South by Midwest: Or, Where is Oklahoma?

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South by Midwest: Or, Where is Oklahoma?

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South by Midwest: Or, Where is Oklahoma?

April 10, 2011

I’m not much of a Facebook person. Most of the time, I passively scroll through status updates while avoiding doing something else. Recently, however, I set off a Facebook conversation that lasted for days, with far-flung acquaintances and distant relatives chiming in on what I thought was a perfectly reasonable assertion.

Before I come to that assertion, let me ask you, dear reader, who I trust has at least a passing interest in the nation’s 46th state: Where is Oklahoma? Were someone on the street to ask you this question, you might turn to a political map of the United States and point to the meat cleaver above Texas. There it is, you would say, in the mid-south-central portion of the continental United States. But where is it culturally? Is it part of The South? The U.S. Census Bureau says so. Generations of venerable southern historians, such as C. Vann Woodward, have said so.

And this was the assertion I casually made on Facebook. Actually, what I said was that, as a Southerner, the word “heritage” (as in “Southern heritage”) struck me as slightly sinister, but I wasn’t quite sure why.
I was quickly shot down by the sister of a very good friend, who happens to live in Birmingham. “Oklahoma is not the South, Russ,” she said. “It’s the Midwest.” Another friend in Georgia sprung to my defense. “I’ve lived in the Deep South and Chicago. Oklahoma is definitely more Southern than Midwestern. Still, it’s not quite the South either.”

A Canadian friend was confused. “Where does the South end?” he wanted to know. “Is the South synonymous with the Bible Belt?” In a famous article, one historian asserted that the best way to define the contemporary South was to examine the audience for religious television. The bigger the market share for televangelists, the more southern the place. By this calculation, Tulsa was either the buckle on the Bible Belt, or, at the very least, one of its belt holes.

A good friend who considers a trip to Dallas to be a visit to a foreign country tried to argue that Oklahoma was its own region, that it shouldn’t be lumped together with any other state, especially not Texas. But this seemed strange, too, because there are some affinities between Texas and Oklahoma. Still, Okies have none of the bluster of Texans, and it’s hard to imagine a tourism campaign with the slogan: “Oklahoma, it’s like a whole other country.” We don’t do arrogance. When I was growing up, the slogan on license plates was “Oklahoma is OK.” Not great, not terrible, just OK.

The conversation went on for days. I could sense I was losing the argument. All the Oklahomans who posted seemed to think their native state was in the Midwest. This disturbed me, but why? There was something hopelessly dull and uninteresting about being from the Midwest. Someone else, a friend in New York, agreed. “It’s in the Midwest, but I would rather it be in the South,” she said. Why was the South an improvement on the Midwest? Being from the South had its own set of problems. And what about the Southwest? Maybe we were Southwesterners.

***

Trace the old Route 66 via Interstate 44, and you will eventually come to a town where, depending on which gas station you visit, you will hear a nasally Midwestern accent or a Southern accent. The town is just across the Missouri-Oklahoma line, in Carthage, Missouri. On the southern end of town, near the highway, locals will say “highway forty-four,” but will often turn the number four into two separate syllables: fo-or. Linguists will tell you that this is the hallmark “Southern drawl”: drawing one vowel out to make it sound like two.

On the other end of town, on the road to Kansas City, I-44 becomes pronounced as “farty-far.” I can make this assertion with some authority, having traveled north and south across Missouri many times on my way to college in Iowa, which, unlike Oklahoma, suffers from no regional identity complex. Rolling hills of grain silos, perfectly red barns and miles of corn fields signify, in no uncertain terms, the Midwest.

Iowa, along with Nebraska and South Dakota, has produced a disproportionate share of broadcasters, in part because the accent in these states is considered the most neutral. This is the heartland of a type of English known as General American (SAE, or Standard American English, in another term of art for this accent), a place the linguist William Labov found to be the area most devoid of regional variations and irregular speech patterns. According to Labov’s Atlas of North American English, General American encompasses an oval-shaped blob from eastern Nebraska and South Dakota to central Illinois, taking in much of Iowa and northern Missouri. Walter Cronkite, Ronald Reagan and Tom Brokaw all spent their formative years in General America. General America is where corporations go to test new products to see if they will succeed in the rest of the country. If all the children in Lake Wobegon are above average, all the children in General America are average.

