It’s November 2024, just after the presidential election during the fall semester of my freshman year. My roommate’s grandparents have come to visit her. By just happening to be in my room, I have volunteered myself for an interrogation. When I mention that I’m from Texas, her grandmother gives me a look of pity.
“You must be so glad you made it out, right? What, with all those awful people there.”
Rewind to February 2021. I am 14 years old and the idea of voting has barely crossed my mind. Due to a failure of the state of Texas power grid, millions are left without power in one of the most intense winter storms the state has ever seen. While our house was fortunate enough to keep power, many homes in my neighborhood were not. When I checked social media, expecting to see an outpouring of support and empathy, much of what I saw amounted to this:
“It’s Texas. They deserve it. Isn’t this what they voted for?”
It’s all too easy for New Englanders or West Coast elites to write off the South as a region of Bible-thumping, Mountain-Dew-drinking, uneducated, bigoted white Republicans that just can’t let go of the good old days of the Civil War. In doing so, they ignore another South — a South forgotten about by the politicians of the region and held together by tight-knit communities of underrepresented groups. They ignore the South that I, and many others, know and love.
You cannot discuss the political underrepresentation of the South without first addressing the big, ugly word: gerrymandering.
Maddie Sparta, “Dunking on the South doesn’t make you progressive”.
You cannot discuss the political underrepresentation of the South without first addressing the big, ugly word: gerrymandering. Southern states have appeared frequently in recent news cycles for their redistricting battles — from Texas’s redrawing of district lines to add five additional Republican seats in 2025, to 2026 Supreme Court Decision Louisiana v. Callais focusing on the racially driven aspects of gerrymandering in the South. The Princeton Redistricting Report Card rates many Southern states “poor” for their heavily biased drawing of district lines ahead of the 2026 midterms.
The gerrymandering of the South has led to a famously Republican-dominated voting bloc, causing many politicians and voters alike to write the area off as “a lost cause.” But in many Southern states, this is changing. Polls for Texan Democratic nominee for Senate, James Talarico, show him narrowly ahead of Republican Ken Paxton. North Carolina’s popular former governor (now Senate candidate), Democrat Roy Cooper, is polling with a double-digit lead over opponent Michael Whatley. And Georgia, a deep-South state surrounded by firmly Republican neighbors, has been established as a swing state after voting for President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election with 16 key electoral votes.
These three examples show that, when able, the South can and will rally around Democratic candidates. This challenges the efforts of the Republican party to dilute likely Democratic voters across awkwardly drawn gerrymandered districts, limiting the voting power of the South’s many minority communities.
Communities of underprivileged groups exist all over the South. Just under half of all Black Americans live in the South; many cities with a Black majority are in the South, from mid-sized cities like Jackson, Miss. and Birmingham, Ala., to larger cities such as Memphis. Metropolitan areas such as the Atlanta metro do not have a Black majority but have some of the largest Black communities — the Atlanta metro alone has 2.1 to 2.3 million Black residents. Other large minority communities in the South include San Antonio, home to over one million Hispanic or Latino identifying residents (about 64.6% of the population) and Village de L’Est in New Orleans, one of the densest Vietnamese enclaves in America.
Additionally, about 35% of all LGBTQ+ adults in America call the South home. Atlanta is well-known for its established queer community and weekend-long Pride celebrations across the city (one of the nation’s oldest Pride traditions!). In Austin, 5.6% of the metro population identifies as LGBTQ — that’s a higher percentage of queer adults than Northeastern cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Boston or West Coast cities such as Seattle and Los Angeles.
Ultimately, someone’s political affiliations or minority status should not make them a person “worth saving.” But writing off the cultural traditions and political efforts of the American South does the entire region a disservice and divides our country even more by alienating an entire region of Americans. Choosing to ignore and look down on the South does more to divide America, not fix it. Northeasterners and West Coast elites: retire your antiquated thinking on the South and embrace Southerners as allies in working toward a brighter future.