Southern accents could cost job seekers a 20% wage penalty, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Southern accents could cost job seekers a 20% wage penalty, study finds

foxbusiness.com

114 pointsmikece104 comments

I grew up mostly in the southeastern U.S. and have a very slight accent, to the extent that only someone else who grew up in Appalachia would likely notice. This article made me pause for a second, because of all the dozens of different accents from around the world I heard while working at a FANG company, I cannot recall one other person having a southern accent (I'm sure there were others — I just never ran into them).

My wife has a much more pronounced southern accent than I do, and I remember that on the occasions when she would visit the campus to have lunch with me, a lot of heads would turn to see who was speaking. I kind of doubt this was due to any negative connotation with southern accents though — I think it was just unusual to hear one there.

I work for a company that has HQ (though not engineering/product) in the Southeast. So lot of calls with fairly mild educated/urban southern accents. Not something anyone really notices. You get into rural southern accents, especially things like Cajun dialects, and it becomes more pronounced.

Sounds like Shipt

At college in Tallahassee my friends would have a stronger accent when talking on the phone to family than talking to friends, even at a Southern college.

This is either part of, or related to, "code-switching". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching . That could be the case at your FANG company, for one or multiple of the reasons given.

I’m from Texas but you would never know it in normal conversation. But it will come out when speaking with relatives. It’s like a dial that you can turn up and down at will, but my normal state is to have it turned off entirely. Except for y’all. That one gets used at work

Y’all is just a great word though, I grew up in the southwest and my family was from the Midwest, but I use y’all. It’s just fun to say!

I grew up in rural Mississippi. A few years back, a few coworkers pointed out that sometimes my accent weirdly sneaks out when I’m particularly deep in talking about tech that I love and know well.

But yeah, most of the time, people are like “Mississippi? You don’t have any accent!”

y'all won't turn heads anywhere anymore, but fixin will.

With "you guys" out of favor "y'all" is one of the common substitutes.

I do this with family too.

Our natural accent is a mix of the many places our family has lived and a fair few words that have stayed with us that most people don't use. It's ours and we love it. But I don't expect other people to know that.

When on the phone or a zoom with everyone, we'll drop into the natural accent. It's especially bad when we get drunk and do so. My SO has had a time learning 'us', and we've added some of their familys' ticks too. I guess it evolves with each person that comes in.

I had a friend in college from Boston's South Side and when he was drunk and on the phone back home, he was unintelligible.

I agree with calling this 'code switching', but to me (and maybe I'm alone here) that sounds a bit, I dunno, negative. Like I'm being forced to speak in a manner that I don't want to because of money. That's not it.

I speak with my family in a way that is a bit more private. We have our own little thing that outsiders aren't a part of. It's not exclusive by any means, but we're not worried about being understood. I think my family understands that a more common form of communication is needed for the rest of the world.

Actually, you know, we do call the form of English we use at work 'Cash English'. So, I'm full of BS here, maybe.

As a midwesterner formerly in a FAANG in SF I'd hear jokes openly about "rednecks", "white trash", "hillbillies", "inbreds", etc. I can understand Southern people code-shifting or switching or whatever it's called.

As another midwesterner also in the bay area, I have a lot of respect for rednecks. Talking to a colleague from Kentucky, I described an exceptionally high IQ friend of mine as a redneck. My colleague was initially offended, until I explained specifically what traits I meant. Then he agreed with me that my friend was a redneck, and that it was a compliment.

Tangentially related, I once told a coworker that he was a hobo. He was also offended, but I suggested he do a bit of research on the etymology. He realized that he was indeed a hobo.

> Tangentially related, I once told a coworker that he was a hobo. He was also offended, but I suggested he do a bit of research on the etymology. He realized that he was indeed a hobo.

Wiktionary has:

> Unknown. Possibly a contraction of ho, boy or the dialectal English term hawbuck (“lout, clumsy fellow, country bumpkin”).

What did he agree to?

Also, there must be something wontedly derogatory but technically accurate they could call you for providing this education?!