When I first drove across General America in the early 1990s, I was shocked to learn how different it was from Oklahoma, which I always assumed was the most generic, milquetoast place in the world. The towns of General America, however, were tidier and straighter than anything I had seen in Oklahoma. The churches were whiter. The town squares looked like settings for Normal Rockwell paintings. So many small towns in Oklahoma looked like they’d just been hit by F-5 tornadoes or served as a setting for a movie about rural meth labs.

I also assumed that anyone not from a city spoke with an Oklahoma accent, which traces its genealogy back to Appalachia—a variation on the Southern accent. When I met my first roommate, Jake, from Hawarden, Iowa (population 2,478) at the University of Iowa, I was surprised he spoke General American. He looked like a hick in his tight Wranglers, mullet, and Metallica t-shirt, and yet he spoke without a trace of an accent. I expected his accent to be something like that of Boomhauer’s from King of the Hill: a twangy, monotone slur. (The creator of the show, Mike Judge, has stated that the inspiration for Boomhauer’s accent came from an unintelligible phone conversation he once had with a man from Oklahoma City.) My roommate also had three more Advanced Placement credits than I did, completing the ruin of my sense of intellectual and cultural superiority.

Even more shocking than all this was learning that I had an accent. I shared a phone with Jake and two guys from Chicago next door. The Chicagoans drank Old Style beer at 8 a.m. and skipped class to watch hockey. One day, I discovered that I was missing a pair of socks and asked them about it.

“You’re missing what?” one of them said.

“Socks,” I said. “I can’t find my socks.”

The one I had been talking to went to find his roommate. He brought him into the common area, where we shared a refrigerator and a telephone.

“I can’t understand this guy,” one Chicagoan said to the other. “What are you missing?”

“My socks!” I said. “You put them on your feet.”

“Sacks,” said the other one. “He’s saying ‘sacks.’ ” They laughed and then mocked me. “Saw-ahks,” they said. “I cain’t find my saw-ahks. Shi-it!” To their ears, I sounded like an Alabama redneck.

So I set about detecting regionalisms in my speech and purging them one by one with the help of a fellow English major from Chicago. Greasy was not pronounced with a “z” sound but with an “s” sound. Words ending in “-ow” were pronounced with an “oh” sound, not with an “-uh” sound. “Pen” and “pin” were pronounced differently. “Milk” was one syllable, not “mi-yulk.”

Going back to Tulsa, I noticed that somewhere south of Kansas City, Standard American gave way to Southern twang, leading me to eventually pinpoint Carthage as the transition zone. A 2004 study of national speech patterns boiled American dialects down to six major groupings. Northeastern Oklahoma and southern Missouri are the northwestern limits of the southern accent, while the “midland,” that area from northern Missouri to Iowa, Nebraska and Illinois, was found to be the region with the fewest deviations from Standard American.

***

Even if we Okies have a sort of Southern accent, though, that doesn’t make us Southerners. The Census Bureau may designate Oklahoma as the South, but what explains the visceral reaction of Georgians and Alabamans when an Okie claims to be from Dixie? A friend of a friend from Tulsa replicated my Facebook experiment and was shot down by from someone from Arkansas. “It’s the Southwest,” he wrote. “The South starts with Arkansas.” The next person to post was confused. “Upper central mid south west?” she wrote. “Please let me know what the answer is.”

A friend of a friend who works for Southern Living magazine was sort of annoyed that Oklahoma was included in her lifestyle magazine. “It was a marketing decision,” she said. “Everyone knows Oklahoma isn’t in the real South.” But where is the real South?

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when Oklahoma politicians made a deliberate effort to make the state part of the “Solid South,” a peculiar institution that guaranteed the one-party rule of the Democratic Party. The heyday of the “Solid South” lasted from the end of Reconstruction until the end of World War II. The strategy was all about, of course, disenfranchising black voters and wielding monolithic political control over state politics. Danney Goble, the recently deceased Oklahoma historian, explains it this way in the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture:

The fact that much of the future state was settled by immigrating southerners had great influence on Oklahoma’s later politics. Its unwieldy constitution, its distrust of concentrated corporate and political power, its steady run-ins with federal authority, even its susceptibility to political corruption–all of these were qualities that the Sooner State shared with states of the Old Confederacy…Early Oklahoma Democrats campaigned and governed just like their fellow Democrats across the South: they openly and bluntly proclaimed their racism to win power, and they used power to affirm and institutionalize their racism. It was they who mandated separate schools under the constitution; they who segregated public transportation in Oklahoma’s first statute; they who countenanced “white only” public accommodations, neighborhoods, even entire towns; they who systematically disenfranchised blacks with racist election laws.

