 This may horrify you, but Southern culture has deeply influenced your life. The South gets made fun of for being backwards, but in a lot of ways y'all non-Southerners are always a step behind us. You see people in Brooklyn drinking out of mason jars, which we've been doing in the South for years, but you don't see many people in Chickamauga, Georgia unicycling to their polyamorous juggling classes. Well, it is strange to be outside of the South and all the cool kids are suddenly dressing like your uncles. That's a very weird day. It started with trucker hats, which our people call them hats. The banjo, country music, blues, rock and roll, and the great American novel, all things that come from the South. You want to talk about the blues, you want to talk about rock and roll, talk about country music, talk about gospel music. All of that is created by Southerners either in the South or in some cases Southerners who've left the South in places like Chicago. If you want to talk about literature in the 20th century, the South was one of the two great fonts of American literature. They are being urban Jewish writers. Take away Southern writers and urban Jewish writers. You don't have much American literature left in the 20th century. I know it's difficult to think of Southerners as thought leaders for anything that doesn't involve monster trucks. Just look at literature. Tennessee ain't just a state. It's also the name of a guy who wrote some of America's greatest plays. Tennessee Williams just by virtue of his name is pretty explicitly Southern, right? Except for what he did and his works and everything about him wasn't stereotypically Southern. And if you don't fit the mold of what people envision a Southerner to be, it doesn't matter how openly Southern you are. You still like don't count to them for whatever reason. It wasn't easy for Southern rappers to overcome people's perceptions either. As Andre 3000 put it at the 1995 Source Awards, Outcast is now recognized as one of the greatest American rap groups of all time. I bet none of y'all were considering them exclusively Southern while you were screaming, hey, y'all, at every wedding from 2004 until whenever Uptown Funk came out. Southerners made the T-shirt cannon and the Super Soaker. So if you need some normally not projectile objects shot out of a gun, we probably know a guy. Personally, I think T-shirt cannons are better for home defense than guns are because even if you miss the burglar, he's going to turn around and chase the free shirt. The South is crossed over to make huge cultural impacts both good and bad. Sorry about the big mouth Billy Bash craze in the early 2000s. The point I'm trying to make is Southern culture gets other eyes as if it's another thing, but it's an integral part of the American story and culture. When I say Southern culture is American culture, a better way to say it might be all Americans own Southern culture. The good, as I alluded to above, Outcast made rap better. The bad against all odds, the North made the theme song for slavery. I'm talking about the song Dixie, perhaps no song is more closely associated with the Old South. Dixie became the unofficial national anthem of the Confederacy, but it was written for minstrel shows and is credited to a guy from Ohio who is living in New York. It's like finding out Billy Graham wrote straight out of Compton. In fact, minstrel shows where white actors performed terrible caricatures in blackface were way more popular in the North and one of the biggest minstrel companies performed on Broadway for a decade. Fun fact, the most popular minstrel performer went by the stage name Jim Crow. So we might have come up with the awful policies of the Jim Crow era, but y'all Northerners help with the branding. Proving once and for all that everything in America from our art to our cuisine to our systemic evils is a collaboration. America is a melting pot and all I'm saying is that the South has contributed some of the good ingredients to that stew. And the nauseating stuff, it's geographically diverse too.