> Also, there must be something wontedly derogatory but technically accurate they could call you for providing this education?!

Condescending?

Call someone a term, then suggest they "research the etymology", then they realize I was right to call them that. Great for me providing them education!

You all don't lightheartedly joke around with your coworkers from time to time?

That's a stretch. Historically, a hobo was a homeless migratory worker, differentiated from a tramp by their willingness to work. The term supposedly came into popularity in California.

Technically, he's a "beachcombing barnacle" if Wikipedia's slang terms are accurate. After graduating with a mechanical engineering degree, he rode a dirt bike across the country to CA with no plan, and couch-surfed for a while on another coworker's boat at the harbor. He eventually stopped by our office on a cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere, poked around a while, then asked for a job he was woefully unqualified for. We offered him an internship based mostly on his exceptional tenacity, and he's now been with the company full time for several years.

I'm born and raised in Louisiana left in my late 20's for 10 years in Texas and now live on the East Coast. My accent is all over the place, only time my Louisiana or Texas accent for that matter, come back is if I spend a minimal of two weeks in either state. Company I worked for in Texas out of a few thousand people I only heard a Louisiana accent once and his was way more pronounced then mine being he was from closer to true Cajun country.

The article says that the wage penalty applies to people with "strong regional accents," and that Southern is the fourth most likely accent for job seekers to try to suppress, with New Jersey being #1. Framing this as specifically Southern inverts the actual finding, and is just culture war chum.

And of course this is what they led with, because it’s Fox News. Why is this on HN’s front page?

Because the title is accurate? It isn’t that New Jersey accents are the applicants who lose out the most it’s that those are the people who suppress it the most. That’s irrelevant to the title and is just an interesting fact pointed out by the article.

The odd thing to me (as someone born [if not bred] in the south) is that I grew up with a bright distinction between "poor whites" and "white trash", but as far as I can tell now (safely on the other side of the Atlantic) the "culture war" —even on Fox' side— seems to be doing its best to conflate the two notions.

The study which found New Jersey at number 1 was a different study - one about self-censoring.

The first study mentioned is the one that found the South most discriminated against.

No it's not. The study compared accents from Southerners and standard accents and found Southerners made 20% less. This has nothing to do with New Jersey residents suppressing their accent.

My dad was a New Jersey guy and a Stevens Tech grad. He didn't have the accent but he did have the gruff attitude. It took me a while to understand how that rubbed off on me.

German, not US accents! Terrible article.

I was suspicious about the lack of references.

Note that the original research [1] (a working paper from three years ago) that these news items don't link to appears to be about German accents and dialects, at least wrt the headline 20% figure here.

The recent study [2] also referred to is about American accents. It quotes the earlier paper (without reference or clarification it's a different country, which doesn't bode well for the quality of the research in the second paper), and the erroneous implication is presumably used without fact checking by the "journalists" involved in writing the OP here.

[1]

Summary

https://www.nber.org/papers/w26719

Paper

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26719/w267...

[2] https://writingtips.org/dialect-discrimination/

ps. h/t @libraryatnight who posted the links earlier; I only just saw the comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36101672

In the UK the direction is inverted - Northern accents tend to be discriminated against, some people opt to try to maintain southern counties or city accents.

https://www.theguardian.com/careers/accent-hinder-job-prospe...

(Was David Tennant's Doctor Who an example of this bias? ; )

I'd guess there's a lot more variation in British accents, despite being such a tiny landmass.

Here in Australia I struggle to pick regional accents - sure, there's a lot fewer of us, but the geographical spread is much larger, and I'd presumed that would be a stronger factor for dialect drift.

Likewise in NZ, we only have one very distinctive accent, the Southland one that likes to roll the Rs.

But as a Mainlander (i.e., the South Island), I can often pick when someone is from Auckland, as there's more of a Polynesian influence on their vowels. (Auckland is sometimes to referred to as the unofficial capital of Tonga/Samoa as the populations of both peoples in Auckland exceeds that in their countries).