****

The geographer Wilbur Zelinsky—one of the inventors of modern cultural geography—attempted to understand regional identity in the “vernacular.” Zelinsky wanted to understand how everyday folks defined themselves in terms of regional identity. This was in the pre-Internet age of the 1970s and 1980s, and Zelinsky focused on the Yellow Pages. The telephone book, unlike, say, the Census Bureau, would give you a good idea of the regional place names that people used to identify themselves and their businesses.

Sorting through thousands of place names in hundreds of cities, he compiled a series of maps that showed how people identified their regions. Some of the regions were predictable: Boston businesses used a lot of terms like New England and Northeastern in their names or descriptions. “Southern” was a dominant term in phone books in Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, etc. But, looking at Zelinksy’s maps today, it is Oklahoma that shows the biggest regional confusion. Strangely, Zelinsky never commented on this fact. He noted that some places, like western Pennsylvania, were kind of stuck between Northeastern and Midwestern, but it was Oklahoma that had the greatest amount of regional identities. Five of the twelve vernacular identities that Zelinsky came up with converged on Oklahoma. For phone books in the very southeastern part of the state, Oklahoma was southern. In the panhandle, it was the “West.” Along the Kansas border, it was the Midwest. From Oklahoma City to the west, it was the “southwest.”

Part of the problem with Zelinsky’s research, though, is that it is static. It doesn’t take into account the way regional identities change. Minnesota was once considered the Northwest; it is now firmly ensconced in the Midwest. Maryland was once considered the South, but few people would today characterize it as anything other than the Mid-Atlantic.

The Midwest, in general, seems to be gaining ground, expanding its reach beyond its western and southern boundaries. In 2006, NPR, while reporting on an outbreak of tornadoes in Tennessee, referred to the state as the Midwest. If the Midwest is the region of Standard American, this seems to make sense, at least on the surface. The common wisdom is that the proliferation of mainstream popular culture through TV, the Internet, and social media is destroying regional identities, making us all one undifferentiated mass of Starbucks coffee shops and crappy reality television. Socio-linguists, however, have found that the opposite is true—at least in terms of regional vocabularies and dialects. New dialects are being born: California used to speak Standard American but now has its own accent and regional variations are becoming more—not less—pronounced.

***

There is always the case for the Southwest. But Oklahoma doesn’t quite fit there either because the proper Southwest is a legacy of what was once Mexico, and, before that, the Spanish Empire. West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, some of Colorado: all these places have Hispanic place names and visible relics of Spain and Mexico. Apart from El Reno—and one has to doubt that there were ever any reindeer (Reno is Spanish for reindeer) in central Oklahoma—there are no Spanish place names in Oklahoma. Coronado, apparently, wandered through the Wichita Mountains and lost a few pounds of gold along the way, but there are no missions, no pueblos. Our only decent Mexican food comes from recent migration patterns; in short, we have nothing that Americans recognize as archetypes of Southwestern culture.

Finally, in moments of brutal honesty, Okies will admit that their state is a variation of Texas. This is a painful admission, to be sure. “The whole state is like a suburb of Dallas,” a fellow Tulsan told a Canadian friend. “It’s Texas-light,” someone wrote during my interminable Facebook conversation. Politically, culturally and religiously speaking, there’s a good case to be made for this assertion. Texans and Oklahomans share the same affinity for hard-right, red-meat conservative politics, and they have large populations of Southern Baptists. Western Swing is a purely Texas-Oklahoma creation of Bob Wills, who belongs to both states. The accent is pretty much the same, although a bit stronger in Texas. There’s the big role oil companies play in the states’ economies. And, of course, there’s football. Both states are football crazed, but therein lies a complication: there is no greater sports hatred than that between the Sooners and the Longhorns.

I’ve tried to deconstruct the annual hatefest that is the OU-Texas game for my wife, a native Californian, who, before meeting me, had never watched a college football game. Part of what makes the game exciting, I told her, is that it’s played on a neutral site. So it’s not in Texas or Oklahoma, she wondered? Well, it’s in Dallas, I said. The idea that Dallas was somehow neutral seemed ludicrous, and, indeed, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like Oklahomans had been bamboozled.

