The Bitter Southerner and building media across difference

I believe, however naively, in the power of stories to overcome difference. American public life is riven by division: income inequality, the rural-urban divide, and identity politics emphasize contrast; social media and segregated social lives reinforce the barriers. Gridlock in Congress, partyist media, and ideological echo chambers encourage a sameness, a conformity antithetical to evolution, to progress, to plot. Our era’s iteration of cinema and literature rejects the necessity of propelling action. Our public life, aimless and infused with anomie, has become a mumblecore movie. We’ve fallen away from the power of narrative.

Cotton field in Georgia

And yet, a fundamental hunger for stories with arcs and resolutions persists. The radio and podcast juggernaut, This American Life, for example, has built decades of success on stories that resolve. When you pitch a story to the show, the producers want to know: How will it end?

Narrative arcs take advantage of our instinctual desire for closure. Regardless of who we are, the structure of a story sweeps us up and deposits us at the resolution together, having added something to our shared knowledge, and leaving us with slightly more in common than we had before.

The America that I want to live in is predicated on our collective ability to understand across difference, where empathy and productive disagreement are valued above ideological conformity. I like to imagine policies and legislation embodying not the ideological purity of a dominating faction, but the result of building something reflective of America’s uniquely diverse polity. In other words, I like to imagine America as a democracy.

This is a daydream, a country far removed from the one we live in. The political campaign season is a reminder that the power of narrative is easily bent to the will of whoever wields it. Compelling stories can render facts irrelevant. They can reinforce worst instincts and affirm existing prejudice.

Yet the seeds of narrative’s power to bring people together are perennial, and there seems no better place for those seeds to take root than in the South, a region especially susceptible to flights of fancy and the power of stories. In fact, storytelling is so much a part of the Southern psyche that it often seems unconsciously done. Yarns simply unspool themselves in the Southern torpor.

But deploying narrative in the service of mutual understanding requires careful consideration: Where are stories taking us and why?

The South naturally provides a broad base for finding commonality: its residents share a sordid history that often obscures ties to any heritage other than the one built together on the South’s red dirt. Southerners, whether black or white, rural or urban, cite the same things when asked what they love about the South: the sense of place, the food, the culture, the closeness to family history. In testimony given in a South Carolina legal case, University of South Carolina professor of history, Dr. Clyde Wilson, spoke to the South’s distinct culture:

Southerners have, unlike other Americans, more than 350 years of living in a biracial society, in which whites and African-Americans have reciprocally influenced each other’s development. It should never be forgotten that the number of African-Americans outside the states of the South was statistically insignificant throughout American history up to World War I. In evidence of a distinct Southern culture, it should be pointed out that Southern African-Americans share with Southern whites nearly every aspect of Southern culture except ethnic origin and political behavior, and differ from general American attitudes in the same direction as do white Southerners.

The South is the only region in America to know true defeat. That defeat and the subsequent devastation of Reconstruction has shaped what the South is — and who Southerners are — today. When the culture below the Mason-Dixon line is decried as racist and regressive, the critic erases the legacy of black Southerners who have contributed in equal part to Southern culture. No region in America has a longer history of being rent against itself, of struggling to resist, overcome, and engage with difference. The South is a story unfolding, full of tumult, and striving toward resolution. One digital publication wants to play a role in shaping that evolving narrative.

By publishing one long feature from the South each week and celebrating Southern identity across the site’s multiple storytelling channels, the Bitter Southerner aims to build understanding of the region beyond stereotypes. The site and its stories shed light on a New South, working to overcome the problems of the past while maintaining a distinctively Southern identity.

By its own admission, the site and its stories are written for like-minded Southerners: “The Bitter Southerner is for the rest of us,” the mission statement reads. “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.” The publication highlights stories that challenge Southern backwardness in an effort to prove to the rest of the world that a different South exists. Liberal, progressive Southerners can glory in their region in a way that’s acceptable and rest assured that they’re not alone.

At times, the Bitter Southerner exemplifies what it means to use stories in building understanding in the face of today’s challenging cultural landscape. But while it seeks to dispel stereotypes from those unfamiliar with the real South, the publication does awfully little to break down the barriers dividing modern Southerners. Which mission is more likely to bring about the New South that the publication’s founders are working toward?

Early in 2015, the site ran a feature called “The Art of Rebellion” about the renowned artisan-crafted motorcycle company, Confederate Motorcycles. Despite an explanation of the company’s name in the story, some readers were disconcerted enough to comment. They claimed that the word “confederate” was tainted, that the name was unfit to be featured in a progressive publication bent on dispelling stereotypes.

The reader response prompted the Bitter Southerner’s editor, Chuck Reece, to append a postscript. In it, he commented that because of the company’s name, the site had almost decided not to run the piece at all and he reiterated a line from the site’s about page: “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.”

The kerfuffle revealed some readers’ determination to remain ensconced in their worldview rather than seek understanding across even minor difference. This is exactly the kind of tradition-bound resistance to growth that the site purports to oppose.

The Bitter Southerner publishes powerful, resonant stories of a South that is too often unrecognized. At the same time, they rarely challenge the worldview of their audience. They’re not alone. Research confirms that conservatives and liberals rarely consume the same media, and the media they do consume tends to reflect their ideology.

When narratives are capable of holding us aloft and sweeping us toward myriad destinations unknown, why do we keep finding ourselves in places we’ve been before?