In contrast, when I visited family in Rugby, UK, my uncle would amuse people at parties by parodying the (many!) varying accents found along the 55km trip from Rugby to Birmingham.

I suppose it's the difference that several centuries of history makes.

>I'd guess there's a lot more variation in British accents, despite being such a tiny landmass.

That was the whole point of Pygmalion of course.

Did you mean Christopher Eccleston?

As an ESL learner I found the ninth doctor hard to understand sometimes but had no troubles with the tenth.

I think David Tennant hides his Scottish accent pretty well, but again I'm not a native speaker.

Christopher Eccleston on the other hand claimed himself, that his northern accent had held him back.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-43139805.amp

Nope, definitely David Tennant - I hadn't seen him in anything prior to Doctor Who, so was very surprised when later hearing him with a broad Scottish accent in an interview.

I've heard him discuss the preference (it's more unsettling / convincing) for middle-class English accents when playing a conventional bad guy role.

I can pick someone from Gippsland the region of Victoria I grew up in. What’s striking about Australian accents is how much they have shifted with access to international media and immigration. If you watch footage from the mid 20th century, especially news reporters interviewing the public, the public and the reporters sound very different and no one sounds like either of them anymore

>I can pick someone from Gippsland the region of Victoria I grew up in. What’s striking about Australian accents is how much they have shifted with access to international media and immigration.

My understanding is that Australia is unusual for (as Jedd said) not having regional accents despite the country's (geographic) size. Am I mistaken?

In my experience spending time in Adelaide, Darwin, Melbourne, Cairns, Brisbane and Sydney, variations mainly come down to the relative density of curse words within a sentence. Anecdotally, the density trends upward with individual intelligence.

Is that a very subtle slight against Adelaide?

No, not at all! The most vulgar and intelligent people I met over there were in Adelaide.

Australia has regional variation, but English has only been spoken here since British conquest 200 years ago, so there wasn't long for strong variation to develop before mass media connected people to the sound of voices from other places. There were some regional differences the mix of backgrounds of immigrants, but not to the extent that this occurred in the US or Canada - until after world war two, when large numbers of people began to migrate to Australia from countries other than UK and Ireland. I spent some of my childhood in Gippsland and some in inner city Melbourne in North Melbourne and the way we spoke was influenced by the large numbers of immigrant kids, especially Italian, Greek, Vietnamese, Chinese and Lebanese kids. I think professionally people code-switch to a neutral accent, but when people relax I think you can hear this influence in accents of people who grew up in areas with large immigrant populations, and that this variation is soaking into the mainstream, and shifting our idea of the neutral Australian accent, and the mix of ethnicities coming to Melbourne was a little different to those going to Sydney and I think you can hear it. So does she: https://www.tiktok.com/@theactualkoi/video/71660824552947581...

This is true, but in some polls the Geordie (northeast) accent was rated the most attractive in England. I have to agree, it sounds much more folksy and warm, and less grating than the posh accent. My friend who went to university in Belfast said you're better off in the tougher parts of Northern Ireland without a posh accent too, even if a northern accent is discriminated against in the London business scene. Everything has its benefits and drawbacks...

I always remembered this movie because of the way accents played such an integral part of the story. James Bolam is still a working actor and master of the Geordie accent.

https://youtu.be/SxwCU_pD5ME

I’m surprised that this doesn’t get talked about more - I’ve worked with plenty of women, minorities, and immigrants at large tech companies, but I can’t recall a single person with a southern accent.

Same for me, but even more than that I can’t remember ever speaking to someone with a southern accent outside of work.

Nobody from the south would be caught dead in California? Mostly kidding.

I recently worked with a guy from the south who had a wicked accent. I could understand him because I spent time in the military and one gets used to all kinds of accents, but no one else could understand him. He was pretty smart and I’m sure he will do fine, but his accent definitely got some mean comments. I told a few people to knock it off because he didn’t deserve them.

Tech is brutal. Even Tim Cook suppresses it.