So, where is Oklahoma? It is in America’s Heart, someone said. Well, not quite, I rebutted. If you compare the map of the continental U.S. to the human body, you would have to conclude that Oklahoma is America’s pancreas. It’s in the mid-south-central of the body, and, although it doesn’t have the poetic resonance of the heart, it serves an important function. It breaks down proteins, carbs and fats. The pancreas is often overlooked until something terrible happens there, like a cancer—or the bombing of a federal building. But there it is, right there in the middle of everything, trying to make sense of all the substances coming through the system. Not all the substances that come through are healthy, but the pancreas soldiers on, keeping the body running.

beyondnothing

Nice analysis. I’ll definitely re-read this. I’ve struggled with this quandary for years, and I’ve encountered the opposite reaction where many Oklahomans who hear me say we’re not really the South get upset. I feel we have some cultural connections to the Old South but that it’s by and large a choice–a bad choice. Geographically and historically, I don’t feel we’re the South. I’ve tried the term “Southern Midwest” out and will keep it up. For now, it’s the best term I’ve found that ties the most important aspects up in the neatest fashion. Doesn’t seem to catch on though, lol. Thanks for writing thoughtfully about a subject that I’ve haven’t seen anyone formally address.
T.

Personally, I love referring to Oklahoma as south-central because then “don’t hate the 918″ becomes “Don’t be a menace to south-central.”

But North Texas and Oklahoma are the same state for sure.

Loved this article. =)
http://www.byrneunit.com/blogs Brian

Fantastic article; this is something I think about a lot. I’ve always been surprised (and a little amused) by how huffy people from The South get when anyone suggests Oklahoma is part of it. Personally I think more highly of Oklahoma to saddle it with such a designation.

The only term I could ever come up with to describe the area was “The Lower Midwest,” and this was as I grew up and lived in OK. I’ve been in Chicago for five years, and that’s actually reinforced my feeling that that name is correct — the goodness and friendliness in people is strikingly similar in both places.

I’ve always contended that Oklahoma was closer to being the groin of the nation, but the pancreas is a much better analogy.
Matt O’Meilia

(Sorry, I hit Submit prematurely the first time.)

This is a great, thought-provoking article. I’ve lived here all of my life and grew up thinking Oklahoma was in the Midwest, but that stopped making sense when I heard newscasters referring to places like Iowa as the Midwest. I like the suggestion above: the Southern Midwest. I prefer that over “Lower Midwest” because, now that I’ve read the pancreas analogy, this term makes me think of the lower intestine. Or “lower class.” We’re definitely not The South, though. A state should be touching Mexico or the Gulf of Mexico to have “south” in its regional description, should it not? So, that rules out my first choice: Southern Midwest. I guess I don’t care what region people think we’re in as long as they don’t call us “Texas Lite.” I’m extremely offended by that.
billy bob

How would you pronounce, “Man, I tell you what, boy. Man, I tell you”???
http://okpolicy.org/blog/in-the-know/in-the-know-april-12-2011/ In The Know: April 12, 2011 | OK Policy Blog

[...] offshore assets that were frozen during the civil war. This Land Press looks at uncertainty around what region Oklahoma is in. In today’s Policy Note, the Los Angeles Times looks at moves in several states to cut taxes [...]
Gypsy Hogan

My father was from Alabama and migrated to East Texas, where I was born. When I moved to Oklahoma, I was greatly teased about my Southern accent, only to go back home, speak a few words of greeting, and have my father tear up and say with his great drawl, “My God, you sound like a Yankee!” I’ve never had anyone from the north tell me that, even today. So, I agree, Oklahoma has quite the identity problem.
Sally Dennison

Oklahoma makes Oklahoma a misfit in the various regions is that it started out as a concentration camp for American Indians. The indian cultural influence is still very strong here and that is why we don’t have the bluster of Texans.
JKOK7

You wanna know why people in the DEEP SOUTH don’t consider OK a part of the South, is because most people (including folks up here in Ohio) don’t know where OK is on the freakin map! I’ve talked to alot of people on this topic and trust me, our school systems have failed miserably in the subject of Geography. They have no idea that OK is west of AR, North of TX and Caddy Corner to LA.

