I Finally Understand The American South…

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]What's up, guys? Welcome back to my channel. And if you're new here, then welcome to our little corner of the internet. Today, we're going to be watching a video titled 53 maps that explain the South, which as if I wasn't confused enough, also talking about explaining, I feel like there's a few things that I might have to mention. Uh, first of all, yes, I'm in my pajamas.

[00:00:17]Second of all, there's an IKEA bag on the floor because I was too lazy to get it off of off the frame, which I know.

[00:00:23]Okay, I know I could have just moved it behind the It doesn't matter. And and third of all, there's there's um a huge pimple in my face that decided to make a guest appearance. So, now that I've uh said all these things out loud, um you guys can either hopefully not pick me in the comments about it or you can pick me in the comments about it. I don't know.

[00:00:46]But still, I just felt like I needed to get it out of out of my system. So, yeah, let's get more confused with 53 maps of the south.

[00:00:55]>> It's August 2004, just after Hurricane Charlie.

[00:00:59]Florida Division of Emergency Management Director Craig Fugate was trying to figure out a way to measure just how bad the damage was.

[00:01:06]>> This will be something unlike we have ever seen.

[00:01:08]>> He needed something incredibly robust and incredibly reliable across the region.

[00:01:12]>> Waffle House prides itself in quickly getting back up and running after storms. And FEMA has taken notice.

[00:01:18]>> Everywhere a Waffle House was closed, things were bad. Limited menu, things were getting bad. Full menu, well, maybe everybody was going to be okay. The Waffle House index is just one of the maps that >> I watched a video with the fat electrician about the Waffle House and he was mentioning the fact that that's when you know like that something is really serious if the Waffle House is closed because they never close even if there was like the worst storm ever.

[00:01:44]>> I'm going to show you today because we're going to use maps to explain the southern United States, a region that is complicated and misunderstood and one that I am actually from. I will show you my very southern childhood accent later in this video. I'm going to eliminate one state from the south after each category, and I'm also going to choose one map that best defines the south.

[00:02:11]Waffle House is well known for breakfast, food, and the occasional late night fight. As >> I cannot wait to go to Waffle House and make a video about it. It's a must.

[00:02:22]Well, look at the sheer density of Waffle Houses here. And look how they really are so southern. Look at Waffle House at the county level. You can see the density. And you can see that it is really clustered here in Georgia.

[00:02:34]Gwennet, Georgia has 40 Waffle Houses.

[00:02:38]Red is going to mean low on all our maps and blue will typically mean higher.

[00:02:43]When I go to southern view like this, it means that the rankings are calculated for the south alone. You've got Bojangles, which is also southern clustered in this southeastern section.

[00:02:54]You can see that they are actually kind of a North Carolina thing. If you don't know, Crystal is the weird southern white castle. Can see that they don't escape the south at all. It also shows up more in the lower south. Any southerner is going to tell you that Piggly Wiggly is also a chain of great importance.

[00:03:13]>> I didn't know that Buffalo House was just southern. I thought it was more like all over the place, but clearly it's not. Oo, I'm so sorry. I probably blew your ears right there.

[00:03:23]>> But you can see Wisconsin's actually number two. We also have Cookout, another chain that if you hadn't been to the South, you wouldn't have heard of it. This is a map of hog and pig production by state. And all the southeastern barbecue proclivities uh might make you think that they lean towards pork and towards pig because they make a lot of it there. But if you look at the map here, you can see that hog and pig production is actually not that localized in the south. Um, I made a whole video that is just about mapplaining barbecue. If you haven't seen that, you should check it out. I stole this idea from Reddit and recreated it. These are seasonal searches, uh, you know, between Halloween and Christmas for peacon pie, pumpkin pie, and apple pie. Peacon pie is only popular in these areas of the south. Let's go ahead and see where >> this means that I must have a lot of people here from the south because I remember before Thanksgiving a lot of you guys were telling me that I should try and make a peacon pie.

[00:04:22]Sweet tea is searched. There is a southern concentration. And just so that I can end this section with a bit of a bummer. Yes, you do see a somewhat higher rate of diabetes uh which often correlates with obesity in the southern United States though not exclusively.

[00:04:40]Waffle House has to be our top map for that section. So, that's the one that's going to go on in our tournament of maps that define the South. I don't want to make this cut, but I think we're going to eliminate Texas. Texas is no longer part of the South. The United States Postal Service actually divides it a little bit differently. They have an Atlantic region that includes Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, and then a southern region that does stretch out to include Texas, Florida, and uh Arkansas, and Oklahoma. I want to show you the Forest Service regions.

[00:05:13]This one is necessarily going to be tied a little more to the actual geography of the South. So, this is how the CDC breaks up the geographic regions. And I like this map because it perfectly matches uh >> this is actually really really interesting to see like to see like what specifics what specs does the salt have.

