Some tales about accents and what they do to listeners from a Southerner living in the Midwest.
Believe me, being a Midwesterner married to a Southerner, we can receive a lot of passive, well, bigotry from Easterners. I developed a few coping mechanisms over the years, such as affecting an Eastern accent to cover my Buckeye-ness, or joining yacht, country, and university clubs to blend into the ways of the East. My original way to cope, when everyone in an Eastern university classroom knew that I was some ignorant boondocker from Ohio, and assumed to be at least half a moron because of that, was to outscore everyone else on the exams. There was a certain satisfaction in that.