If you compare Oklahoma to Arkansas, you will find alot of similarities. I was born and raised in Lawton, OK and I currently live in Columbus, OH. Let me tell you this, if you were to tell anybody up here that OK is the MIDWEST they would laugh in your face. It’s not even a comparison between the great lake states and OK, culturally, weather wise, diet wise ect. Oklahoma has Oil, Cotton Crops, Red Dirt mounds and roads, old plantation homes, some magnolia trees, had slavery, The Black Wall Street Bombing in Tulsa (Greenwood), was aligned with the confederacy and IS below the Mason Dixon line. Oklahoma has long summers and short mild winters. We “USUALLY” don’t get alot of snow, but we get alot of ice which is a characteristic of the rest of the south. Our staple is Fried Okra, and the folks that are native to Oklahoma talk with a SOUTHERN DRAW or have a SOUTHERN ACCENT. Some of our elementary schools sing DIXIE in place of our national anthem (which is very controversial in some areas). If that doesn’t make you a southern state, I don’t know what does.

Another thing, most Oklahomans like catfish and such. I can tell you that that isn’t necessarily the case in the midwest where some eat Mackerel. The midwest has a strong Catholic influence, while Oklahoma is Baptist country like the rest of the South and OK is in the Bible Belt, the midwest is not.

We are not the (DEEP SOUTH) like Mississippi, but if you had to put us in one of the four regions we are in the South. I would say anything west of OKC is Southwestern and anything east is the South with no arguement. Man, Oklahoma’s problem is the same as Kentucky’s and West Virgina’s. Even the state of Ohio is constantly argued as either Midwest or Northeastern.

Guthrie might have more in common with Kansas than it does Arkansas, while Broken Bow and Hugo have more in common with AR, LA & TX. I know Lawton has way more in common with Texas than any other state. Looking at the animals, Lawton-Fort Sill has Tarantulas while Broken Bow & Idabel have GATORS! It’s a very very diverse state with 13 different sub-tropic climates.

The beautiful thing about the south is, every part of the south have their own unique accents. People in parts of OK, TX, AR and northern LA may talk the same while folks in GA, AL & MS talk another way and the Carolinas talk differently then the rest.

While I admit OK and TX have their own thing goin on & are a lil different. But who says that all of the south has to be like Mississippi or Georgia? Question, why is it that alot of people call red dirt (Georgia Clay) when red dirt is found all throughout the south. From OK to the Carolinas? Somethin to think about. Oklahoma by definition is a Southern State, our neighbors to the east of us who hold a grudge against us because we weren’t a state during the civil war, need to get over it. We were a confederate TERRITORY. Nevertheless, the war is over. Livin up in Ohio, I can truely say that Oklahoma is far from a yankee state. We are the SOUTH! Just not the coastal south.
JKOK7

Great article:

I agre, if you got rid of that little spot of water we call the Red River, you’d never know where Oklahoma ends and Texas begins. I’ve heard some people from the DFW area call Oklahoma “Lil Texas”.
Joe

You forgot a critical juncture most southerners forget, the final battles of the Civil War were not fought in Georgia, Mississippi, or Alabama but in the OK state of Oklahoma.
Stand Watie was the last Confederate General to surrender and he was Cherokee. So Oklahoma should get its credits for being apart of the south for that reason alone.
http://www.hareandarrow.com reeseylocks

I lived in NY for a while and when this came up, I always told people that Oklahoma wasn’t Midwest, South or anything like Texas. I would always call it Native America or the Heartland. Great article.
JKOK7

Native America it is, however “Native America” still has front lawns and vehicles laced with Confeferate Flags so “Native America” has to be in some region. I don’t know what part of Oklahoma you’re from, but I would argue that Oklahoma (especially south of OKC) is very much like North Texas. Not like Houston, not like San Antonio or El Paso. Our panhandle is similar to that whole Amarillo area.

I and my family know plenty of Texans all of them admit (when we put away our pride) that Texas & Oklahoma are very very similar especially if your talkin about Abilene northward.

As far as Oklahoma being a part of the South. We are not in the north like Kansas and Missouri, we are not the desert southwest like New Mexico & Arizona. In my opinion we have more right to be included in the South than KY, MD, DE or even VA who are all further north than OK. Again, east of 35 you get a strong southern feel, you get southern hospitality through 90% of the state, & like Reeseylocks said (the last Civil War battles were in Oklahoma) and we had slavery. Please look up “The Black Wall Street”. Trust me, that’s not gonna happen in Chicago, Cleveland, Santa Fe or Phoenix. That Bombing only happens in the South. We have a historically black university (Langston), which is something you find exclusively in southern states (Ohio and Pennsylvania are the exception). We have high schools with names like Booker T. Washington and we also had Dunbar high school in Lawton. The South embassed Booker T. Washington’s philosophy while the North embrassed W. E. B. Du Bois. Despite Midwest City, we have many towns with southern and native american names.