The other obvious missing part is African Americans, especially for tech roles. I'd be shocked if more than 1% of SDEs at FAANG are African Americans. The biggest social elevator of the past few decades and they're completely cut off from it.

Definitely not "completely"

No, not completely cut off from the software tech elevator, you're right, just 90%.

Much better :-)

I wouldn't frame it as "cut off" as much as it is "unknown unknowns."

If you don't have family/close friends in this industry and don't have any resources or the wherewithal to help you/yourself break into it, then you're kind of SOL.

Downvoted: look around where you work, FAANG. Count the African Americans :-)

Truth hurts, I guess?

Much more prevalent in public sector and regional tech.

Could be wrong but this was a bit in Silence of the lambs. Roughly that Clarice was hiding her southern accent to not invoke northernerns prejudices so she could advance her career?

people are nuts about southern accents: i had a manager (not my manager but one of his peers) actively mocking me for having a southern accent after finding i’d grown up in the south.

weird thing, though, my accent (since everyone has one) matches the area i live perfectly, which isn’t much of a surprise since my parents grew up here before moving to the south.

For a lot of Americans, unfortunately, the biggest exposure one gets to Southern Accents is from the fake, “dumb on purpose” caricature that defines country music stars and Larry The Cable Guy. I’m from Montana, and know several born-and-raised Montanans (and Oregonians, Washingtonians, even Californians) with completely inexplicable drawls (people decidedly not sharing any familial or otherwise relationship with the South) that lapse in and out of perceptibility based on circumstance.

It wasn’t until I had a research advisor who was verifiably not a dullard that I even had an option to consider anything to the contrary of the base American conception that a Southern accents indicates stupidity, laziness, pig-headedness, etc.

The death of the region accent really is a crying shame. Glad my folks still have their hokey Saskatchewanesque lilt.

What does "saskatchewanesque" sound like, Corner Gas?

Not familiar with the reference but I would describe it as similar to the classic Midwest/Minnesota/Wisconsin “ohyooobetcha” parody, but more dour/deadpan in delivery, and almost with a lilt. People from Saskatchewan would say Saskatchuwun, “we are” becomes “were” exclusively, “you” becomes “yeh” (as opposed to classic Midwest “yuu” or “yah”). I’ve had people tell me, and noticed it in other children-of-Montanans, that it’s reminiscent of a Scottish/Irish manner of speaking, which makes sense as my great great grandad emigrated from Ireland to Butte in the 1800’s, as did many Irish people at the time.

I like when these things are celebrated with humor. Letterkenny/Shoresy can do good things with that sometimes.

Ironically Larry the Cable Guy's accent is itself affected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_the_Cable_Guy#Stand-up_c...

Link to the study?

Southern culture is more delineated at its class lines. I totally agree this costs folks at the lower rungs. But once you are stable, a Southern accent wins hearts and minds across the country and abroad. (Being able to preserve your idiosyncrasies through the ladder is a signal itself.)

Seems like it's this 2020 study https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26719/w267... (also found this blog https://news.uchicago.edu/story/how-your-speech-could-impact...)

It seems odd they've kicked this up years later, but the recency is apparently due to some survey data https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/study-claims-having-an-acce...

Maybe we should start with that to explain intersectionality in southern states. :)

I've been identifying as Redneck-American for years.

The bumpkins are way ahead of whatever you think you’re suggesting, despite whatever you’re unintentionally reinforcing about the stereotype.

What do you mean by "way ahead"? I don't follow.

They are already having these conversations.

I haven't read the study, but it wouldn't surprise me if this were true. People are biased by default, and some accents are valued more highly than others. I fight against my own biases every day.

The study https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26719/w267...

The article reports (emphasis mine):

> A _new_ study

Yet this study appears to be from 2020. Is this the correct study?

