Howdy everybody! More and more I see and hear Oklahoma being referred to as part of the Midwest, and I do not at all agree with this.
Obviously Oklahoma is located halfway between the east and west coasts, and I think most people in Oklahoma use the term "midwest" to reflect that we are in the central part of the country. We use the Midwestern label pretty ambiguously; what do we mean? Do we mean we're in a region that stretches from Texas clear to North Dakota? The Central time zone? The Great Plains? My hunch is that most Oklahomans tend to think of the Midwest as being the states that have a Big 12 school (but I can't prove this, plus West Virginia would be an outlier now).
The problem with calling ourselves Midwestern is that it groups us in with the actual Midwest (the U.S. Census Bureau formerly called these the North Central United States: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin). I don't think we have very much in common with any of these states, except for Kansas and Missouri and maybe Nebraska. Does anyone think that we are in a different region than Texas??
I will definitely acknowledge that different parts of Oklahoma could be attached to different regions, and there are different types of regions (regions based on topography vs. culture), but growing up and still today I think of Oklahoma as being part of the South. I'm interested in what y'all have to say, and thanks for reading.
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