While I agree that we are Native America, we can’t just call ourselves something and not be apart of any region.
kelk

to quote August: Osage County, “Hey. Please. This is not the Midwest. All right? Michigan is the Midwest, god knows why. This is the Plains: a state of mind, right, some spiritual affliction, like the Blues. Are you okay? I’m fine. Just got the Plains.”
I’ve always liked the variety of accents you find in Oklahoma — a friend and I were born and spent our entire childhoods, raised a few miles apart, in Tulsa. I have no discernible accent, and she twangs like there’s no tomorrow. And I was shocked the first time a fellow Okie told me she considered Oklahoma to be southern, that had never even occurred to me. we’re a Plains/Heartland state. we’re Bible Belt and Tornado Alley. and we’re so windy because Kansas blows and Texas sucks. that’s all the definition I need.
Nirvana-1fan

That’s not true, slot of country folk here in Ok have a southern accent,definitely eastern and southeastern Oklahoma
Oklahoma_twang

That makes no sense whatsoever regarding the bordering of the Gulf of Mexico of the Mexican border as southern. That would mean Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Missouri, and Arkansas are not southern.
Oklahoma_twang

None of the universities in OK are designated as southern universities. There are no Southern Studies courses available at any Oklahoma public universities. The schools named after civil war generals are only named after Union Civil War generals, such as Grant High School. The fact that Obama’s mother was from OK and Blake Griffin was from OK prevents OK from having the ethnocentric southern mindset. Also, the fact that nothing in OK is modeled after European culture or colonialism, likewise prevents it from being any part of Dixie. OK has the thrid largest percentage of interracial/black male-white female marriages in America…that definitely prevents it from being southern. The golf courses and country clubs in OK are in no way southern.

The conservative style of dress and clothing (see: blue jeans and t-shirts) worn around campuses and casual blue collar style prevent it from being anything like the seer-sucker suits and mint julips one will find at SEC games and tailgate cocktail parties prevents it from being southern. The fact that OK has a negative view of alcohol consumption and culture also prevents it from being southern in any way. We all know how they love to drink down on Bourbon Street in New Orleans.
David

A lot of people feel strongly connected to one part of the country or another, but the fact is, Oklahoma is simply a “No Man’s Land” between the various cultural regions. The comments section here is proof of that.
wyobraska girl

I agree – the Plains states all have a bit of an identity crisis. I’m from western Nebraska, and though the state is usually put in the Midwest category (which fits the Omaha/Lincoln area just fine!), the panhandle definitely fits in better with the Rocky Mountain/West region.
Boomer Sooner

Whoever thinks Oklahoma isn’t in the South obviously hasn’t ever stepped foot in any town in Oklahoma besides Tulsa or Oklahoma City. It may not be the “Old South”, but it’s definitely more Southern than Midwestern. I was born in raised in Sapulpa and the accents there are so far from Midwestern, it’s not even funny. Also, whoever said all of the schools are named after Northern Generals… wrong. I once lived across the street from a Robert E. Lee Elementary. Boom. Roasted.
Oklahoma_twang

The strong amount of German and Czech blood in many Oklahomans and Oklahoma towns make it Midwestern. Many in OK are German Lutherans, which is clearly northern and Midwestern culture. Oklahoma is a Great Plains/pro-Union settlement known as Jayhawkers or Jayhawks. OK was settled by the same Union pioneers as Kansas. The Native American presence in OK also prevent the state from being southern. Southerners despise Native Americans as much as they do African Americans. Always remember, the South honors anti-indian historical figures like Andrew Jackson. OK never named their towns after people like Jackson and Beauregard, etc.
Alphagetty

I was born here, lived in dallas did not have to come back here (okc) becuz of
sickness in family. Since then nothing but Sh_t has happened. I was making
a very decent amount of $ b4 being here. I had been away so long I forgot why
I wanted to leave. The people, weather, roads and just about anything else to
mention I would ( too much to text) but I believe oklahoma IS a slave state!
I’ll leave that to those to ponder. The house is for sale, and to make a long
story short, want to get the hell OUT of this propaganda place. You won’t
fool me any longer. Have fun and keep telling yourselves OK is the bomb.
Okay

