In this retelling, the student offered his best impression of an African American woman from the South, oblivious to the treacherous historical ground upon which he danced. This student meant no harm. But his anecdote, and the manner in which he delivered it, provide windows onto the racial, historical, and sectional imaginaries of the white Midwest. In the author's U.S. South and Southern Cultures in Global Perspective course, the student from the opening vignette was not particularly unique. This article recounts the author's experiences teaching this class. It posits that the myth of Southern exceptionalism (perhaps unsurprisingly) is alive and well. Yet it also suggests that racism, inequality, and trauma are "hidden in plain sight," to use Jeanne Theoharis's formulation, within the American Midwest. Therefore, the present essay argues, complicating these students' reductive views about the South destabilized their ideas about the Midwest's inherent goodness. The article that follows contributes to this project and looks specifically at how race figured in the author's students' ideas about the South and the Midwest - that is, how they assigned characteristics to swaths of space or land. These insights illustrate the salience of region to students' impressions of local, national, and transnational histories. Through our discussions, my students and worked "not to absolve the South, but to implicate the nation," and to think critically about the character - and frequent mischaracterization - of racial inequality in the United States.