Response: Southern Depictions

To be completely honest, growing up in Florida, and one of the major cities in Florida, I can't exactly claim to have grown up in the South, culturally, at any rate. But having owned property on the Suwanee River in a county with less than 13,000 people for the last fifteen years or so, I suppose I can claim a bit to that.

To start off with, I've found that a good number of rednecks don't laugh hardest at redneck jokes because of how untrue they are, but because they are thinking about someone they know who's done something like that, or would in that particular situation. A good portion of those jokes aren't made up, just to state. At least, not the iconic 'You might be a redneck if...' jokes.

I will agree, however, that for the most part the South is overall depicted as a redneck/hillbilly society. The movie Deliverance plays a huge role in how people view backwoods parts of the United States, but the South in particular. Nowadays, you'd be hard pressed to find an area of the United States that was a backwards as the area in Deliverance that you could get away with the things they did, but the stigma still holds. Other than that, with my mom being from Texas and my dad from Alabama, I was taught growing up to be polite and civil with everyone, and for the most part every Southern I have met has been brought up the same way.