And it's not about Southern accents:

Previous work has documented that speaking one’s native language with an accent distinct from the mainstream is associated with lower wages. In this study, we seek to estimate the causal effect of speaking with a distinctive regional accent, disentangling the effect of the accent from that of omitted variables. We collected data on workers’ speech in Germany, a country with wide variation in regional dialects. We use a variety of strategies in estimation, including an instrumental variables strategy in which the instruments are based on research findings from the linguistics of accent acquisition. All of our estimators show that speaking with a distinctive regional accent reduces wages by an amount that is comparable to the gender wage gap. We also find that workers with distinctive regional accents tend to sort away from occupations that demand high levels of face-to-face contact, consistent with various occupational sorting models.

Original title is "THE WAGE PENALTY OF REGIONAL ACCENTS".

> And it's not about Southern accents:

To be fair, they do make specific mention of (Germanic) "Southern states" which you could imagine that someone at a less reputable news outlet like Fox might gloss over in order to spin some bullshit.

"The Southern states have the highest share of speakers with distinct accent. The interaction term is positive, hinting at a lower penalty for Southern dialects.

(which, if I'm reading correctly, suggests that "Southern accents" actually hurt you less - at least in Germany?)

Also not reviewed but that seems an irrelevant nit compared with "it's talking about an entirely different country".

"[NBER working papers] have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications."

I figure they can usually tell where you grew up by looking at your resume, so it doesn't really matter. To be fair, Black people have been fighting this battle a lot longer than white people that get out of the South; if you sound "too black" people low ball you and make sure you have zero visibility to customers or management. It's interesting that the article never mentions code-switching.

Where I’m from in the South, having a notably Southern accent is a tell that you grew up in a lower class family and area, and all that goes with it (like having less education). Obviously it doesn’t mean you’re stupid, but regarding education and workforce readiness (a lot of Southern communities have very low workforce participation rates, and almost no white collar jobs outside government) it’s a Bayes rule thing.

So I would dispute the causation here - it’s not the accent itself that reduces wages, but being from a poorer family without much exposure to the corporate world that does.

Though of course, even aspects of the mild accent I do have invite unwanted attention sometimes, so it’s no surprise people with much stronger accents would code switch and conceal it.

That sounds more likely, especially given the stats later in the article:

> Another recent study found that 38% of job seekers admitted to "softening" their regional accents during interviews because of negative stereotypes.

> This study by the Writing Tips Institute found that applicants with a Southern accent were the fourth most likely to change their voice. People from Western New England, South Midland and New Jersey were the most likely to alter their accents.

It just sounds like people with Southern accents and their guidance counselors haven't figured it out yet.

It sounds like this isn't a Southern phenomenon at all, and is just framed that way to rile up the Fox Business audience.

Having a strong regional accent, or more accurately, being unable to turn off your strong regional accent, is just a class marker.

It can be a Bayes rule thing where they're statistically less likely to participate in white collar work, but it could also be biases in companies who believe a candidate is less educated if they have a strong regional accent. The article suggests that some candidates attempt to hide their accents and have better luck with that.

It’s not just likelihood to participate in white collar work, at least IME having a stronger accent correlates with all sorts of behavior which makes you less able to navigate a typical US corporate environment. I’m thinking things like growing up in a family with no white collar workers (and thus not being exposed to the distinct social etiquette of the white collar workforce), having strong political and religious views that are at odds with the white collar norm, how you prioritize work vs family. And certainly education - you may get a degree but typically standards at <southern flagship university where people come from a typically more educated background> are different from <regional southern university>. Class distinctions in the South run deep

I should RTFNews but I bet they didn’t test for class.

And did they test vernacular vs accent? Many times in a work situation it is alternate grammar and vocabulary rather than accent that is taken to be unprofessional.

Did they track the difference in geo background of the employee and the wage-setter? Since this seems clickbaity I’ll guess the news piece wants to drum up an inter-regional anger when the offenders are probably intra-.

Personally I love all regional accents. I am drawn to Chris Arnade’s lessons in Dignity, where he remarks that class can be tracked partially by willingness and opportunity to leave one’s hometown to pursue wealth. To my ear, having a regional accent tells me that a person managed to mitigate that and I think it is cool.