[00:05:33]>> The map that I'm using throughout this video except Missouri is in that west north central area. So I'm going to pick this for my top map, the CDC map. We're going to cut Missouri. Missouri, you are no longer southern.

[00:05:47]Now that we've gotten into it, we can start to get a little more serious. This is a map of southern governors, and you can see that right here, you're getting some political polarization as the south red stands for Republican, and the blue stands for Democratic. Virginia recently turned blue. You've got North Carolina and Kentucky blue. Any political map has to include the US presidential map of 2024. This is what it looks like when you look at the map by county. To me, this is an argument for a rural urban divide because you can see that in urban areas of the south, they still tilted pretty blue. This is a map of right to work states. So, that basically means states where you don't have to join a union if you're trying to get a job. And you can see that here you really do have a southern wall. When this is a map, >> what does it mean to not join a union?

[00:06:39]What does that mean? Like, what do you mean you don't have to join a union to look for a job? Do you have to what is a union >> of states where school starts before 8:00 a.m.? This is a mashup of values >> before 800 a.m.

[00:06:56]torturing the kids. What do you mean?

[00:06:59]School starts before 8:00 a.m. At what time? Like, do you have to wake up at 5 in the morning to go to school?

[00:07:08]>> But also weather and heat in the south.

[00:07:11]the most disproportionately represented white ethnic group that you're going to see is ScotchIrish.

[00:07:16]Um, and that you can see right here.

[00:07:19]It's clustered here in all the former colonies. Number one state is going to be North Carolina. But there are also interesting surprises. This is a map that I found that Joseph Hannah made. It shows ethnic Vietnamese in the United States by county. And you can see that most ethnic Vietnamese are in California, but there are pockets in the very southern Gulf areas of the south.

[00:07:44]And people speculate that that is because some of the agriculture and climate is similar and that's why people chose to migrate to those areas. In some cases, this map of Golagichi heritage is interesting because it's clustered along the coast. Black Americans of a specific ethnic group that developed their own culture, in some cases, spoke their own language. Now, Gulligichi are black Americans. I'm going to have more about that in uh some of the other sections of this video. Oh my gosh, we have to make another cut. I have to say that honestly, Virginia is is standing out to me just because of the influence of Washington DC. We look on the map of governors there. You also get it not being that southern. I'm going to cut Virginia from the south.

[00:08:29]I will be in trouble for this.

[00:08:32]>> Mhm.

[00:08:32]>> Okay. Okay, if you want to hear my southern accent, I'm about to play it for you. Uh, and that's thanks to the sponsor of this video, which is Monarch.

[00:08:39]I went through some old home video footage.

[00:08:41]>> Are we going to Oh, I want to watch this ad now. But are we going to go through all of the states and then like have a most southern state >> from the 1990s, >> like all of the states in the south?

[00:08:54]>> I track down myself explaining the south in my super southern accent. And the whole process actually reminds me a bit of Monarch.

[00:09:05]>> Hello.

[00:09:06]>> If you don't know about Monarch, Monarch is a personalized ad-free financial platform. Basically, it takes all your financial world and integrates it into one easy to use dashboard. And I'm thinking of it now because to look at my old home family videos, I have to get out these like physical DVDs and hook them up via USB adapter to my computer.

[00:09:28]It's a huge hassle. Your financial life shouldn't be that way. Now, because all my personal info is on Monarch, I want to actually walk you through some of the demos so you can get an idea how it works. Here you can see how all the accounts are actually.

[00:09:51]He's balling. Okay.

[00:09:54]>> Synced together. You've got credit cards, cash, investments. Here it's got a budget tool that gives you an idea of how much you're spending or overspending. And it's using a lot of intelligence to give you insights. And I'm showing you on my computer, but most of the time I have it on my phone.

[00:10:09]Here's me explaining the South.

[00:10:11]>> These are southern states that can be simply >> you did not believe I was from the South. Now you do. So yeah, it's okay if your old home movies are complicated, but your financial life should be simple, and that's what Monarch does.

[00:10:28]>> All the snakes can be saved.

[00:10:30]>> Thank you to Monarch for partnering with me. Start your free trial, and you can get 50% off your first year of Total Money Clarity. Go ahead and use the link I've got down in the description, the QR code, or use code Phil to get 50% off the Monarch Core tier. Thanks, Monarch.

[00:10:47]This is me on a very dangerous alpine slide.

[00:10:55]>> Let's recover from that with some alligators.

[00:11:00]The USGS has a good map of alligator zones and alligator appearances. And you can see that they are really clustered in the lower US, >> but still they go all the way up to Dallas.

[00:11:12]What? That's crazy. Hey, I don't know how I feel about that.

