renthony
A lot of people have a super, super skewed idea of what rural towns in America are like.
I grew up on a farm two miles outside a town with less than 200 people. For a short while, there was a queer-owned coffee shop/art gallery on the main highway. It's where I spent the better part of an entire summer, just hanging out with my laptop. The owner would start experimenting with new drink ideas on slow days, and give me free ones in exchange for feedback.
"And he didn't get run out of town?!" Nah, because his mom owned a hair salon and did the hair of all the old ladies in town, and if they were jerks to her son, she would have stopped doing up their hair and they'd have had to drive half an hour into the city to find a new hairdresser.
My hometown isn't some bastion of progressive politics or anything, but like...it's not a two-dimensional caricature, either. I still live in the area. There are queer people. There are a lot of people of color, especially Black elders and Latinx immigrants. There are disabled folks. There's an entire group of found-family queer leftists who bought a farm together. I know of at least two pagan families, and multiple Jewish folks.
If you read "town of 200 people" and immediately assumed that all of them are white, Christian, cis, straight, able-bodied, republican landowners? You're extremely mistaken.
Rural America is more diverse than you think.
#*farquad pointing* NORTHERNER
I'm from Florida, actually, which you'll recognize as being pretty notably in the South.
The American South has the highest population of Black people in the entire country. The three states with the highest population of Black citizens are Texas, Georgia, and Florida. [x]
Texas and Florida are both listed in the top three US states with the highest populations of Hispanic/Latinx people. [x]
Texas is listed as the overall second-most ethnically diverse state in America. Out of the five least ethnically diverse states, three of them are Northern states--Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. [x]
Six--SIX--of the world's top 50 largest Pride events happen in the American South--Houston, Atlanta, St. Petersburg, New Orleans, Charlotte, and Miami [x].
Florida and Texas are both listed in the top five US states with the highest percentage of queer & LGBT people [x].
Of the top five American states with the highest percentage of disabled people, four of them are in the South [x].
I could keep going.
The South is more diverse than you think.
This post is going around again, and people are so fucking determined to prove that I didn’t “really” grow up rural.
“Half an hour outside a city isn’t rural!” The literal definition of rural is “relating to the countryside instead of a town.”
I grew up on a farm. I did not get an “allowance,” I just did Farm Chores because that’s what you do on a family farm. We traded shit with the neighbors because it was faster and easier than driving into town, much less the nearest city. Going into town for groceries was an Excursion. There was no such thing as a “corner store.” I know what the stars look like. We had to worry about coyotes and foxes and bears getting into our trash and harassing our livestock. We had a flock of yard birds. We had a big garden and a pond stocked with fish and crawfish that we would fish up and eat. I grew up running around in the woods. I was taught basic wilderness survival safety from the time I was a small child, just in case I got lost or ran into a dangerous animal or otherwise had to navigate a dangerous situation out in the middle of nowhere. Not sure what else y'all want from me.
But all of that is a moot point anyway, because it’s not even the actual point of the fucking post. Your arbitrary standards of “true rural” are irrelevant to the actual topic, which is that the South is more diverse than people pretend.
Also, to everyone who keeps telling me that I must be from the most utopian small town in the country: did you willingly ignore the part where I literally said my hometown is not a bastion of progressive politics, or are you just a pathetic little troll who will ignore everything someone says just to pick a little loser fight?
All I said was that marginalized people live in the South. If you decided to take that as, “so obviously it’s not dangerous and Republican,” that’s…not really my fault. Get a hobby.
