3 ms·

I used to live in a rural farming town for a few years. I'll be blunt. The people in the town were racist. Not everyone, but enough to make life extremely uncom

I used to live in a rural farming town for a few years. I'll be blunt. The people in the town were racist. Not everyone, but enough to make life extremely uncomfortable. And not the 'burn a cross on your lawn' kind of racist (well, mostly, some of the youth were precisely that kind of overt racist - I was called various racial slurs by drunk teenagers, and one time had them swerve their car to almost hit me), but the 'it takes five times as long to take my order at the diner as anyone else' or 'postal clerk keeps insisting on multiple forms of ID to hand over a package, despite not asking for any ID from anyone else who came up to the window' kind of racism. That's not pleasant to put up with daily nonstop. This throwaway factoid in the article is supremely important: > small towns in north central and northwest Kansas are usually 90%+ white. This kind of extreme homogeneity breeds racism and xenophobia.

BizarroLand 5y ago
Yep, the random people following you around every store you shop at, always double and triple checking up on you every 5 minutes, random people side-eyeing you everywhere you go but being nice to your face and you couldn't convince them that their actions qualified as racism if you held them before a 12-panel jury with video evidence and Jesus Christ as your prosecutor. But they're not generally mean to you, they didn't kill you or anything, just made you feel unwelcome everywhere you go every day of your life always, and they did it so effortlessly they weren't even aware they were doing it. That's deep south racism and it sucks so much because I didn't even have the tools to recognize what they were doing until I got away from it. Since it always happened to me, I just assumed that's the way people were. Moving to the PNW and being treated as part of the background and not a circus side show was such an eye opener. I now think everyone should get away from their hometown for a few years at least once in their lives, because otherwise they may never know how much of what they take as normal is actually weird, evil, odd, or strange about their version of "normal".

BizarroLand 5y ago

Yep, the random people following you around every store you shop at, always double and triple checking up on you every 5 minutes, random people side-eyeing you everywhere you go but being nice to your face and you couldn't convince them that their actions qualified as racism if you held them before a 12-panel jury with video evidence and Jesus Christ as your prosecutor. But they're not generally mean to you, they didn't kill you or anything, just made you feel unwelcome everywhere you go every day of your life always, and they did it so effortlessly they weren't even aware they were doing it. That's deep south racism and it sucks so much because I didn't even have the tools to recognize what they were doing until I got away from it. Since it always happened to me, I just assumed that's the way people were. Moving to the PNW and being treated as part of the background and not a circus side show was such an eye opener. I now think everyone should get away from their hometown for a few years at least once in their lives, because otherwise they may never know how much of what they take as normal is actually weird, evil, odd, or strange about their version of "normal".