I code-switched my very sharp Boston accent down when I got to college in the midwest. Two reasons.

There are many accents and vernaculars from any single region including Appalachia that denote class. Mine let people know I came from a line of laborers, teamsters, mechanics.

So, first reason: My accent infuriated a professor I had who came from New England but had a plummier more “Boston Brahmin” line. I know that cost me by the way he openly mocked me in class. I did not use vernacular in class - I did not use “wicked” as a positive adjective or anything like that. That was pure distain for my home - like he got mugged on the subway once by my cohort.

The second reason was that a lot of my new friends were from Nebraska and Wisconsin and they actually could not understand what I was saying at times. It became something I would have to actively cultivate to keep as I repeated myself with more Rs and -ing suffixes to make myself understood. They loved the vernacular bit and actually had fondness for the accent but the force was strong.

In the end I came out a little more like Arnade’s truth. I would go home and people could tell that something changed.

Anyway I hope that bias. am be removed from wage-setting. Unions are good for that. Salary setting is different and I hope that bias can be overcome, and no matter the quality of TFA maybe the salary setters here can take it as a reminder.

I'm southern, and regardless of what we're seeing in this article from the studies, and how people want to argue about it, I have anecdotally seen bias against the southern accent with my own eyes, as well as southerners generally. Especially from people who move to the south for the robust job market but then fail to understand that our culture is just as valid as where they came from. The effects of that go far beyond just wage bias.

Consider the demographic differences. In the northeast it appears private education, wealth, family pedigree, and family connections are major deal makers in life generally. An aristocracy. That is not a cultural norm outside the northeast even when family wealth is present. This cultural distinction creates identifiable exclusion.

"Old money" is absolutely a thing in the south, as is "the good ol' boys" network. There are places in the south where not having the right surname constitutes an achievement ceiling all by itself.

Much of the "old money" in the south is northerners. People who came after Civil War to open factories and textile mills.

I've never met an example of this. More common in my experience is plantations that either turned into country clubs or subdivisions.

It's a somewhat common trope in TV and Cinema (Independance Day comes to mind, as well as any horror movie taking place near the south, The Hills Have Eyes and Texas Chainsaw Massacre for example) to give characters that are shown as stupid/misadapted a Southern accent.

On the flip side, the former Chief Privacy Officer at data broker Acxiom, a formidable lady who often had to testify under oath to Congress, would ham up her Arkansas accent and Southern belle demeanor because it would have a certain class of senators eating out of her hand.

Not surprising, Americans from outside coastal states are being walked over all the time and when they inevitably rebel are called despicable human beings. If there was genuine economic opportunity and cultural pluralism, there would be less immature culture wars from the other side as well. Has to start with making sure someone from or even in Alabama can also get a software job and drive a Tesla without having to change how they were brought up (in non pathological cases, there are always outliers that prove the rule)

A lot of coastal states speak with Southern accents.

America is accentist, ageist, sexist, racist, imperialist. God bless Amerika.

I'm sure that's probably true of Boston accents as well?

Can we not post trash like Fox here on HN?

For many, a Southern accent immediately invokes thoughts of MAGA, gun fanatics, Republicans, Trump supporters, anti-science, racists, homophobes, fascists, xenophobes, misogynists, etc. There are so many negative stereotypes tied up with the Bible Belt that this study doesn’t surprise me at all.

The reason for that is liberals creating that stereotype in media you consume. It's not by accident or just the way things are. It's quite deliberate.

Ah yes, the liberals who voted for Trump, passed anti-gun-control legistlation, vote Republican, push creationism into schools, judge people based on skin color, vote anti-gay-rights clauses into their state constitutions, gerrymander or limit polling stations to push urban areas out of representation, complain about immigrants, and vote for removing womens' agency in health care. Couldn't be the voters in the south, must be The Media.

Speaking as someone who spent two thirds of his life in the south, you can turn off the TV and nothing changes. It sucks that someone would make all these assumptions based on someone's accent, but all of this negative press for the South is entirely earned.

> Couldn't be the voters in the south, must be The Media.

