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‘White Lotus’ Takes On Touchy Subjects. The Southern Accent Is One of Them.
The third season of “The White Lotus” began with gunfire bursting through a lush resort in Thailand. But viewers with affection for a certain region of the United States perked up a little later in the episode, as a privileged, preppy family from North Carolina arrived by boat.
“We flew over the North Pole!” declares Victoria Ratliff, the matriarch played by Parker Posey, her speech so slowed by her Southernness (and the anti-anxiety drug lorazepam) that “Pole” sounds like it has half a dozen syllables.
Right then, Victoria sent an unmistakable signal: “The White Lotus” was taking on the Southern accent.
Or at least that’s what many viewers assumed, judging by the intense response — including many, many memes on social media — that has only grown with each episode. The commentary has focused on whether the accents concocted by Ms. Posey and the actor playing her husband, Jason Isaacs, credibly passed as those of well-to-do (and entirely self-absorbed) tourists from Durham, N.C. — or whether this was yet another atrocious attempt by Hollywood to replicate a Southern dialect.
A torturous track record of accents in movies and television has fostered a reflexive skepticism. Some viewers from the South have said that, at least initially, “The White Lotus” had just that effect on them. But it largely didn’t last, especially when it came to Ms. Posey’s performance. Viewers delighted over her pronunciations — “tsunami,” “Buddhist,” “Duke,” as in the university in their hometown — and pronouncements, like the way she sneered at others attending a party on a yacht.
“What was that?” her character asks. “That was a convention for con men and tax cheats.”
Was her accent a knowing and loving tribute to colorful Southern women? Perhaps. Campy? Undoubtedly. The performance was nevertheless hailed as a work of modern art. “Hang her accent in the Louvre!” one person suggested on social media. Another said Ms. Posey’s ties to Laurel, Miss., came shining through.
“If you were to put a bunch of lorazepam in the food at the country club in Laurel at lunch, that’s exactly what everybody would sound like an hour later,” said Landon Bryant, a resident of Laurel who has sought to demystify the South on Instagram and in a book, “Bless Your Heart: A Field Guide to All Things Southern,” released this week.
Accuracy and authenticity are very much judged by the ear of the beholder and are difficult, if not impossible, to rate by an objective standard. Even so, plenty of Southerners have been eager to give it a shot.
Lorazepam, an anti-anxiety drug, seems to be having a moment, thanks to Ms. Ratliff’s frequent mentions, where her accent dances along the open vowels.
“Everybody has a right to be an expert about how they speak,” said Elisa Carlson, a dialect coach in Atlanta. “Your speech is personal. It’s intellectual. It’s social.”
The discussion around “The White Lotus” has brought out how accents are quite malleable, reflecting how new generations and new residents can bend dialects in unexpected ways. It has also been a reminder of how hard it can be to hear how you sound — or how others think you sound — played back at you. Southerners are painfully aware that the way they speak often conjures negative connotations in pop culture, like ignorance or prejudice.
“It’s not about the Southern dialect, per se — it’s what the Southern dialect represents for Southerners,” said Walt Wolfram, a linguistics professor at North Carolina State University.
Of course, Southerners do not have a monopoly on feeling sensitive and even defensive about how their accents are portrayed (People from Bah-ston, for instance, have been known to have similar reactions).
But portrayals of Southerners have a particularly long and gnarled track record. Many from the region can instantly name a performance they remember as especially egregious.
In promotional interviews, actors on “The White Lotus” said that Mike White, the writer and director of the series, had encouraged them to draw inspiration from “Southern Charm,” a long-running Bravo reality series based in Charleston, S.C. Mr. Isaacs has said he had studied Thomas Ravenel, who appeared on the show for five seasons, as the actor shaped his character, Timothy Ratliff, a scion of a prominent political family who unravels while vacationing with his wife and children.
Timothy dips into his wife’s lorazepam supply, unable to face the potential fallout from financial misdeeds that his family apparently knows nothing about.
“I am a pillar of the community,” he tells two strangers, wallowing in self-pity. “My grandfather was the governor of North Carolina. My father was a very, very, very successful businessman.”
Mr. Ravenel said in an interview that he was unaware of this when he started watching the third season.
“This sounds very familiar,” he said, recalling watching Mr. Isaacs’s performance. “But once everyone started making a big to-do about it, then I said, ‘That’s not me.’”
Jason Isaacs as Timothy Ratliffe
Thomas Ravenel
He said he thought Ms. Posey’s muse was much clearer: “More so she sounds like Pat than he sounds like me.”
Pat is Patricia Altschul, a socialite who is the soul, if not the star, of “Southern Charm.”
