Irritated

Most of the people I spend time with up here consider themselves liberal and open-minded.  They are quick to condemn racism, sexism, and judgments based on stereotypes.  People here take pride in their own tolerance and pat themselves on the back for their enlightenment.  However, apparently, there's one stereotype that it's still okay to perpetuate; it seeps through everyday conversations and it drives me up the wall.  It pops up everywhere: the south is backward, the south is ignorant, the people are stupid, no one goes there willingly.  Sometimes it's subtle, sometimes not so much.  I've never been personally called uneducated or backward, but the innuendo surrounding the region is unmistakable.  A small town in Massachusetts is charming; a small town in Alabama is underdeveloped.  A flag on a house in Connecticut is patriotic; a flag on a house in Georgia is redneck.  I can vouch for the fact that there are ignorant people in every part of the country, but I have never met better people than I have in the south.  It blows my mind that the same people who fight for openness and equality around campus will turn around and make a joke about the south being full of hicks.  Unsurprisingly, these are usually the people who haven't spent any significant amount of time down there.  So I would say that this doesn't make someone liberal and open-minded, but elitist and bigoted instead.  Sorry I'm not sorry.

this is how this makes me feel