Garden and spoke
the future into existence while accepting the award for Best
New Rap Group alongside Antoine big Boy Patten, his collaborator

(00:22):
in the Atlanta duo Outcast, Andre looked out at a
crowd full of jeering East and West Coast hip hop partisans,
leaned over the mic and uttered a phrase that would
go down as one of the greatest called shots since
Babe Ruth. The South got something to Say. Andrea, of course,
was right about the future of hip hop. Within a
few years, the gravitational pool of the music industry would

(00:45):
be yanked southward, producing an absurd list of stars that
includes Beyonce, Lola, Wayne Migo's, Pharrell Williams, and Travis Scott.
But three decades later, it looks like he was also
prescient about the trajectory of America as a whole. Outcast
accepted its award, the signs of a changing country were
already there in the duo's hometown. The metropolitan Atlanta area

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would see its population increase by forty three percent from
nineteen ninety to two thousand, a growth rate that meant
an average of three hundred and sixty new people put
down routes in the SouthEast's most populous metro area every
day for ten years. By twenty twenty, the Atlanta metro
area was home to more than six million people, a

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population swollen with transplants from the Northeast and the rest Belt,
in addition to a significant group of immigrants, largely from
Asia and Latin America. Many of the region's other metro
areas Nashville, Houston, Dallas, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Jacksonville, Florida,
plus smaller cities like Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Durham, North Carolina,

(01:49):
have followed similar trajectories over the past few decades. Combined,
this growth has expanded the Southeast population at an annual
compound rate of roughly one percent since twenty ten, easily
the quickest growth of any region in the country. As
people go, so does culture. The recentering of America's population
has brought with it a host of changes in the

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country's economic, social, and political life. From where cars are
manufactured and movies are filmed, to where the upwardly mobiles
send their kids to college, and what they wear to
signal status. And just as the South has changed the country,
the country has changed the South too. There are a
number of different moments where you can plausibly argue that
America's southbound future was guaranteed. The birth of the Interstate

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Highway System in nineteen fifty six, the passage of the
Civil Rights Act in nineteen sixty four, American Airlines and
Delta's respective choices of Dallas nineteen seventy nine and Atlanta
nineteen forty one as their corporate hubs. As the historian
Raymond Arsenal argued in a Watershed nineteen eighty four paper,
these events were crucial, but their impact on migration was

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maximized by another force. As any Southerner over thirty years
of age to explain why the South has changed in
recent decades, and he may begin with the civil rights
movement or industrialization, Arseno wrote, but sooner or later he
will come around to the subject of air conditioning. In
nineteen fifty five, fewer than two percent of American homes

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had AC In nineteen sixty six, Texas became the first
state to have it in more than half of its residences,
and by the end of the decade, the entire South
had hit that benchmark. Not coincidentally, in Arseno's view, the
nineteen sixties were the first decades since the Civil War
that the South saw its population grow instead of decline,

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a reversal that was startling at the time. He attributes
the shift both to the success of the civil rights
movement and to the multifaceted impacts of cooling in the
region's homes, workplaces, stores, and medical facilities. Heat related mortality plummeted,
the region's historically high levels of outmigration declined, and Northerners

(04:00):
started moving south. In a nineteen seventy editorial, The New
York Times declared that year's census the air conditioned Census
for the evident impact that the technology was already having
on Americans migration between regions. Up to that point, the
South's political and cultural isolation had left the region and
its people at a bit of a remove from dominant

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American culture, and some of its leaders still resentful. At
the forced end of Jim Crow weren't eager to invite
outsiders in but as time passed, an ac became even
more omnipresent. Some state governments and prominent business figures saw
an opportunity they could market the region's low taxes, cheap resources,
permissive labor laws, and poorly paid workers to attract employers

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and accelerate the South's game of economic catchup. As the
North began to de industrialize and economic possibilities in many
of its cities changed, state governments in the South set
about building tax programs and incentive packages to lure manufacturing
and warehouse jobs, as well as corporate offices full of
white collar workers. One Georgia state program that ran from

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nineteen ninety through twenty twelve, for example, offered companies a
per employee bounty of one thousand dollars for jobs moved
to the state's less developed counties, a program that became
more permissive in which types of jobs qualified and where
they could be located over time. Other states dangled similarly
huge bundles of cash. In twenty twenty three, Volkswagen AG