She was not entirely thrilled by the comparison to Ms. Posey’s Victoria.
“I was flattered at first,” said Ms. Altschul, who credits her own lilt to an upbringing in Virginia. “But now, you know, she’s on pills and he’s a sketchy businessman with a gun. So, I’m not quite sure to what extent we should be flattered.”
Parker Posey as Victoria Ratliffe
Patricia Altschul
Ms. Posey has talked about why the accents of Southern women are irresistible to her as an actress. An “emphasis on feeling,” she has said. A musicality. An ability to make the mundane sound dramatic.
“It has this power,” she said in a recent television interview, “and you can’t knock it down.”
In truth, there is no single Southern accent, but rather a regionwide buffet of twangs and drawls. In an interview, Mr. Isaacs said he went for a precise accent from Durham — “It’s not just North Carolina,” he told Esquire — which stumped quite a few people in the city who weren’t aware there even was a Durham accent. (Dr. Wolfram, the linguistics professor at N.C. State, said there was not.)
Some in Durham pointed out they are as likely to hear Spanglish or Hindi as a classic Southern drawl.
“Hell, half your neighbors are from Ohio or New York or New Jersey,” said Garrett Dixon, a native North Carolinian who lives in Durham and works in sales.
Yet some argue that “The White Lotus” has not simply repurposed a tired, clichéd perception of Southerners. Instead, they say, it has captured what in many ways feels like a real Southern family in 2025, one confronted by the tensions between past and present that grip the region as a whole.
The fact that the Ratliffs’ three children don’t seem to have accents rings true, for example, as in-migration and the connectedness brought by technology have diminished accents across the South and in other parts of the country, too.
Ms. Altschul thinks the show has exquisitely nailed Southerners of a “certain elevation” — “the way they look, the way they talk, what they talk about,” she said.
The swagger, the shorts, the sunglasses with the Croakies worn by the oldest son, Saxon, played by Patrick Schwarzenegger: That all checks out. Then, there’s the conniption that Victoria has over her daughter, Piper, announcing her plan to move to Thailand to study Buddhism, during which she refers to Thailand as Taiwan and fears her daughter is joining a cult.
“Don’t look at me like I’m crazy!” she said. “It happens all the time — sheltered girls like you are constantly getting brainwashed and turned out!”
That felt real, too, Mr. Bryant said.
“Very small town, very ‘all that matters is where we are,’” he said. “That’s an attitude you see and feel.”
As the finale nears and viewers spin all sorts of predictions about how it will end, Ms. Altschul doesn’t have a theory so much as a wish: that Victoria turns out to be a villain, but a brilliant one.
“I’m hoping that she ends up being kind of savvy,” Ms. Altschul said. “Sometimes there’s the equation that if you sound Southern, you sound stupid. I would like to think that that’s not the case.”
A cotton field in north Louisiana.
Dylan Hawkins
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Dylan Hawkins
NEW ORLEANS – James Davis had the best year in his entire farming career this year.
The third-generation Black row crop farmer estimated picking almost 1,300 pounds of cotton, an average of 50 bushels of soybeans, and an average of around 155 bushels of corn on 2,500 acres of his farmland in northeast Louisiana.
But with U.S. commodities facing steep retaliatory tariffs overseas, he says he and many other farmers can’t sell their crops for enough to cover the loans they take out to fund the growing season.
The tariffs, Davis said, are making it almost impossible to survive.
“To have that kind of yield and still not be able to pay all your bills, that tells you something is broken in the farming industry,” Davis said.
In order to plan for next year, farmers need relief now, Davis said. At a recent meeting with his banker, the bank projected 2026 revenues in order to secure crop loans, and the cash flow math wasn’t adding up — the farm’s expected income wasn’t enough to cover operating loans once input costs, equipment notes, land rent and insurance premiums were factored in.
The Trump administration announced just this week a new $12 billion package of one-time bridge payments for American farmers like Davis, aimed at helping them recover from temporary market disruptions and high production costs.
“This relief will provide much needed certainty as they get this year’s harvest to market and look ahead to next year’s crops,” Trump said during a White House roundtable event. “It’ll help them continue their efforts to lower food prices for American families.”
Davis says that type of help can’t come soon enough.
“Without bailouts, it is hard to make crop loans work on paper,” he said in an interview with NPR on Monday.
James Davis asks a question at a panel on farm finances at the National Black Growers Council conference in New Orleans on Dec. 10, 2025. Davis is a third-generation Black row crop farmer who said that despite having the best year he’s ever had in his farming career, he’s still struggling to pay his bills.
