It's everyone's responsibility - I'm not giving a pass to the Heartland or the Coasts. I come from the kinds of demographics that connect with both - born and r

It's everyone's responsibility - I'm not giving a pass to the Heartland or the Coasts. I come from the kinds of demographics that connect with both - born and raised in a small, rural town just minutes north of Boston with a population of 6,000 that is nearly 98% white. I had never met a black person until elementary school when he came to town as part of the inner city outreach program to give promising kids a better school system. But when I did, his skin color didn't mean a thing to me, and I had always felt that way. I asked my mom why they shot Martin Luther King Jr because I didn't understand why it was because he was "brown" (as I referred to it at the tender age of 4). Just because you live in an insular, white community doesn't automatically make you an anachronistic bigot. It's an anecdotal reference point but so is this blog post. Either way you side, this whole charade of "well rural America needs to read a few books and travel to the National Museum of African American History and Culture" is tiresome and making us progressives look bitter and callous to the fact that we lost, straight up, and we did ignore rural America: in the polling, on the issues, and their struggle to retain jobs. Not to mention that many poor people in the middle of America can't actually afford to travel to Washington DC to wise up and learn about other cultures. A really easy thing to ask for and a hard thing for a lot of people to do. Someone said it on HN earlier, there's a strong link between economic hardship, bigotry, and low education: when you've been deprived of jobs and a stable wage, and you don't understand how the world works but you do know that the news has said we've been shipping jobs off to China and India, you're going to blame other people that are different than you. It's not right, but the feelings of not being able to take care of yourself and your family are valid and heartfelt feelings. And we as the technologically-gifted are partially to blame: we are automating jobs away. I wouldn't say that technological progress is a bad thing, but we set high standards for who we employ, and we, as a nation, haven't done enough to educate that workforce to meet the demands of the changing workforce from manufacturing to services/technology.