When you hear the phrase, “rural America,” what comes to mind? This answer certainly may vary based on the background of the reader and their exposure to rural spaces. For many, they think about a bucolic and pastoral country side that represents a place that they may have visited on a family vacation. Yet others may think of “conservative” America, typified by gun toting, Bible worshipping “Trump supporters.” The same reader may juxtapose these images and use them to represent one in the same, almost as if to represent rural America as a “good place to visit but not live.” But is there even a common image that can accurately depict rural America? After all, the phrase “rural America” be used to describe terrain as diverse as the snow swept Alaskan tundra to the lush Green Mountains of Vermont to the pine forest swamps of eastern North Carolina to the mountainous deserts of Arizona. And people as diverse as the African American people of the Black Belt South, aging “Back to the Landers” in northern New England, coal miners of Appalachia, and Native people all across this country.
It is a landscape of challenges, an increasingly aging and poverty stricken landscape with vast systemic inequality that the popular imagination is increasingly leaving behind. Being disadvantaged in rural America often means vulnerability. Your ability to seek redress for injustices is significantly impaired by inherent systemic inequalities. After all, approximately twenty percent of Americans live in rural America but yet two percent of lawyer practice there. However, the perceptions of these communities and the struggles that they face are often shrouded in an invisible veil. The lack of attention paid to these communities and the mischaracterizations and overgeneralizations that are made in their popular depictions serve to obscure or distort these issues.
In the wake of the 2016 Presidential election, many media outlets sought to explain how Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States. This led to some deep soul searching and ultimately a series of thought pieces on “rural America” and how its citizens were led to vote for Donald Trump. This paper will not seek to litigate the election result and how it ultimately happened, there are other forums for that. However, I will note that Donald Trump was not uniquely popular in rural spaces. In fact, his share of the rural vote was only 3% higher than Mitt Romney in 2012. Trump also performed almost equal to the two previous Republican presidential candidates in urban and suburban communities so Trump also wasn’t uniquely unpopular there either. The bigger shift of rural voters happened between 2008 and 2012 when Mitt Romney gained a 6% greater share of the rural vote than John McCain had. The image of rural America being uniquely Trump obsessed is greatly at odds with the statistical reality of a partisan shift that was better reflected in the 2012 presidential election.
The statistical reality of the situation did not stop many media outlets from attempting to portray rural America as “Trump Country” and using that as a basis for thought pieces. It is grossly unfair however to look at rural America through the lens of a single election result. It is an outright disservice to the people and institutions in those regions. The systemic inequalities that plague many rural spaces are decades in the making, centuries in some places even. An oversimplification of the struggles faced by rural America is also problematic because it complicates the process of building the political will to address the issues faced by people in those spaces. These systemic inequalities are drive the need to ensure that rural Americans have equitable access to justice. Ensuring that these issues are adequately depicted is essential for creating the political will to get it done.
This dire reality faced by rural America is reflected in the raw statistics. As a whole, rural America has a higher poverty rate than urban and suburban America. Many rural communities are suffering because their economies were based on a single industry and that industry has left or become obsolete. Others are suffering because of an ongoing decades long economic malady. After all, poverty in rural America tends to be persistent, deep, and remarkably long lasting. In fact, of the 353 “persistent poverty” counties (defined by federal law as a county in which “20 percent or more of its population [has lived] in poverty over the past 30 years"), 301 are “non-metro.” Many places are also suffering because of the economic consequences of racism and the creation of power structures that disadvantage certain groups of people, a commonality shared with urban areas but yet exacerbated by the spatial isolation inherent in a rural existence. A 2018 study by the Bridgespan Group and National 4-H Council found that of the rural counties where a quarter or more of the population was African American, none of them ranked in the upper quartile in terms of social mobility. It is important to remember also that none of these categories are exclusive and a lot of areas are afflicted by multiple issues. For example, a community may have been based around a single industry but the majority of the population who worked in it were impoverished. The economic makeup of a given industry can also doom those who rely on it to poverty. For an example of how this may look in reality, think of a Southern mill town or a town where a significant number of people work as sharecroppers. While the given industry never brought prosperity to the average worker, its collapse only served to further bury the people who depended on it for their survival.
This reality also reflects a community development problem. The migration of job opportunities to urban areas is leading to a corresponding outmigration to urban communities. One has to only drive through old mining towns in West Virginia, old logging towns in Maine, old tobacco farming communities in eastern North Carolina, and countless of other rural landscapes to see the effect. Communities are dying all over this country and the politicization of “rural America” is contributing to the apathy surrounding this trend. Instead of coming together to recognize the struggles of these communities, people are instead being conditioned to frame these people’s struggles in the context of who their region voted for in the last Presidential election. Even if those results don’t reflect the wishes of the most vulnerable people in those regions. As always, the reality is much more complex than whatever simplistic narrative can be spun up.
Vulnerability is perhaps the biggest factor that is created by the spatial isolation of rural America. When we think of rural America as dominated by white, conservative interests, we are dooming the people who do not fit that archetype to an existence of marginalization. To provide a concrete example, the South is littered with “red” counties that have a significant African American population. However, when we look at a map and see that a Southern state is “red,” we ignore the collective existence of the people in its rural pockets that do not constitute a majority but have to live under the decisions made by the majority. To be vulnerable in rural America means that you are often subject to the whims of people who support policies that are at best apathetic to your best interests and often times diametrically opposed. In some communities, it also means that you are up against a power structure that was built to oppose your interests and whose existence has been fortified over the years.
The diversity of challenges in rural America also bears mentioning. For communities in rural northern New England, they continue to face the perpetual issue of outmigration, which has plagued them in some way since their son and daughters started leaving for the West and the urbanized Industrial Revolution cities of southern New England in the 19th century. This reality is manifested in the fact that New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine lead the nation in median age. For communities in the South, they continue to face the plague of persistent poverty and economic despair, which has plagued them for generations. In some ways, these wounds were self-inflicted, the product of policies that served to subjugate entire segments of the population. This reality is reflected in the fact that Southern states are routinely among the leaders in poverty rates around the country. For communities in Appalachia, they have to reckon with the collapse of the coal industry and the declining of mining as an integral part of the local economy. This fact is reflected in the dire poverty statistics and life outcomes for Appalachian communities. And yet even this list is obviously non-exhaustive and other regions of the country are dealing with other issues that I did not name here. Also, no issue is exclusive to any region. There are rural communities in every corner of the country dealing with aging and outmigration and the legacy of racism is also present in every corner of the country, especially in areas along the Mexican border and in Tribal communities. However, these issues are minimized when they are not adequately represented. When rural representation is oversimplified, the vulnerable people in those communities suffer.
Rural America and her citizens deserve better.
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