Throughout The Devil You Know, Blow confronts the common preconceptions about the northern-southern divide in America, namely that the North bears moral authority over the South. Blow argues that while the South bears responsibility for enslaving millions of Black people, the North is guilty of failing to live to the same moral standards it fought for in the Civil War.

As the home of slavery, the South is considered the heart of American white supremacy. The civil rights movement of the 1960s and ’70s, which fought to end Jim Crow, further reinforced this premise. It is this same premise of rampant racial discrimination and terror in the South that fueled the Great Migration, which aimed to move Black people to equitable and prosperous destination cities in the North.

However, Blow challenges the “Great American Mythos” of regional tolerance and intolerance (113). He notes that white supremacy adopts different forms depending on location, wryly explaining that “in the South, it’s an old man. There, racism hasn’t vanished (far from it), but it has come to terms with itself. In the North, particularly in destination cities, racism is a teenage boy, acting out as the old man did years ago” (27).