We had plenty of prejudice during the war and after. See Tulsa race riots. As for Native American hatred, you’re crazy if you don’t think Oklahoma has long been home to this sort of prejudice. P.S. We had an Andrew Jackson elementary in my home town so there goes your theory. However this is not to say that we do not have strong midwestern tendencies too. Any article that tries to say exactly what we are will be reductive. Oklahoma is what it is. Not quite south or west or north or great plains, but somehow a little bit of each.
Okay

You’re damaged.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Kent-Ryan-Hefley/1043380652 Kent Ryan Hefley

The majority of town in OK are named after towns in the old south. Almost 70 percent of Oklahomans consider themselves to be southern. Oklahoma was a Confederate controlled territory during the civil war and the last Confederate general to fall to Union forces happened in OK. All Five Civilized Tribes owned slaves and adopted southern culture. Our state meal is southern. We speak with drawl and have a dereliction for sweet tea and deep fried foods. We predominantly say y’all instead of “you guys.”

Our political structure follows that of most of the South. We have more Southern Baptists per capita than any state in the Union.

Go anywhere west of New Mexico and the people will tell you you are southern. If anyone thinks the SE portion of the state is more like Iowa than northern Louisiana is insane. Anyone thinking that Oklahoma has anything in common with states like Iowa and Illinois is insane. People in the Midwest will tell you that Oklahoma is not midwestern. Forget high schools, we have counties named after Confederate generals.

Those who long for it to be the midwest suffer from delusional thoughts of guilt for being tied to the south. Oklahoma is part of the south and it’s time to accept that. Tell all your “progressive” friends Tulsa they are wrong and do not speak for the majority.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Kent-Ryan-Hefley/1043380652 Kent Ryan Hefley

It gets colder in Dallas than it does in OKC. Not to mention central and eastern Texas are under the same weather pattern as Oklahoma. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Kent-Ryan-Hefley/1043380652 Kent Ryan Hefley

Here is another misconception held by a large portion of the nation. People assume all of Oklahoma is situated in the Great Plains. That is also not the case. Only the northwestern portion of the state is plains. The central region is described as the cross timbers(woods on the edge of the eastern woodlands). The eastern portion of the state(east of I 35) is the eastern woodlands.

The real great plains begin in west Texas into eastern NM and CO.

The great plains
http://alldownstream.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/greatplains.png

the 100th meridian(divides the eastern and western US.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_OiGM8PFA_-8/TUkcVPJ1WZI/AAAAAAAAAO4/S6cVGu4Wzms/s1600/100th%2BMeridian.gif

If more people actually studied geography, we would have less people putting the midwestern/plains label on Oklahoma.
guest

My childrens school puts it in the South West!
Crookedletter Ok

I grew up in Altus and always thought it was the southwest. Sagebrush, cactus, cowboys, indians…. And HEAT. Then you go to southeast OK and it’s swamps, alligators, and palmettos! The first time went to Broken Bow I’d have sworn I was in a different state. We definitely don’t fit with any of the accepted regions. Imagine if eastern OK had become the state of Sequoyah as originally attempted. We’d have a MUCH clearer definition of where we’d belong. Eastern OK might as well be the moon to me… And I’d bet people from there would feel the same about my stomping ground.
Mindymeson

I moved to PA 8 years ago from Oklahoma. As an Okie, I am constantly annoyed with people referring to Oklahoma as the midwest. Southwestern is okay with me…..BUT definitely not midwestern If you need proof, just have a conversation with my Okie accented Dad
Okiefromuskogee

My family has been here in northeastern OK since before it was even a state, and we are traced back from Tennessee, Alabama, and North Carolina and culturally identify with the South more than anything. People are so ignorant on this subject. It’s the south, get over it..
Tommy

I’m from California. For what it’s worth, don’t let any other state or any other people who think they know you just because they lived in your state tell you what you are. Californians don’t care about what other states think about them, they just tell other states what they are, even if it isn’t true. It’s all about deception. But who will know and who will care, the only thing that matters is you know who you are and you know what others think about you, so you can play that card if you need it.
Voss

Great article. I suggest that Oklahoma is in the “Western South” – not the Southwest. Many people self-identify as being from the West, but also claim southern heritage. I appreciate your analysis of the roots of settlers in Oklahoma – not all were boomers or from the south. The mixture of cultures in Oklahoma make it a fantastically unique place.