Rurality as diversity

That's newsman Doug Burns' thesis in this column published yesterday in his Carroll Times Herald. ." Here's the lede for the column, headlined, "Rural Iowans must see themselves as part of nation’s diversity."

In the age of scarcity (for many) and excess (for the few), the language and policies of diversity become zero-sum. What another gets, you lose, so goes the polarized thinking that has turned our public square into a fever swamp of resentments and recriminations.

For too many rural Americans, the term diversity is synonymous with otherness because residents of remote regions don’t realize that we, too, are underrepresented and misunderstood. Policies and structures strand and marginalize us.

We rural Americans need to focus on correcting this, finding allies in other demographics who are similarly left out of the modern American economy and higher education and top levels of the judiciary — and yes, even my profession, journalism, where rural voices can be absent or hard to find in key power centers.

Rural Americans served in wars and farmed and mined coal and built the manufacturing base, and increasingly there is little, if any, role for them in the new economy — one in which wealth is scooped and segregated to coastal tech clusters.

This is something I've written about in the context of higher ed admissions, here, here, and here.