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was awarded nearly one point three billion in subsidies from
the state of South Carolina for a single autoplant. The
effort has largely worked as the region's leaders had intended.
Southern cities have become major hubs for millions of white
collar jobs in finance, law, consulting, energy, healthcare, and the
consumer sector, and those high salary workers have bought up

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homes as fast as cities and suburbs are willing to
build them, driving up property values. The South has also
become a hub for manufacturing and for auto production. In particular,
it now produces twice as many of the country's exports
as the Midwest, including millions of luxury cars from the
likes of BMWAG and Mercedes benz Ag, which is currently

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in the process of moving its North American headquarters from
New Jersey to Atlanta's northern suburbs, joining Portia. For blue
collar workers on the region's new assembly lines, the results
have been more mixed. Their jobs tend to be lower
paying and more dangerous than the same work elsewhere in
the country, a feature instead of a bug for their employers.
As the population of the South changed, so did the

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policies implemented to shape the region's economic and cultural power.
Attracting millions of existing high wage workers to the South
wasn't enough to guarantee that their kids and those kids'
future earning potential wouldn't leave in search of the kind
of prestigious college education that upwardly mobile American families have
sought for generations. People tend to settle within the geographic

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footprint and alumni network of their university, So Southern leaders
need to convince northern born parents that the region's flagship
public universities colleges that Southern elites have long used as
finishing schools for their sons and daughters of privilege, but
that were largely spurned by those outside the region, or
a smart choice. They did so with preferential admission and

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financial subsidies designed to stifle brain drain. Texas guaranteed admission
to public universities for in state kids who graduated in
the top ten percent of their high school class. Georgia
implemented the Hope Scholarship Program, and Florida implemented the Bright
Future Scholarship Program, both of which use lottery revenue to
pay in state tuition for admitted students who meet certain

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academic benchmarks in high school, regardless of parental income. In
the interest of full disclosure, Hope paid my tuition at
the University of Georgia, as it did for virtually all
of my friends in the mid two thousands. This suite
of policies has been more successful than the people who
implemented them decades ago probably could have imagined. Schools like

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the University of Texas at Austin, the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Georgia, and the
University of Florida have all become far more selective over
the past few decades, allowing them to grow in both
size and prestige. Ut for example, has had to dial
back automatic admissions for its flagship Austin campus to just

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the top five percent of the state's high school graduating classes.
When combined with the rising costs of private universities elsewhere,
the programs have helped some Southern states reverse the brain
drain problem entirely, attracting an increasing number of out of
state applicants who've never lived in the region at all.
That shift was exacerbated by the pandemic, at least in

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part because some parents were radicalized by their opposition to
even modest public health measures and states that kept kids
home from school and restricted travel and leisure activities. Some
of these parents chose to move their families to cheaper
and more permissive, at least in some ways, Southern six States,
while others simply ended up more open to sending their
kids there after high school. Many students, too, seemed to

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change their views of college during the same period, discovering
a renewed interest in the experience itself, and hey, warm
weather and big time college football seem fun, and paying
full freight as an out of state student at UGA
or UT is still cheaper in many cases than going
somewhere smaller and snowier. The South's population has also changed

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in ways that don't neatly fit assumptions about who exactly
might want to live there. The region's economy and culture
have benefited enormously from an influx of immigrants from around
the world, largely to its major cities. In twenty twenty three,
almost a quarter of Houston's metro population were immigrants, including
large communities of people from Mexico, Vietnam, Nigeria, India, and China.

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From mid twenty twenty to mid twenty twenty four, two
thirds of the more than two hundred thousand people who
moved to Metro Atlanta were from another country. The Great Migration, Too,
which saw millions of black residents of the Jim Crow
South flee north to escape Slavery's legacy of violence and repression,
has begun to reverse. Black Americans have begun returning to

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the South over the past several decades in search of
a lower cost of living, more job opportunities, and the
chance to be part of the region's robust black communities
and culture. In twenty twenty one, the journalist and commentator
Charles M. Blow published The Devil You Know, which called
on Black Americans to move back to the South as
he had to retake the majoritarian political power in several

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states that they briefly held during reconstruction. That these changes
have coincided with changes in how media is produced and
distributed is no coincidence. Air Conditioning isn't the only novel
technology that has altered the trajectory of the South. For decades,
the country's art and entertainment worlds were highly concentrated in
New York and Los Angeles, and mass media reflected its