[00:11:17]>> Creating an alligator belt. Uh, but not like made of alligator. Metaphorical alligator belt. That's what I mean. You have to be blown away by the power of cudu. The power of the cud. This ivylike plant is very invasive and it's gone all over the south. There are other oddities that aren't southwide, but they're just terrifying like the Burmese python. The agriculture of the south is also affected by the red clay soil that is so common there. Looking so southern here, Oklahoma. Despite that red clay, which looks so infertile, uh the south is actually pretty good when it comes to tree diversity. The forest coverage map of the south is interesting less as an agricultural thing and maybe more as a political one. This one that's provided by the US Forest Service shows that the south is is covered in forest, right?

[00:12:10]This dark green that's over in the western area indicates federal ownership of these forests. Whereas the colors that you'll see in the south over here, those indicate private ownership. I think most of that comes from the fact that the south is just a really really old region of the country. A lot of people also think of Spanish moss when it comes to the south. You can see the coverage there is kind of similar to the alligator map. So cotton is not quite the only the south thing that you might expect it to be. We've got a fair amount of cotton here in Texas, uh, and even in California. I want to show you one more map in this section, which is FEMA's national risk index. A lot of these emergency risky areas are out west, and that's because of wildfires, but you do also have sections in Florida because of hurricanes. We've got to go with Kudzu.

[00:12:59]That is such a southern thing. We've already cut Texas, but I don't think we've cut Oklahoma yet. But I still can't believe I cut Virginia. Why did I not just cut Maryland? Honestly, I didn't see it. It's so little and dinky compared to Virginia.

[00:13:13]Now, we are finally getting into history. I want to start it on a bit of a lighter note, which is death. And you can see that the South's age really, really affects how many graveyards there are because a lot of these were small little graveyards. So, as William Faulner once said, the past it's never even passed, bro. This basically said that Missouri could become part of the union if uh as long as Maine could be a free state. And I think it's >> this is a really good video. I'm so glad that I stumbled on upon this.

[00:13:46]>> It's incredible how, you know, 200 years later, from 1820. 200 years later, this map is still so descriptive of the South as a cultural region. Even if the political implications of this map, the legality of slavery are gone. This War Department map of 1861 kind of shows you where the lines were drawn. And of course, this war that was waged over slavery and the future of slavery had legacies that extended well beyond it.

[00:14:17]This is by IdaB. Wells. This is the red record of lynching map. And um and you can see here it's it's disproportionately clustered in the south though not universally in the south. I would also be remiss if I didn't show you this web deo map of distribution of black Americans in the United States. These were the states that were segregated prior to Brown versus the board of education. Naturally African-Americans responded to this via the great migration. But of course as you may know the demography is is changing and evolving. This is a county bycounty map of people who have reported their race as being black alone. That's largely a southern thing where it's happening. I mean, you you get clusters of this in urban areas in the Midwest.

[00:15:02]Um the same in New York, but when you rank and look at the proportion of people who report black alone as their race, um there are significantly more who do so in the south. And that's worth noting. I think that's also clear when you look at the statewide map. Now, compare this to a map of people reporting white alone as their race, and you can see that it's significantly more common in the northern areas of the United States. Uh, number one state for that is actually West Virginia, which is an interesting argument to cut it. This dynamic that I'm talking about is clear when you look at people reporting two or more races. That's more common out on the West, less common here in the East Coast. It also does necessarily extend to some of the ownership in these areas of the country. So, this is going to be disproportionately affected by the fact that there are just more nonwhite uh people in these areas of the country.

[00:15:53]But there are also more non-white homeowners in these areas of the country. And I think this is particularly important when you look back on issues like redlinining, which was the prejuditial granting of federal loans because remember these were at a federal level. So look at this redlinining map and you'll see that you know all over the United States redlinining existed. It's also important to the story of the south to note where the Indian federal lands are. And today you really have to zoom in to see federal lands that are controlled by Indians. Uh whereas in the west, you know, the Navajo region is is huge.

[00:16:31]Okay, that is the end of the history section. My top map of this section has to be the Missouri Compromise. It fascinates me how it captures what is and isn't southern and yet it's 200 years old.

[00:16:46]>> I love his setup, by the way. It looks so cozy.

[00:16:49]>> Again, it goes back to that William Faulner quote. History, you're always around and doing stuff. What is up with that, man? You could argue that Kentucky and West Virginia are both a little anomalous. Uh, but I think you've got to go with West Virginia.

[00:17:08]>> I always wondered when you like study history in school, what is the point that they stop like teaching old stuff?

[00:17:14]Like is there like a line like 200 years, 300 years, or are like the kids in 1,000 years still going to learn about COVID in 2025 when they're like in 3,000? Are they still going to talk about Lincoln or are these going to be like myths or what? Like what's going to happen in 1,000 years from now? I want to know.

