“The south” is a really big region so maybe someone pops up because you’re tarring an entire region based on your individual experience. As an LGBT person, I grew up with people telling urban legends about gerbils and whatnot. Perhaps they witnessed a single person doing this, but attributing it to a large group is not very accurate.

I grew up in the south in a super backwards small town and now live in a really forward town in the south. It’s a big place and there’s a lot of great places.

Stereotypes are based on common behavior but don’t apply to everyone here or every part of the south.

I'm tarring an entire region because I say, truthfully, that I left it because I experienced discrimination there? Can you elaborate the ways I'm obligated to caveat and contextualize my experience so I don't hurt other people's feelings by honestly relaying it?

You’re not obligated to do anything, especially not to help me and others better understand you or make your comments useful.

“The south” ranges from Virginia to Texas. Maybe you lived everywhere and experienced discrimination everywhere.

For me, I grew up in a down of a 1000 people and live just a few hours away in a town with maybe one of the most diverse cultures (including LGBT) in the country.

If I said that because I experienced discrimination in my shitkicker little town that the entire south was similar, that would be wrong, and not very helpful to anyone trying to understand the south.

I suppose you can avoid absolutes and generalizations if you want to help others. But you definitely aren’t obligated to help anyone.

But generalizations jump out at me and annoy me because I’ve frequently encountered jerks saying something about perverts or crime stats and then just fall back on that they were just honestly relating their experience. But there is a difference between my experience and me saying that my experience applies to others. Especially if not backed by data and a suitable generalization.

To be clear, you're accusing me of tarring an entire region for relaying an experience I had in it. I didn't even make any claim that the South is more discriminatory against LGBT people than elsewhere, though if you're going to project that onto me anyway...

I guarantee you apply this kind of radical stance against all generalization in a very selective way. Do you get upset if someone says that Russia is a repressive country? Or that California is expensive?

Even if I were to give my entire life story, you can always feign offense, claiming "city A 20 miles away from city B is totally different, you can't generalize an entire county!" At some point I'd have to be listing all the individuals I had negative experiences with, and even then, isn't it unfair for me to represent the entirety of their person with a single selective moment of their life?

It's like when people hear a statement like you've made they recoil and assume that 100% of your interactions in a region involve discrimination. What they fail to understand is that the rate you experienced discrimination is higher in these areas than in others. It's a probability, it's clear to me from the context that surely not every interaction of yours in the south is bad, but given drawing a random interaction out of a hat, you are more likely to have a bad one living in Virginia than in New York. Given this reality, I wouldn't want to live in the American South either.

There must be some sort of logical block that prevents people from understanding the nuance in these comments, and rushing to defend against absolutes that no one implied existed. I blame a lack of understanding of statistics and probability.

Exactly. I've also experienced discrimination in San Francisco, for what it's worth! But as soon as you make any statement that it tends to be more common in the South (or even if it's merely implied), people end up triggered and rise up in defense of it.

I’m not defending the south, per se, I’m defending statements like “it tends to be more common in the South.”

The experience you described doesn’t seem to me that it justifies saying the south is worse or better than other regions.

The reason why you see people jump in the defend the south is that you are making a general statement about an entire region.

Here’s what I mean. Someone said that midwesterners are nice to people if they are white. Downthread you share that part of the reason you left the south is because of discrimination you experienced and I think you were pointing out that it was odd that people jumped in to defend the south.

It seems reasonable that people would try to more accurately describe the south and share their experiences as well.

Saying people are triggered seems to belittle their input. If I want more input I don’t call you triggered for feeling compelled to share info.

This is totally different if you think that there actually is some higher level of discrimination in the south or midwest or wherever. But I don’t think your anecdote isn’t really that helpful for tarring or exonerating a region. Despite how true or honest it may be.

So, first point: I reject the idea that in my first comment I made any general statements about the South. I recounted a particular experience I had, and some people extrapolated that into a claim that all of the South is uniformly homophobic or some other statement I'm being held to which I didn't make.

If I'm actually making general statements, I would say that big cities in the South are more gay friendly, though they're still impacted by state politics and as you enter the suburbs and especially rural areas you encounter much more bias. Two hours north of Atlanta is much worse than two hours north of San Francisco. If push came to shove, I'd feel more welcomed in Atlanta ITP than in many parts of the Central Valley; but I'm also not particularly interested in grading on a curve. But everyone's mileage will vary, and all the tradeoffs involved are complicated and will differ between different people and even in the same person at different times in their life.