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coastal origins off and proudly so. In July nineteen ninety six,
for example, the New Yorker mocked Atlanta's role as host
of the centennial Olympic Games with a cover illustration featuring
a hay seed farmer in overalls hoisting the Olympic torch
in one hand and a piglet in the other. More recently,
changes in how American culture is produced have helped both

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to hasten the end of the region's isolation and infuse
more of its eccentricities into that culture at large. Some
of these changes have been purposeful efforts to accrue cultural
power in the region. The Atlanta Olympics, the courtship of
expansion teams from professional football, basketball, baseball, and soccer leagues,
and Georgia's and Louisiana's huge tax break programs to attract

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major movie and television production facilities have all put the
South and its inhabitants in front of more cameras and
on more screens in recent decades. When combined with the
decentralizing influence of the Internet, these efforts have fueled, among
along other things, the huge influence that black Southerners now
have on popular music. They've also changed how people get

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famous and who can accrue an audience. Bama Rush Talk
a spontaneous, hugely popular TikTok event that chronicles the trials
and tribulations and outfits of participants in Sorority Rush at
the University of Alabama has helped further fuel interest in
attending the region's schools from students elsewhere. Mister Beast aka

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Jimmy Donaldson, the most popular person on YouTube, sits atop
a nascent empire with an estimated worth of as much
as one billion dollars from his home outside of Greenville,
North Carolina, where he grew up. You can see the
further blending of Southern culture everywhere if you look. Nashville,
New Orleans, and Charleston, South Carolina have become popular destinations

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for bachelorette parties and girls trips from all over the country.
Cowboy boots are trendy everywhere from Brooklyn, New York, to Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
The latest Wall Street Wreats status symbol is merged from
the Master's Golf tournament held annually at Augusta National Golf
Club in Georgia. Chick fil A, Inc. A fast food
chain owned by a deeply religious family in Atlanta's South suburbs,

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has successfully proliferated its franchises into virtually every corner of
the country. Even after years of localized opposition and more
progressive states to its now deceased patriarch support of anti
LGBTQ organizations, the Louisiana based chicken finger chain raising canes
has become nationally ubiquitous with even more astonishing speed. America

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loves and buys pickup trucks more than it ever has before.
Country stars like Morgan Wallen and Zach Bryan are some
of the country's most broadly popular musical acts, and artists
like Texas natives Beyonce and Post Malone have embraced the
genre's sounds and symbolism. A bar song Tipsy, one of

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twenty twenty four's biggest hits, is a countrified reimagining of
the two thousand four by the Saint Louis rapper Jai Kwan.
The new version is by Shaboozi, a Virginia born Nigerian
American whose music straddles both genres. Of course, it's impossible
to miss that national interest in Southern culture, or at
least in its aesthetic signifiers, has spiked when a wide

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swath of the country itself seems to be in a
raventious mood. The South's reputation as a place of vicious
racial domination makes it a powerful symbol for the white
Americans who feel like their status atop the country's racial
hierarchy has been unduly challenged. The lost Cause vision of
the Confederacy has begun to gain ground again as part

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of the backlash to twenty twenties Black Lives Matters protests.
The Trump administration recently announced that a Washington, d c.
Statue of a Confederate general that had been felled during
those protests would soon rise again, and much of the
South's current leadership appears happy to cling to parts of
that past with both hands. Whether that means jare remandering

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their states to stifle the power of black voters, or
marketing their disproportionately black blue collar workforces to national and
international corporations as easier to underpay and exploit. This fight
for the soul of the South is nothing less than
a fight over the future of America itself. The region's
recent trajectory of expansion, diversification, and political moderation would not

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have been possible without ending Jim Crow and prying the
bluntest instruments of racial domination from the hands of Southern elites.
Now there is a real push to give those tools back,
not just to Southerners, but to want to be Confederates
across the country. But ravanchists looking to today's South as
an answer to their prayers might end up disappointed in

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what they'll find. A region that has become more like
the rest of the country, which has in turn become
more like it. That and a lot of central air conditioning.
But as the South's heat and humidity has spread north
over time, enabling Magnolia's dogwoods and chameleas to thrive as
far afield as New York City, that too is pretty

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much everywhere now has spiked when a wide swath of
the country itself seems to be in a Reventroust mood