[00:17:37]>> Red is going to be low income. Blue is going to be higher income. You definitely have lower income areas clustered in the South, in particular, Mississippi and Louisiana. Oh, and look at this. Maryland, you are not lawn for this world. You are not looking good when it comes to money. You're rich, Maryland. I want to also show manufactured homes. This is what we would think of as mobile homes, though it's actually a slightly broader class.

[00:18:01]1.8% 8% of homes are manufactured in Maryland versus in Mississippi where it's 34.3%.

[00:18:08]And I am happy to say that I have found redemption. Maryland, you are rich. Get out of my house. You are not part of the South anymore.

[00:18:19]I considered leading off the entire video uh with this map. This is excessive drinking as defined by the CDC. You can see right here, Wisconsin is all blue. Texas is anomalous. The rest of the South here, right where the Bible belt is, you have a lot of >> What is going on in Wisconsin?

[00:18:39]>> Red, which means that there's not a lot of excessive drinking. So, since we're talking about hard drinks, let's talk about soft drinks, too. This is a map from pop versus soda. If you saw my video in which I map explained the Midwest, uh you know where pop is popular. This is where people say drink a Coke. Uh the number one state where you drink a Coke rather than saying a soft drink, soda, or pop is Louisiana.

[00:19:05]Yeah. So in Vermont, nobody's saying drink a Coke. Bernie Sanders is not drinking a Coke. I'd like a soda, please. This would be malpractice if I didn't show you some linguistic maps.

[00:19:15]Like in my Midwestern video, these maps were made by Joshua Catz. This is a map of y'all regions, but not not in Florida. He's got where do you call sal and then the second vowel in >> I mean y regions that's funny >> pajamas. This is my favorite one.

[00:19:32]Apparently in the red you say the a as in father which I just did. I just proved I'm southern. Pajamas father. I'm wearing my pajamas father. Country is not a southern.

[00:19:42]>> Oh cuz then otherwise you would say pajamas >> thing. Country is a rural thing and increasingly an everybody thing much to the chagrin of people with ears. This is religious adherence uh normalized by population, by county. And you can see that there is more blue in the south here. When you look at the state-by-state map, it becomes a little clearer that it's a southern thing.

[00:20:03]You've got this southern wall here. When you look at the rankings, yeah, Utah's number one. An interesting twist on this is if you look at religious congregations normalized by population, uh you see a map that at first blush looks similar. Then when you look at the state rankings, you start to wonder, okay, why is Texas like this? When you look at a map of megaurches by state, Texas and Florida are super dense when it comes to megaurches. So if you have 10,000 people going to a mega church, that is a lot fewer churches, but just as many religious adherence. A mega church is defined as 2,000 people or more. The only other map that I want to get to is the map of the SEC. This is not because I want to put it there, but because people like sports. Um, we are done with our final section. To to me, you've got to go with religious congregations normalized by population.

[00:20:56]In Florida, >> I knew it. I was just going to say he's going to take up Florida cuz he didn't say anything about Florida in this video. And now it's going to seem like I didn't know it because he just said it.

[00:21:07]>> The axe is finally coming down. You are out of the south.

[00:21:12]What is the top map? The person in me who loves the south really wants to pick Waffle House. I have to say that that map of the Missouri Compromise really struck me. In 2026, a map from 1820 can still do some serious work in defining the cultural region that we call the Southern United States. It explains a lot of the things that would confound outsiders. So, Faulner, I agree. You're right. Past ain't past.

[00:21:46]It's still passing on the past. But there might be something new going on, too.

[00:21:55]All right, that's it for this one. Let me know what you think. Should I have cut Virginia? Was that a terrible mistake? Can I uh no longer be seen in public? And let me know what you think I should map next. Um, over on Patreon, I will tell you all about how I made so many of these maps and displayed them on screen. This week, I'm going to have a special article. It's going to be about my personal experience with the South.

[00:22:19]I really, really enjoyed that video thoroughly. I really enjoyed that video.

[00:22:24]Now, I just really want to go to Waffle House. I want to try hash browns. Hash browns, I think they're called, for the first time. I've never had waffles for breakfast. Have I ever even had a waffle? I might have never even had a waffle.

[00:22:40]Do you guys prefer panc pancakes or waffles? I think I I don't think I've never had a waffle, but I think I would probably prefer waffle because of the pockets and then you can like pour like chocolate and like maple syrup on it.

[00:22:53]It's going to get in the pockets and and then yeah, I just imag and the texture is probably I don't know. I need to try them. But anyways, I need to get I need to get myself to Waffle House, guys. Um, thank you so much for joining me for this video. I really hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Let me know if you're from the south. Please leave a like, subscribe if you haven't yet, and I'll see you guys in the next video. Bye.