Bad Southern accents and bad history

Earlier this week, as I wrapped up listening to the recent Rest is History series on the first and second iterations of the Ku Klux Klan, I joked on Substack that Tom Holland’s Southern accent “would count as a hate crime in many jurisdictions.”

That was just a couple days ago, so when Alan Jacobs posted yesterday that the accents and, finally, a remark about American cheese in the new samurai series—which I haven’t even started yet—had driven him to the nuclear option of canceling his Club membership and deleting the show, I was surprised by the coincidence and actually a little shocked that he had gone so far.

I am not, however, surprised by the annoyance. I was joking about Tom’s Southern accent and realize that it’s done at least partly in jest, but it is genuinely painful to listen to. And Jacobs points at a deeper problem evinced by Tom and Dominic’s resort to this kind of parody, what he describes as

a low-level but constant sniping and sneering at virtually every element of American culture. For instance: recently, in a series of episodes on the Ku Klux Klan, Tom decided that the Southern accent he wanted to imitate, in reading Klan speeches or newspaper editorials, was that of Cletus from The Simpsons, AKA Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. A more pompous diction would’ve been more appropriate, but Tom wasn’t interested in reinforcing the point that these people were evil (which they were); instead he wanted to indicate that they were stupid (which, alas, they were not). I’m a Southerner, I’m used to this sort of attitude—it’s almost universal among non-Southerners, and especially common among Brits—but when it goes on and on and on, it gets wearisome.

Also worth noting: the second Klan may have started at Stone Mountain but was a huge Midwestern phenomenon. Tom and Dominic acknowledge this several times, but guess what kind of dialect they (attempt to) use for quotations? Per Drive-By Truckers, “it’s always a little more convenient to play [racism] with a Southern accent.”

Jacobs’s primary complaint is “the compulsive mocking” of American culture on the show. I don’t feel much of a need to stick up for American culture because “American culture” is so vast and I’m at heart a provincial, with a much narrower window of loyalties than anything “American.” You have to get more specific and intrude on my patch to rile me. But of course, being a Southerner with a chip on his shoulder, I have lots of opportunities to get riled.

I also haven’t had quite the experience Jacobs has with British attitudes toward the South. My interactions have been msotly positive. I’ve met Brits who love the South—or at least find it endearing—and even some who have noted the South’s vestigial affinities with the mother country: the fossil Englishness preserved in our dialect and culture. But there are exceptions that match Jacobs’s observations. One British literary guy I follow on Substack spent a good bit of a trip to Virginia expressing dismay every time he saw a house flying a Confederate Battle Flag. He never showed any curiosity about what these people meant by flying the flag and even wrote sneering rejoinders to commenters who suggested he may be overreacting.

What both British Lit Guy and Tom and Dominic show in these examples is an unrealized and therefore unexamined incuriosity. The easy mockery of the accents and the finger-wagging tourism reveal a blind spot; you can’t learn what you think you already know. That’s a flaw with serious repercussions for any critic or historian, and the episodes in which Tom and Dominic give in to the inclination to mock tend to be those with the least insight into whomever they judge the villain. Even the Klan deserves to be understood—dismissing or misapprehending groups like them is dangerous and results in bad history.

That’s the truly annoying aspect of all of this. As Tom and Dominic might say, they’ve let themselves down.

Read Jacob’s entire post. He has many more complaints, some of which I agree with, including the perceptible difference between topics in which Tom and Dominic are intellectually engaged and those in which they aren’t, though I am nowhere near ready to go as far as he did in remedying what to me are still minor annoyances. But he’s absolutely right that putting up with a lifetime of mockery of your home—whether you construe that as America or the South—gets old.