These subtleties are lost, though, because my comment wasn't intended to provide a comprehensive overview of life as an LGBT person in the South, but to counter someone who was writing off someone else's experience as merely a way to feel virtuous about their self instead of anything real. It's a common response to many negative experiences from marginalized groups, so I see it as perfectly natural that I drew on my own experiences to call it out.

> Russia is a repressive country?

This is usually interpreted as a statement about the russian government, which is an abstract entity, unlike "the midwest" which is interpreted as referring to the people living there which is not.

> At some point I'd have to be listing all the individuals I had negative experiences with

This paradox is the subject of "statistics" which resolves this problem with ideas of "representative" samples. I think the issue here is that most people would consider a sample size big enough to represent an area as big as the midwest would exceed the lifetime of any individual, such that no one could prove anything from their own experiences alone.

Being more specific about the locale would help. Nashville is not Atlanta, NOLA is not Tampa when it comes to flavors of discriminatory attitudes - and rural or suburban attitudes are different as well. Describing where you went to for relief also adds even more context.

Not to mention Houston, for instance, is one of the most diverse cities in the entire country -- more diverse than much of CA. It's also one of the largest and most iconic cities of the South.

Houston remains one of the most segregated cities in the entire country.

This page ranks it 18th in that regard: https://cityobservatory.org/most_segregated/

Of note, LA is measured as being more segregated than Houston.

Memo: There's a gradient from liberal urban islands to the surrounding regressive rural areas. With some exceptions.

Surprised?

Not tarring, maybe he was just pointing out the unconscious bias of the statement not being more elusive.

>I'm making it all up and the South is perfectly open and tolerant.

I'm sure you're not. But "the South" is diverse. Atlanta has a very large LGBT community (both in absolute terms and as a percentage) and culture that is completely different from areas just an hour away. It's very possible that you and the people you are talking to had completely different experiences.

Both of you are almost certainly overgeneralizing your experiences when you say "the South".

People who live in the South get upset that the country likes to pretend that the rest of the country outside a few urban centers is any different. That is, if you had left the South for the rural or suburban Midwest or most of Pennsylvania, you'd likely have had a similar experience.

Thanks for explaining my experiences to me, as someone who spent twenty years living in exurban Atlanta.

I'm not explaining your experience to you. I'm telling you that your experience growing up in 1 place doesn't give you the ability to generalize a entire region.

>exurban Atlanta

Exurban Atlanta is not Atlanta. That's like saying the Jersey Shore is Manhattan.

> I'm telling you that your experience growing up in 1 place doesn't give you the ability to generalize a entire region.

And where did I do that? I am actually quite happy to generalize, but the only thing I've said in the comment you were replying to is that I experienced discrimination in the South. A simple factual statement that says nothing in general about the South, aside from the fact that at least one person experienced discrimination there. You're inventing statements in your head ("he's saying every last person in the South is homophobic!") and attributing them to me, based off of... nothing.

All that said, I do think there are accurate generalizations you can make about the South, or any large region. To take an extreme example, if someone said they had left the Middle East because the people around them were homophobic, you wouldn't be jumping in to defend the region because Beirut has a comparatively bustling gay scene right now.

ETA: And, on further thought, if we're going to be stridently anti-generalization, you're generalizing about Atlanta. Forsyth County, for instance, is definitely exurban and just as definitely part of the Atlanta metropolitan area. Just because you want to present a rosy picture doesn't mean you can generalize and say that every place in Atlanta is a beautiful utopia for LGBT residents.

> I'm always direct when pointing out that I left the South partially because of discrimination

Any reasonable person who reads will infer that "the South" is that thing that is discriminatory in general. If you instead meant something else you worded it very poorly.

I honestly have a hard time believing that you don't understand how the sentence "I left X because of Y." implies that X is Y.

"I left my marriage because of domestic violence." It's entirely possible to construct a meaning where your spouse wasn't the one beating you, but that's the logical inference.

If you didn't intend to generalize that the South is discriminatory overall then why didn't you just say: I left my hometown because of discrimination? What additional meaning does "the South" add to that if you really just mean:

"I left my home town because of discrimination. My hometown happens to be in the South, but I don't think the South at large is any more or less discriminatory than any other region."

