This is NOT a little story about a man named Jed…

It has happened to me more than once in my life.

I found myself the victim of a snap-judgement based on my Southern accent. Call it Twang-scrimination.

After giving a welcome and sharing some personal information about myself with a few women for an event recently, a younger woman who was from New York looked at me and, as if holding back her amusement, said, “And, did you grow up here your whole life?”

There was a condescending nature about her tone, which suggested that she felt superior by the mere fact alone that she could say she was a New Yorker. It annoyed me completely given that a>she was much younger than me and b>had much less career and life experience than myself.

I moved to Texas from North Carolina when I was three, so you can imagine what a thick and bizarre accent that made for in my elementary school years. But, by high school, I was just like everyone else in my rural Texas town. The daughter of an English teacher with grammar in my blood, I was a Journalism major in college and worked through my accent in my Broadcasting classes. Today, I actually have much less of an accent than most of my family and most of my hometown friends.

I promise you, I didn’t utter a “Fixin’ to,” a “y’all,” or a “Get ‘er done, Bubba!” the entire conversation with this woman, and yet I found myself sitting there feeling as if she thought I had just stepped off of my double-wide to meet her.

As a woman who is proud to call herself a Texan, who has a college degree and published writings, who has travelled around the States and abroad, and considers herself not to be a complete idiot, it was hard to not tear into this woman.

In fact, I considered opening up a Texas-sized can of whoop-arse on her, but thought better. It might not make my point very well and could mean the end of my job since this was a work gig. Alas, it was also not the only time that I’ve experienced “Twang-scrimination” and I am certain it will not be the last.

“What did you say?”  The waiter had asked me back in high school on a marching band trip to Colorado for competition.

“DId you say you wanted TAAAY to drink? (giggling) TAAAAY? Did you mean “TEEE?”  He blasted back as I scowled at him.

Cue the entire table of my band mates, all of which had as bad or WORSE Texas drawls than my own, laughing heartily at my expense.

“Uh….I’ll stick with a water,” I’d said sheepishly.

Why is it that people who grow up without a Southern accent, think so little of those of us who do?

Do they not realize that they have their own dialect that might seem foreign to us as well?

Do they think that because you have a southern accent, you cannot be articulate and intelligent?

On this particular evening, I was already exhausted and edgy. I considered going into my Roscoe P. Coltrain imitation from the Dukes of Hazzard, just to see if I could scare the New Yorker girl off with visions of Deliverance in her head.

I imagined chortling back at her, “Oh, no you did-ent! Newsflash, homeslice! We’re not ALL uneducated country bumpkins! I could, in fact, judge you as an up-tight, sour and brash New Yorker, if I chose to perpetuate stereotypes, but you don’t see me doing that do you? SNAP!” 

We finished out our evening and I eventually did have nice conversations with the “Northern” group of ladies. I think once they stopped being so amused by my Texas accent and started listening to what I had to say, they realized that I do not just sit on my back porch and shoot up some vittlins’ for dinner each night. I am really not very different from them, and I sometimes have meaningful things to add to a conversation.

Still, as the group walked a way, I felt this urge to channel my inner Jed Clampett scream out,

“Y’all come back now, ya HEAR!”

You know, just to see what they’d do…