If You’re Not From the South: Rethinking the Red States

By: Shiloh Ary

“Georgia isn’t a red state,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted the evening of November 11, “It’s a voter suppressed state.” On November 3, for the first time in 28 years, a plurality of Georgians voted for the Democratic presidential candidate. Georgia’s flip from red to blue may not seem important overall; the sixteen electoral votes of Georgia are easily outweighed by the other Southern states (sans Virginia) that President Trump won. But it does mean that a more nuanced lens needs to be applied to the American South, and as a Georgian living in New York, I feel somewhat qualified to say that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is right.

If you’re not fom the South, it’s easy to get a bad representation of it. In the media, the South has one voice: I’m reminded of the rich accents in The Devil All the Time or Hillbilly Elegy. In reality, everywhere talks differently. People from New Orleans do not talk like people from Savannah, even though their city aesthetics are very similar. People in Macon, Georgia do not talk like people from Jackson, Mississippi. The people in Birmingham talk exactly how you’d think though. But my point isn’t just that the South isn’t homogeneous, it’s that all the cities I listed have something in common: they have a majority Black population. But watching films like Hillbilly Elegy , with their predominantly white casts, you might not think so.

If you’re not from the South, you might think of its populace as all Trump supporters waving Confederate flags and shooting guns. And that’s certainly a part of it – over this past summer I was driving through rural Mississippi and passed a house with a flagpole for three Confederate flags: the battle flag popularized by Dixiecrats in the 1950s, the “Stars and Bars” flag which was the actual flag of the Confederacy that the (now previous) Mississippi flag was based on, and the Bonnie Blue flag which is associated with the inception of the Confederacy. But the South and its narrative do not belong to these flags or the people waving them. 

If you’re not from the South, you may forget that the Civil Rights Movement was largely a Southern-based movement. You may not think of the South and think of figures like John Lewis, Ida B. Wells, Walter F. White, Rosa Parks, Jesse Jackson, and countless others. Even Lyndon B. Johnson, whose presidency saw the passage of significant Civil Rights legislation, is from Texas. And as a cisgender white man writing this, I encourage readers to learn about the long-fought struggle for civil rights from narratives that reflect marginalized identities, especially Black voices. As this summer has shown us with the large-scale protests against police violence, these fights are far from over and there is a dire need for better education on the history of oppression in this country. The legacy of racism is not only alive and well, but it also makes the hard work towards social justice invisible, especially systemically.

If you’re not from the South, you might not have seen firsthand how the systems of governance in America can disenfranchise people, especially at the voting booth. One year, while driving to my brother’s house, I passed a sign for Shelby County, as in Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 US Supreme Court decision which gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, select states with histories of voter suppression would require preclearance to make changes to their voting procedures, such as changing polling places or passing laws which may restrict voting rights. But in 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that the preclearance requirement was unconstitutional because there was no racial discrimination in the voter registrations of these jurisdictions. Simply put: because the law was working there was no need for it anymore. Unsurprisingly, with these protections gone almost every Southern state passed laws which suppress minority voters such as voter ID laws, shutting down DMVs where people can receive IDs to vote, limiting drop-off ballot locations, limiting polling places, voter purges, and other miniscule ways to make voting more difficult.

If you’re not from the South, you might just think of it as “red states” and not recognize  activists’ hard work to get out the vote. It’s easy to look at the electoral map and see red states, but look at Mississippi for example: over 500,000 people voted for Joe Biden. In Alabama, it was over 800,000 – around the same number as Louisiana. Of course, the margins are not close and none of these states had above 45% of votes being cast for Biden, but these are still Southerners contradicting  this narrative of “red state” denizens who are virulent Trump supporters.

It was Stacey Abrams who saw this in Georgia. She played a significant role in delivering its electors to Biden thanks to her efforts in registering voters and advocating for voting rights. Abrams’s efforts to combat voter suppression are in direct response to the  2018 gubernatorial election, where then-Secretary of State Brain Kemp, who oversaw the election and refused to recuse himself from this role, ran against Abrams, who was the Minority Leader of the Georgia House of Representatives.

Under Kemp’s direction, voter registration lists were purged, some registrations were put on hold without notice, one polling place wasn’t given enough power cords for their voting machines, causing long lines. These issues mostly affected Black voters in numbers much larger than the margins between the candidates. While Kemp was ultimately declared the winner and is now the governor, it was clear that the legitimacy of the election was questionable at best.

If you’re not from the South, you might just shrug off this disenfranchisement. And a lot of Southerners might agree. As Abrams explains in Our Time is Now, “Voter suppression works its might by first tripping and causing to stumble the unwanted voter, then by convincing those who see the obstacle course to forfeit the race without even starting to run.”

The system isn’t just designed to discriminate, but also to exhaust and perpetuate. Many people have tried to do what Abrams has done and failed, and the more we consider the South “red states,” the more we accept this notion that the disenfranchisement is legitimate, and that power in the South belongs to the non-marginalized.

The South has never been all white, or cisgender male, or heterosexual, or all of the above. But these identities dominate the narrative by erasing the real narratives, both by institutions and media representations. Because the South is filled with people like Laverne Cox, Lil Nas X, Frank Ocean, Don Lemon, and Laura Jane Grace, all of whom are members of the LGBTQ+ community born in the South.

If you’re not from the South, you might just think it’s all just white rednecks, instead of a region filled with good, hard-working people who face significant obstacles to participate in democratic process those in other states take for granted. People whose efforts are erased, and whose stories never get told.  But I’m from the South, and I want people to start seeing it for what it is.