“If you are a person who buys the states’ rights argument … or you fly the rebel flag in your front yard … or you still think women look really nice in hoop skirts, we politely suggest you find other amusements on the web. The Bitter Southerner is not for you,” Mr. Reece wrote when the site began publishing in August 2013. “The Bitter Southerner is for the rest of us. It is about the South that the rest of us know: the one we live in today and the one we hope to create in the future.”

He knows his own publication has a way to go. The founders, a half-decade ago, were all white. Mr. Reece recently recruited a black managing editor, Timothy Turner, and a black music columnist, Joycelyn Wilson, a media studies professor at Georgia Tech. One of her most recent pieces, riffing on the latest 2 Chainz album, was titled “Four Reasons Pretty Girls Like Trap Music.”

When I returned to the South three years ago to work as a correspondent for The New York Times, The Bitter Southerner was gaining some buzz, but I was leery. Mr. Reece has written that his site exists “to support anyone who yearns to claim their Southern identity proudly and without shame,” and I suppose I think of my Southern identity as something less to claim than to puzzle out. The summer 2017 issue of The Oxford American features an essay by Harrison Scott Key, in which he describes his experience of playing in a Southern R&B band as a kid. I played in one, too. Apparently we shared the same small epiphany:

“We played for friends here and there, and we sounded O.K. — but something was missing,” Mr. Key wrote. “On the outside, we were white, but on the inside, we were also white. And inside that inner whiteness, there existed a deeper shade of white that knew things, such as how our good fortunes had come pretty easy, at least compared to the people we sang about in the songs we played.”

But I like Mr. Reece’s magazine, which, like any great periodical, feels like it is of its moment. At Kimball House, Mr. Reece held forth on a range of Southern topics both frivolous and deep: The introduction of okra as a cheap New World food supply for enslaved Africans. (“You can’t write a story about how wonderful a thing gumbo is without acknowledging that it is an undeserved gift.”) The mixology skills of New Orleans bartenders. (“There are old bars where folks never stopped doing it right.”) His interview with the Atlanta rapper Killer Mike (“He said, ‘I’m not that different from people you call redneck. I drive a truck. I like to fish.’”) And Southern millennials, born into a world where correctives to the Lost Cause myth are only a couple of clicks away.

They are an important part, he said, of The Bitter Southerner’s target audience.

“We have ancestors, recent ancestors, who grew up a certain way, and never challenged that way of thinking,” he said. “Now we’ve got all of these kids who have all of the world’s information at their fingertips. And they have the courage” — Mr. Reece used a more earthy phrase here — “to challenge it.”