You do realize that in even even in the reddest southern state (Alabama) 35% of people did not vote for Trump?

Also that if your diatribe was targeted at any other ethnic group or nationality it would almost invariably be perceived as racist by most?

Moral standards does not apply to self righteous people. Since they are good people and only bad people do bad stuff.

"My" diatribe was a point for point repetition of the grandparent post with examples. And yes, I do realize that -- hence the bit about how people should not be judged by an accent? Did you read the whole post or just the bits you wanted to get mad at?

Any diatribe targeted at any ethnic group is racist?. Are you under the impression "Southerner" is an ethnic group? I am talking about a group of people who share vile political goals and have a voting majority in specific US states. I didn't say one word about ethnicity, so you might try to peddle your rage bait elsewhere.

This is a stupid rhetorical device. "If you said bad things about minorities you'd be racist!". No shit. Guess it's a good thing I'm saying bad things about people with shitty ideologies.

So every person who has a southern accent is part of:

> I am talking about a group of people who share vile political goals

right?

So are you implying that they only gain the accent when they join this group or that having the accent makes them predisposed somehow to join it, or what?

What makes your diatribe (part II) even more mind-boggling is that this whole discussion is about people who chose to move to some other states. Which probably would make them less likely to support these “shitty ideologies”? That is unless you believe they are somehow predisposed to hold ’vile’ views because of where they were born?

> Guess it's a good thing I'm saying bad things about people with shitty ideologies.

Well you’re implying that any person who speaks with a southern accent is incapable of holding liberal/progressive(?) beliefs? Or that anybody born in “the south” is regardless pf the accent? That everyone who doesn’t/isn’t is a somehow inherently superior human being? It’s hard to say.. either idea is pretty disturbing.

> you wanted to get mad at?

I’m not mad.. just a bit puzzled and surprised that you’re not sharing your thoughts on Reddit instead.

You're conflating two different topics. One is the overall thread topic, the study where people with strong accents -- NOT just southern ones -- receive lower wage offers. The other is media portrayal of the south in general, which is what I was responding to. I explicitly said it was bad that people associate possession of a Southern accent with subscription to the despicable politics that are at play in the South. I also said that the media portrayal of the South as full of extreme right-wing politics, racism, and xenophobia was largely accurate, because the powers that be in the south subscribe to them, and they're voted in by the populace. Does that mean they are unanimously supported? No, but that didn't stop you from making bad assumptions about my intent. The fact is that the parts of the country where these things prevail in politics is also the part of the country where Southern accents are common. There is no causative relationship between these two facts. I'm not "implying" anything; I'm saying that people should not be judged by their accents AND media portrayal of the south as politically backwards is accurate ... and these two things can both be true. It's part of the guidelines of this site to avoid going out of your way to make bad-faith interpretations of posts here, and this pointless exchange is why.

I assume the Reddit reference is some kind of an attempt at a burn that would make sense to extremely online people, but since I don't really read Reddit I'm not going to bother to figure out what the hell you're talking about there.

Does this comment include Southern Blacks and Hispanics or just the white ones?

Well, the southern Cubanos do tend to vote Republican…

It includes all the people who support the policies I mentioned. Pretty ineffective race card attempt, I must say. What was it meant to accomplish?

I figured many people with your viewpoint would have a hard time criticizing people of color.

Half my family are people of color who vote republican. The other half are people of color who do not. I generally don't have any problems criticizing anyone who hold beliefs I don't agree with.

I thought people from the south that left the south were the ones spreading that stereotype? Poetic justice perhaps?

This type of stereotyping is the exact reasoning that fuels the liberal paradise fallacy. In reality the rates of racial equity among what kind of teachers you see, and racial equity in home ownership rates, are better in the south than in a lot of "blue states". Racism exists up north, it's just got a different flavor that is far less publicized.

It’s interesting that you fixate on racism while ignoring anti-abortion legislation, anti-trans legislation, mass shootings, anti-science climate change denial, etc. ad naseum.

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