Drew Hawkins/Gulf States Newsroom
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Drew Hawkins/Gulf States Newsroom
At the same time, however, the Trump Administration dismantled decades-old USDA programs designed to assist Black farmers by eliminating the “socially disadvantaged” designation, including programs like the 2501 Program, which many Black row-crop farmers rely on for access to credit, technical assistance, and conservation support that are otherwise difficult to secure at county-level USDA offices. The USDA did not respond to requests for interviews or comment.
Those supports, experts said, were designed to help smaller farmers and farmers of color remain on the land.
Welcome relief may not come in time
The Farmer Bridge Assistance Program accounts for up to $11 billion of the newly announced package, and offers proportional payments to farmers growing major commodities, including row crops like soybeans, corn and cotton.
Payments are expected to begin by February of next year, and are designed to offset losses from the 2025 crop year.
For many farmers, that isn’t soon enough. While the bridge payment may help with crop loans, there are immediate bills due for many in the coming weeks.
“This needs to show up like Santa Claus underneath the Christmas tree, to be honest with you,” said PJ Haynie, a fifth-generation Black farmer with rice operations in Virginia and Arkansas and chairman of the National Black Growers Council, which met in New Orleans this week for its annual conference.
“Our landlords want their money by the end of the year — our seed and input and chemical and equipment companies that we have to make payments by the end of the year,” he said.
Some farmers may have relationships with bankers and companies that will work with them and extend payment deadlines a few months, Haynie said — others don’t. And farmers are grateful for any support they receive, but, Haynie said, the one-time bridge payments aren’t enough.
“They still won’t make us whole because of the losses that we’ve incurred because of the markets, the tariffs, the trade,” he said. “But every dollar helps.”
Farmers already face challenges like unpredictable weather, pests and stagnant commodity prices, as well as rising input costs including machinery and fertilizer purchases. “We plant and we pray,” as Haynie put it. Tariffs have only compounded those challenges.
Black farmers face additional challenges
Black farmers like Haynie and Davis make up less than 2% of all U.S. farmers — and Black row-crop farmers, like those at this week’s conference, are an even smaller slice of that.
“Our herd is small,” Haynie said, “and if we can protect the herd, the herd will grow.”
Black farmers have asked the federal government for loan relief and other assistance for decades. A century ago, Black farmers owned at least 16 million acres of land. Today, Haynie said they hold around 2 million.
Following the Civil War, Black Americans were promised “40 acres and a mule” by the federal government, but many say that promise never came to pass.
Over the course of the past 100 years, the amount of Black-owned farmland dropped by 90%, according to Data for Progress, due to higher rates of loan and credit denials, lack of legal and industry support and “outright acts of violence and intimidation.”
Advocates say the inability for Black farmers to get a start, and later the sharp drop in farming population, is in part due to what they call USDA’s discriminatory lending practices, and often specific loan officers’ biases. The agency is the subject of an ongoing discrimination class action lawsuit by Black farmers and additional litigation due to those and other allegations.
Much of that history plays into how Black farmers approach the Trump administration.
“The Black row crop farm community needs the support of the administration,” Haynie said. “I can’t … buy an $800,000 combine to sell $4 corn. The math doesn’t math on that.”
All farmers — “Black or white” — are responding to the same depressed prices, he said. But Black farmers, he argues, already a small percentage of total U.S. growers, and often operating at a smaller scale, have less buffer to absorb sudden market shocks.
As farmers look at their projected costs next year, economists say they’re also navigating deep uncertainty in global markets.
“I think that a lot of farmers are still very much looking at the next year with some trepidation, thinking that their margins will continue to be very, very tight,” said Joseph Glauber, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington D.C.
U.S. trade with China — historically the top buyer of American soybeans and other row crops — has not rebounded to pre–trade war levels despite a new agreement. Meanwhile, Glauber said, countries like Brazil have expanded production dramatically, seizing market share during the trade war and becoming the world’s top soybean exporter — a long-term structural shift that U.S. growers now have to compete against.
Finis Stribling III (left) and John Green II (right) take a break during the National Black Growers Council conference in New Orleans on Dec. 10, 2025. Both Stribling and Green were plagued by bad weather at the start of this year’s growing season, and both said tariffs have only made things harder.
Drew Hawkins/Gulf States Newsroom
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Drew Hawkins/Gulf States Newsroom
He added that crops grown in the Mississippi River Delta, such as cotton and soybeans, have been hit especially hard by low prices and retaliatory tariffs.
Finis Stribling III farms 800 acres of cotton, rice, corn, soybeans and wheat in Arkansas and Tennessee. At the National Black Growers Council’s conference, he told NPR 2025 was another year of what he calls “farming in deficit.”
