In the US, if you live on the coasts, most southern accents you’ll hear tend to be comedic relief, uneducated, unsophisticated portrayals in tv/movies. It is unconsciously drilled into the culture that a southern accent is a sign of poor education. It’s hard to fight all that unconscious reinforcement as much as people may intellectually agree that accentism is bad.

I don’t want to get political but it doesn’t help that it’s mostly southern states trying to eliminate evolution curriculums and other anti-science stances...