Comment by scarface_74
6 days ago
> My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not
See how much pearl clutching you will get by southern “anti-woke” folks when someone imitates their voice or start saying the only thing they care about is “Gods and Guns”.
FWIW: I was born and raised in southern GA and have only lived in two states my entire life - GA and FL.
They are very sensitive if you talk about their way of life or say anything that can be interpreted as anti-Christian.
Fundamentalist Christians were the original prigs. It is amusing to see pg try and shoehorn the word on to the social justice movement.
Puritans predate "Fundamentalists" in the American Christian sense of the term, and if we're just following _this_ line of thought (and no others) the Romans were busy setting Christians on fire for garden parties because they were not willing to conform to what the Empire demanded (worship of the Emperor and acknowledgement of many gods).
The behaviors and reactions to benign, relative ideas and thinking from anyone they disagree with are uncannily identical. There is no shoehorn to be found here.
They have much in common.
I don't disagree, but I do think it's important to note whether the person is mocking the southern accent or just imitating it as a form of flattery. Often it's the former rather than the latter. The (vast) majority of the time I hear someone doing a southern accent it's for purposes of making fun of them, especially for being stupid/redneck. I don't think it's unreasonable to be offended when somebody is mocking you.
There is no world where people imitate a southern accent as a form of “flattery” any more than when a White person immitates how they perceive Black people talking or how imitating Indian accents use to be the norm.
Of course the exception I can think of for imitating southern accents would be acting
I think you're probably right wrt flattery of southern accent, but for white people imitated black accents I have to disagree. Growing up one of my friend idolized Will Smith and thought he was the most badass dude on the planet. He would often quote movie lines from him with the accent, and it was 100% a form of flattery. It is also very common for white people to rap along with black artists using the same accent, and it's because they love the song and the style. Nowadays most parents will immediately try to silence their kids for doing that in public, and anyone older than about 12 is now terrified of doing that, so it's quite possible things have changed.
That said, I would agree that the majority of people doing accents are likely to be mocking. I'm not sure how to prevent throwing the baby out with the bath water though.
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> See how much pearl clutching you will get by southern “anti-woke” folks when someone imitates their voice
Graham’s point, generously, is you’ll always have pearl-clutching prigs. What matters is if they’re empowered.
> are very sensitive if you talk about their way of life or say anything that can be interpreted as anti-Christian
But they haven’t—until recently—had the power to e.g. end someone’s career or ability to perform in New York or San Francisco over it.
> Graham’s point, generously, is you’ll always have pearl-clutching prigs. What matters is if they’re empowered.
That idea gets very close to
https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2009/march.htm
> “I am a middle-aged white person and even I know that blacks and other racial minorities cannot be racist, just like women can not be sexists. Racism equals power. Whites are not hurt by the everyday flow of society.”
I’m Black and I can go into a long rant about how I disagree with every word of that sentence.
But the Christian Right has had most of the power in the US for most of its existence until the rise of tech during the last 20 years. The entire crusade against “woke” is that demographic shifts are going to make the US a “minority majority” country within our lifetimes and that people who were usually in the shadows are now able to speak out.
> the Christian Right has had most of the power in the US for most of its existence until the rise of tech during the last 20 years
I’d argue their power fell earlier, with the Civil Rights movement: we’ve seen almost monotonic decreases in Christian religiosity since [1]. (It’s currently in a generational peak. I don’t know if that’s a last gasp of their boomers or something deeper.)
> The entire crusade against ‘woke’ is that demographic shifts are going to make the US a ‘minority majority’ country within our lifetimes and that people who were usually in the shadows are now able to speak out
I think it’s about as unfair to paint the rejection of “wokeness” like this as it is to paint every progressive policy as woke.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-reli...
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