It is true that I like my iced tea unsweetened, that NASCAR makes me gag and that I've never sat through a full episode of "Hee Haw." While my tongue occasionally slips and I'll describe someone without clothing as "nekkid," this is one of the few vestigial remains of a Southern twang that I lost somewhere between the fourth and seventh grades.
My own particular struggle to convince my dentist I'm not a carpetbagger isn't that interesting. What matters is that the South is producing more and more people like me -- Southerners who inflect their reckons with irony instead of twang and who are more comfortable in New York than in New Bern.
Reflecting on what it's like to grow up today in certain parts of the South, it's easy to see how some Southerners are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from their peers in other regions of the country. The world of an 8-year-old -- reading Harry Potter while eating McDonald's before soccer practice, doing homework and watching Nickelodeon before bed -- isn't radically different in Seattle or Nashville.
As kids grow up, their shared culture eventually fractures into a couple dozen subcultures that defy any sort of regional characterization. Old Navy stores dot the landscape. "Dawson's Creek" is a national obsession. Insane Clown Posse goes on a North American tour, and AOL chatrooms link together the 58 teenagers across the country who play the role-playing game Magic: The Gathering and enjoy reading Sylvia Plath.
It's not that people growing up today don't have a certain level of regional identity. It's just that their regional identity isn't often that salient. Limp Bizkit vocalist Fred Durst has become a more potent symbol of identification than Stonewall Jackson. But who could guess that Durst is from North Carolina?
Don't get me wrong; I don't see Southern identity being erased in the next thousand years. Anyone can guess that former UNC basketball player Kris Lang is from beneath the Mason-Dixon line.
But I do think this creeping national homogenization will continue to wind itself slowly throughout our region like the kudzu around our trees. Our region is going to have to come to terms with the fact that a reasonable percentage of the native population isn't going to match our own stereotypes about who is and who ain't isn't a Southerner. It's just a consequence of living in a regional society in which national media plays a huge role in the formation of cultural identity.
Last year, I became a member of the Carolina BBQ Society, a student organization that plans outings to sample the many incredible varieties of pork barbecue offered across our state. If barbecue says anything about North Carolina, it's that some things will always remain distinctive about this place.
However, what's strange is that traveling to Granville and Rockingham counties to eat barbecue doesn't feel distinctly different from going to eat at a Thai or Ethiopian restaurant. If taking a trip to a barbecue restaurant can be a cultural exchange for Southerners, then it only forecasts the future of living in a South that's becoming more heterogeneous than ever.
