Editor's note: This story was originally published in the April 1, 2011 issue of This Land. It's still unclear where Oklahoma is.
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.
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