11 Things North Carolinians Do That Would Horrify the Rest of America

North Carolina is a state in the middle of becoming something new without fully letting go of what it’s always been, which is either inspiring or exhausting depending on the day and which part of the state you’re standing in. The Tar Heel State stretches from the barrier islands of the Outer Banks to the peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains in one long, gorgeous, contradictory sweep — containing Research Triangle tech workers and tobacco farmers and Appalachian homesteaders and coastal fishermen and furniture makers and barbecue philosophers all at once, held together by ACC basketball, pulled pork, and a genuine, abiding love of the land that tends to outlast every other disagreement. It’s a big state with a bigger argument and an even bigger heart. Pull up a chair. The ‘cue’s already on.

1. Conduct the eastern versus western barbecue debate like a religious schism with real consequences

North Carolina barbecue is not one thing. It is two things that have nothing to do with each other and share only the name and the fire. Eastern North Carolina barbecue is whole hog — the entire pig, cooked over wood coals, chopped and mixed with a vinegar and pepper sauce that contains nothing else and requires nothing else. Western North Carolina, also called Lexington-style, uses pork shoulder and adds a touch of ketchup to the sauce, which the eastern side considers an error of almost theological proportions. These are not preferences. These are identities. Families are divided. The debate does not resolve. It is not supposed to resolve.

2. Take ACC basketball with a seriousness that restructures their entire social calendar

The Atlantic Coast Conference basketball rivalry — and specifically the UNC versus NC State versus Duke triangle of mutual devotion and mutual contempt — is the primary organizing structure of North Carolina’s sports identity and a meaningful portion of its social identity. The Duke-UNC rivalry is the most storied in college basketball and is conducted with a personal ferocity that leaves no room for neutrality. You are Carolina blue or you are Duke blue or you are an NC State wolfpack red, and this choice was made before you had a full set of adult teeth and has not been reconsidered since. Asking someone in North Carolina if they follow basketball is like asking if they breathe.

3. Drive to the Outer Banks every summer with the commitment of a seasonal migration

The Outer Banks — a thin chain of barrier islands off the North Carolina coast, separated from the mainland by sounds and marshes and accessed by bridge and ferry — are the North Carolina beach, the specific and irreplaceable one, and families return to the same house, the same stretch of beach, the same Fish House restaurant for the same fried flounder year after year with the loyalty of people who have found the thing and do not need to keep looking. The Outer Banks are not fancy. The rental houses are large. The drive takes longer than it should. None of this is negotiable.

4. Eat Cheerwine like it’s a food group and regard it as a genuine cultural contribution

Cheerwine — a cherry-flavored soft drink invented in Salisbury, North Carolina in 1917, carbonated with a bubble that is lighter and more plentiful than regular soda, sweet without being cloying, and deeply specific to the Carolinas — is consumed by North Carolinians with a regional loyalty that the drink’s limited national distribution has only intensified. It is not available everywhere, which makes it more precious. North Carolinians who travel report searching for it with the specific purposefulness of people looking for something they know they’re not going to find. Finding it is a small but genuine joy. Not finding it is expected and accepted.

5. Refer to all furniture as coming from High Point and mean this as a quality designation

High Point, North Carolina is the Furniture Capital of the World — home to the High Point Market, the largest furnishings industry trade show on Earth, and the center of an American furniture manufacturing tradition that has defined the region’s economy and identity for over a century. North Carolinians who buy furniture ask where it’s from with a seriousness that suggests the answer matters. “It’s from High Point” is not just provenance — it is a quality claim, a regional endorsement, a signal that the piece was made by people who have been making furniture in these hills for generations. The rest of America buys from big box stores. North Carolina built the big box store’s inventory.

