In 1966, activist Stokely Carmichael popularized the term “Black Power” while organizing in rural Mississippi, though the term is now almost exclusively associated with the Northeast and West Coast. I’m a teaching assistant, and this surprises my students because Black Power activism has become so closely tied with the coasts, major cities, and the non-South. (Even scholars of Black Power tend to write stories set in the Northeast and West Coast.) But 10.3 million people, one-fifth of rural America, are people of color.
Mainstream media’s rush to humanize Trump supporters and “understand” the Midwest, Appalachia, and the rural South has given undue attention to the white rural population of the United States. Much of rural America, particularly areas with growing populations, like California, is made up of people of color. Popular depictions of rural life mostly involve white people, and discussions often focus overwhelmingly on rural white conservatives at the expense of everyone else living in rural America, leading some to wonder why rural Americans vote against their own interests. But many of them, including people of color, don’t.
Large numbers of African-Americans left the rural South during the Great Migration, which spanned from about 1916 to 1970, but places like Alabama’s Black Belt and the Mississippi Delta still have large African-American populations, and the South isn’t the only diverse rural area. Much of popular literature about Indigenous peoples is based on reservation life, but these communities are effectively erased from political discussions around rural America. Even the largest Native American reservation in the country, Navajo Nation, faces issues common in rural America. Native Americans have the lowest employment rate of any ethnic group in the U.S. and, on average, just over 50% of Native American students graduate from high school. Additionally, many Native American reservations struggle with poor water quality, infrastructural issues (i.e., a lack of paved roads), and food scarcity.
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