>All that said, I do think there are accurate generalizations you can make about the South, or any large region.

Sure. I don't think you can based on the experience of having lived in one tiny area of that region.

>Forsyth County, for instance, is definitely exurban and just as definitely part of the Atlanta metropolitan area.

Exurban is one step away from farmland. The differences between Cumming and say the area around Little Five Points is much greater than the difference between that same area of Atlanta and San Francisco.

It’s amazing how many people are going out of their way to prove your point.

What point? That living in one small exurb in the South gives them enough experience to generalize a region of 125 million people?

Your comments indicated that such an explanation was necessary to improve your understanding.

I’m not LGBT (but I’m an ethnic minority who grew up in suburban Atlanta). I wanted to add that personally it’s not enough to just be ‘tolerated’. I’d rather be in a place where I’m “mainstream” or at least normalized. In that sense (for me as a South Asian) the Bay Area and NYC are no comparison so the South or the Midwest. I feel like I’m an active member of mainstream society there, not someone in the sides.

That is very cultural as well. I'm of Eastern European origin (white) and feel quite at home in large cities with varied population and racial variety and would feel quite uncomfortable to live permanently in the rural south just because of cultural differences.

It's important to clarify that you are mixing up two geographic regions here. You seem to mostly be referring to the deep south (especially since you refer to Atlanta in a later comment), which according to generally popular definitions is physically distinct from the midwest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_South

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States

What's more reasonable:

1) That I'm confusing the Deep South and the Midwest

or

2) That I'm commenting on a tendency of people to discount people's individual experiences because they don't like the idea that a particular region treats different people worse than other regions

What's reasonable is that you're doing both things simultaneously and probably in the process getting a lot of complicated reactions because of imprecise use of terminology.

Not a single person here was confused between the Midwest and the South, and you're obfuscating to generate noise.

There's at least one person who shifted the discussion from the former to the latter (you). If you did so intentionally, knowing fully well the regions are completely distinct, perhaps you should consider your own role in generating noise before you accuse others of that. I do not believe it was unreasonable or obfuscating or noisy for me to point out that the discussion abruptly shifted to a totally different area of the country and that it was unclear whether this shift was intentional or an innocent mistake.

It's very funny to imagine the mental gymnastics you performed to confidently conclude that a person who has lived in the South must be confusing it with the Midwest

Just downvote and move on if you feel that strongly about it.

  someone is always happy to butt in to say ... the South is perfectly open and tolerant

which would be a generalisation, which is exactly what jacobriis is warning of

No, jacobriis is not doing that. He's stating

> when people say things like this they often do so to feel virtuous themselves

You're laundering his comment into some abstract statement about how you can't make generalizations about anyone, when he was the one making a generalization that people who say that they experienced X are making things up.

Yes he is, here is the relevant quote:

  The idea that people in the Midwest (which has a population of over 65 million people similar to France and the UK) are only friendly to white people is pretty crazy.

You quoted a different part. I'm not "laundering" anything, there are multiple statements there. I didn't get the link between "someone is always happy to butt in" and whether or not OP experienced racism in the Midwest, but I am speaking of the generalisation of those experiences to the whole area, which jacobriis covers in the above quote.

> how you can't make generalizations about anyone, when he was the one making a generalization

generalisation in original post:

  people are friendly, as long as you look like them

generalisation by jacobriis:

  when people say things like this they *often* do so to feel virtuous

unless that's a silent "often", the generalisation is qualified, versus the unqualified generalisation in the first case.

But it's not just that - "generalisation", or specifically "bad" generalisation takes a particular form, otherwise how do you distinguish it from a metaphor? The way the first characterises a specific area based on personal experience, versus the second which talks of "people" in general based on some personal judgment makes them different kinds of statement: the first as an objective account, the second an explicitly subjective opinion.

> that people who say that they experienced X are making things up

No, he said they "do so to feel virtuous themselves" i.e. their motivation, they didn't say anything about the actual truth of the statement. They did not say anything to suggest that they are "making things up".

Given you just accused jacobriis of saying this, I now have to wonder about your original statement: "someone is always happy to butt in to say I'm making it all up" - did they specifically say that, or was that your interpretation?