“We had too much rain early, then drought,” he said. “And when you finally get a crop in the field, the price support isn’t strong enough to cover the cost of production.”
Sitting next to him during a lunch break at the conference, another Arkansas row crop farmer John Lee II, put it bluntly: “What I’m worried about is next year. What do we do in 2026 when we go to the bank to try and get a loan? I’m concerned about the notion of going to the bank this upcoming year and not being able to get a loan because we can’t make the loan cash flow.”
Both also said the new tariff relief will help — but not nearly to the degree many outside agriculture may think.
“From the outside looking in, non-farm community, you say $12 billion seems like a lot of money,” Stribling said. “But when you look at the cost of production and the money that’s spent in agriculture, $12 billion is really just a drop in the bucket. It’s almost like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.”
More than 400 law enforcement personnel have been deployed as police search for the suspect in a shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island in which two students were killed and nine wounded, US officials said.
The Ivy League university in Providence remained in lockdown early on Sunday, several hours after a suspect with a firearm entered a building where students were taking exams on Saturday. Streets around the campus were packed with emergency vehicles hours after the shooting, and security was heightened around the city as law enforcement agencies continued their manhunt.
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The suspect remained at large, officials said, as police worked with agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to search streets and buildings around the campus to find the individual.
Saturday’s shooting is the second major incident of gun violence on a university campus this week.
Providence deputy police chief Timothy O’Hara said the suspect had not been identified.
Officials said they would release a video of the suspect, a male possibly in his 30s and dressed in black, who O’Hara said may have been wearing a mask. He said officials had retrieved shell casings from the scene of the shooting, but that police were not prepared to release more details of the attack.
Providence Mayor Brett Smiley has confirmed that two students were killed and nine people were injured in the attack.
At a news conference, Smiley said university leaders became aware of the shooting at about 4:05pm local time (21:05 GMT), when emergency responders received a 911 call.
Smiley declined to identify the shooting victims, citing the ongoing investigation. However, he sought to reassure the community, despite a shelter-in-place order for the Brown campus and the surrounding neighbourhood.
“We have no reason to believe there are any additional threats at this time,” he said.
The university’s president, Christina Paxton, explained she had been on a flight to Washington, DC, when she learned of the shooting. She immediately returned to Providence to attend a night-time news conference.
“This is a day that we hoped never would come to our community. It is deeply devastating for all of us,” Paxton said in a written statement.
At the news conference, Paxton said she was told the victims were students.
Suspect remains at large
At approximately 4:22pm local time (21:22 GMT), the university issued its first emergency update, warning that there was an armed man near the Barus and Holley engineering and physics building.
“Lock doors, silence phones and stay hidden until further notice,” the university said in its update.
“Remember: RUN, if you are in the affected location, evacuate safely if you can; HIDE, if evacuation is not possible, take cover; FIGHT, as a last resort, take action to protect yourself.”
Upon arriving at the scene, law enforcement swept the building, according to Providence police’s O’Hara.
“They did a systematic search of the building. However, no suspect was located at that time,” O’Hara said.
The university had to withdraw an early announcement that a suspect had been apprehended, writing, “Police do not have a suspect in custody and continue to search for suspect(s).”
US President Donald Trump published a similar retraction on his online platform, Truth Social, after erroneously posting at about 5:44pm (22:44 GMT) that a suspect had been detained.
Mayor Smiley said there were 400 law enforcement officers in the area to search for the suspect.
He also encouraged witnesses to come forward with any information about the shooting.
The seventh-oldest university in the US, Brown is considered part of the prestigious Ivy League, a cluster of private research colleges in the northeast. Its student body numbers 11,005, according to its website.
On December 9, Kentucky State University in the southern city of Frankfort also experienced gunfire on campus, killing one student and leaving a second critically injured.
The suspect in that case was identified as Jacob Lee Bard, the parent of a student at the school.
new video loaded: At Least Two Killed in Shooting at Brown University
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At Least Two Killed in Shooting at Brown University
Students remained locked in their dorms and classrooms as the police searched for the shooter, who was described as a man wearing black. At least two people are dead, and eight are in critical condition.
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At 4:00 in the afternoon, we received a call. 4:05 was when the initial call came in to Brown University of a report of an active shooter. I can confirm that there are two individuals who have died this afternoon, and there are another eight in critical status. We do not have a shooter in custody at this time. There is a shelter in place in effect for the greater Brown University area. If you live on or near Brown’s campus, we are encouraging you to stay home and stay inside. This is a sad state of our country right now where you have to plan for these things. And hopefully the community takes some comfort to know that their Providence leadership has planned for this occurrence, including very recently.
By McKinnon de Kuyper
December 13, 2025
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