6. Take the Blue Ridge Parkway at forty-five miles an hour and consider this an activity

The Blue Ridge Parkway — 469 miles of two-lane scenic road along the spine of the Appalachian Mountains, no commercial vehicles, no billboards, speed limit forty-five — is not merely a road in North Carolina. It is a destination, a Sunday activity, a way of being in the mountains without a specific goal beyond the being. North Carolinians drive it with the particular leisure of people who understand that the drive is the point and the point does not require justification. In October when the leaves are turning, sections of the Parkway become transcendently beautiful. North Carolinians will tell you this and they are not overstating it.

7. Eat livermush for breakfast without apology or explanation

Livermush — a pork liver and cornmeal loaf, sliced and fried until crispy on the outside and soft within, served on white bread with mustard or as part of a breakfast plate — is a North Carolina Piedmont specialty that is exactly what it sounds like and is eaten by locals with the uncomplicated appetite of people who grew up with it and see no reason to stop. The name does not help its reputation with outsiders. The taste does. People who try livermush expecting to confirm their reluctance frequently discover they were wrong about the reluctance, which North Carolinians have been saying all along.

8. Argue about sweet tea recipes with people who all make it the same way

Sweet tea in North Carolina is not a recipe — it is a result, and the result is strong brewed tea with enough sugar dissolved in it while hot to create a sweetness that room-temperature addition cannot achieve. Every North Carolinian family makes it this way. Every North Carolinian family makes it slightly differently. The differences are small — the exact ratio of sugar, the steeping time, the brand of tea — and the arguments about them are large, conducted with the patience and tenacity of people who have been having this conversation since childhood and expect to be having it at the end of their lives as well.

9. Maintain a beach music and shag dancing tradition that the rest of America has forgotten existed

The shag — the official state dance of North Carolina, a smooth, rhythmic, partner-based dance danced to beach music (a specific genre of rhythm and blues that emerged along the Carolinas coast in the 1950s) — is practiced at dance clubs called shag clubs up and down the Carolina coast by people of every age, and the tradition is so specific and so alive that it exists essentially independently of the rest of American popular culture, requiring no validation from outside and receiving very little. The Shag Capital of the World is Ocean Drive, South Carolina, but North Carolina shares the culture and the bragging rights. The dancing is genuinely beautiful to watch.

10. Treat Krispy Kreme with a reverence that its national chain status hasn’t diminished

Krispy Kreme was founded in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1937, and North Carolinians maintain a proprietary affection for the brand that its national expansion has not diluted. The Hot Now sign — the red neon signal that the glazed doughnuts are coming off the line fresh — produces in North Carolinians a Pavlovian response that years of living near a Krispy Kreme has not conditioned away. A hot original glazed Krispy Kreme is a specific, irreducible pleasure that North Carolinians treat as birthright. The rest of America has Krispy Kremes too. North Carolina has the original ones, which is a distinction they maintain is meaningful and are correct about.

11. Refer to the Research Triangle as if everyone knows what that means

The Research Triangle — the region anchored by Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, defined by the presence of NC State, Duke, and UNC, and home to Research Triangle Park, one of the largest research parks in the world — is spoken of by North Carolinians as a self-evident geographic and cultural designation that requires no explanation. It does require explanation outside the state. Inside the state, saying “the Triangle” communicates everything about location, culture, demographics, and general orientation toward the world. The rest of North Carolina has a complicated relationship with the Triangle’s rapid growth and cultural influence. The Triangle has noticed this and is adding more apartments.

North Carolina is too big and too contradictory and too genuinely alive in too many different directions to be reduced to any single story — not the barbecue debate, not the basketball rivalry, not the tech corridor or the tobacco history or the mountains or the coast. It is all of it simultaneously, held together by something that isn’t easy to name but is easy to feel when you’re standing on the Blue Ridge Parkway in October watching the light go gold across forty miles of turning forest, or eating pulled pork from a place with no sign that you only found because someone who loves you gave you the address, or watching the waves break on a Outer Banks beach that looks exactly as it did a hundred years ago and will look exactly this way a hundred years from now if we’re careful. North Carolina is not finished becoming what it’s going to be. It is paying attention to the process. It has good barbecue for the road.