I spent most of my youth bouncing around America. I was born in the South, moved to the Midwest for a brief spell, moved back to the South, lived out on the West Coast for nine months, moved back to the Midwest and so on. Because I never stayed in one place for too long, I never really developed a connection to any specific regional culture. My parents both have a mild Kentucky accent I didn’t inherit. My extended family in Nebraska can rattle off the roster of every Huskers football team from ‘94 to ‘97 in the time it takes me to remember who Tom Osborne is.  

Considering my track record, my stilted relationship with regional culture makes some sense. But I suspect the issue is really a more encompassing one, which applies to most of our generation. The accents that once made a New Yorker or New Englander immediately recognizable are less and less common. Dialects that defined parts of the Southern U.S., like Cajun, are considered critically endangered. Beyond dialect and other forms of expression, there’s a sense that our experience of culture is also more homogeneous. Social media and major television networks ensure that a lot of Americans see and consume the same things, follow national trends as opposed to local ones and (as I did when I was younger) constantly travel, relocate and adapt to the social norms of other cities.  

Citizens in larger metros often decry the prevalence of “transplants,” people who move to a city like New York later in life and supposedly taint the sanctity of East Coast culture with their drab Midwestern sensibilities.  I think in many cases transplants are actually the ones most desperate to latch on to a distinct regional identity.  

I’ve tried, many times, to replicate the vowels that make up my parents’ accents or develop esoteric knowledge on horse racing. I think it’s natural for people to feel a lack of identity and reach for something beyond it, a way to connect to a distinct heritage, whether it belongs to you or not. The problem is that I, and others, haven’t been very successful in making that connection.  

The decay of regionalism and the Internet Age make it easy to perform regional identity, but this performance usually caters to the distinguishable elements of Americana, the North and the South, the urban and the rural, over the hyper-local. The result is a vapid simulacrum of what used to make each state and city unique. Reviving regionalism might be a futile effort, but if we ever hope to pursue it sincerely, Americans have to examine local culture and history beyond the shiny veneer. Maybe the number of Runzas is all that differentiates Nebraska from Iowa. But wouldn’t it be worth it to find out?