Broad nosed faces

My Grandfather and I in Castro Valley, California, 1996

Photo Credit: Veija Kusama

“広い鼻” (hiroi hana) he would tell me, tapping the slope of my nose with the calloused pad of his forefinger.

“アイヌ” (Ainu).

His tone was always reticent. Rooted in the belly of history, in the timbre of family and tradition. Laced with something bitter, a tinge darker. Not quite manifested as shame, never quite asserted as pride. I did not know what Ainu was. What it meant for me and my broad nose. Nor did I ask. Somehow, I knew not to.

Ainu Chieftan

Photo Credit: Midnight Believer

A human being

The name Ainu literally translates to ‘a human being’, traditionally contrasted with kamuy, or ‘divine beings'. Historically residing primarily in the Hokkaidō, Sakhalin, and Kuril Islands, the Ainu are believed to be descendants of the ancient Jōmon culture, which dates back over 10,000 years. Beginning in the 9th Century, Ainu communities began to fall to Japanese subjugation and by the 18th Century they were the target of concerted forced assimilation policies.

Throughout the Meiji Restoration of the 19th Century, Emperor Mutsuhito forced the Ainu peoples off their land, disrupting their relationships with their spiritual heartlands, and terminating their traditional ways of life. As Bri Lambright of Ursinus University notes:

"Ainu land was stolen, and small plots were returned with the express purpose of farming. With traditional hunting practices banned in order to allow Japanese manufacturers to capitalize on exporting deer meat and hides to the mainland, the Ainu were left with little option but to adhere to the government’s plans, lest they face starvation and burial beneath the waves of Japanese settlers who could readily take the community’s place."

Faced with an impossible choice, the Ainu were blamed for the predicament in which they found themselves, as evidenced by letters exchanged between the Nemuro and Naimushō Prefectures dated November of 1882:

“They have brought this difficulty upon themselves since they lack the spirit of activity and progress. In their society in the past there was nothing they needed to record through writing, no stimulus to develop their knowledge through learning; when thirsty they drank, when hungry they ate. They are a purely primitive people.”

Google Translation Screenshot - Ainu

Barbarian, savage, vandal

As the hallowed halls of Edo were devising the extinction of the living, a rising consortium of scientists began to covet the currency of the dead. As Noah Oskaw writes in his piece for Unseen Japan:

"The impetus for the veritable grave plundering of Ainu bones was ostensibly scientific: the desire by Japanese researchers to learn more about the physical and, later, genetic make-up of the indigenous ethnic minorities native to Japan’s northern borders… In both 1864 and 1865, mere years before the fall of the Tokugawa dynasty, the British consul in Hakodate led a group of foreigners interested in uncovering the mystery of the Ainu’s 'Caucasian' features to secretly raid Ainu gravesites… Most infamous of the grave robbers was Hokkaido University Professor Kodama Sakuzaemon, who led various state-sanctioned raids into local boneyards throughout the 1920s to 1970s – all against Ainu protests - sometimes police were called in to help hold off Ainu from physically preventing the unearthing of their ancestors."

Final resting places rendered temporary. Ancestors dragged to lay upon steel tables. Loved ones etched by the scalpels of foreign hands. For nearly one hundred years, the people of Ainu waited.

Interior of an Ainu Home in Yezo, 1906

Photo Credit: Snapshots of the Past

Homecoming

In 2012, a cohort of Ainu elders banded together to achieve the return of their ancestors. Banding together under the slogan, ‘Return the Ainu Remains to the Soil of the Ainu Kotan’, they brought suit against Hokkaidō University demanding repatriation. Mounting political pressures, further exacerbated by Japan’s recent ratification of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which includes a provision requiring governments to work for the return of indigenous people's remains, resulted in a historic 2016 settlement. The case was the first legal domino of its kind, and a chain reaction of “small but significant” repatriations have followed.

In July of 2007 the Berliner Gesellschaft fur Anthropologie returned a skull stolen from an Ainu cemetery in Sapporo by a German tourist in 1879. In May of 2023, a set of four skulls were returned from Melbourne, following their 1911 exploitation by a pair of anthropological pen-pals: a prewar exchange by which the National Museum of Australia sent Aboriginal skeletal remains to the University of Tokyo in return for Ainu skeletal material. And next month, officials from the Japanese government will travel to Britain to receive the remains of five Ainu previously housed at the National History Museum in London and the University of Edinburgh’s Anatomical Museum.

Ainu Woman Playing the Mukkuri

Photo Credit: Midnight Believer

Locating the lost 

While the ten sets of returned remains mark a promising trend, the number of stolen Ainu is estimated to be in the thousands, and for a culture on the brink of extinction, preservation has begun to equate survival. Today, only a few isolated pockets of Ainu people remain scattered across rural Hokkaido, with most of the estimated 20,000 Ainu assimilating into cities and towns around the island. After decades of government proscription, the Hokkaido Ainu language is likely extinct, as there remain no known native speakers, and many individuals of Ainu descent have no knowledge of their ancestry or tradition. To state it quite starkly, the Ainu are disappearing.

My Grandfather and I in Hakodate, Hokkaido, 2025

Photo Credit: Veija Kusama

Good for breathing 

My grandfather is now 82 and his tone regarding our Ainu heritage has shifted in recent years. What was once coated in a glaze of indignity has come to be considered with a degree of quiet contentment. Now, when he regards the nose his genes placed upon my face, he adds a simple but emblematic qualifier. “広い鼻” (broad nose), “呼吸に良い” (good for breathing). Perhaps, the repatriation movement is not only about reclaiming the skulls of our ancestors, but rather about reclaiming the faces they gave us.

Recent reports identify rural public health interventions, some with potential to mitigate Medicaid cuts

U.S. Department of Public Health Building.
Image courtesy of Boston Public Library. 

Healthcare in rural America finds itself a topic of much discussion lately, with mainstream media coverage of the crisis unfolding after Medicaid cuts by the Trump administration's 2025 budget reconciliation bill, which was signed into law July 2025. By some estimates, the new law will increase the number of uninsured people by 10 million in 2034. Other coverage concerns the fate of a $50 billion rural health slush fund that is yet to pay out in the communities who need it most and the recent slew of hospital closures in rural communities.

While the new restrictions on Medicaid eligibility and reduced federal spending will be felt across the nation, rural communities will be hit especially hard, due to the higher rates of people on Medicaid in nonmetropolitan areas. Sarah Jane Tribble, reporting for KFF Health News, writes: 

People who live in the nation’s rural expanses have more chronic diseases, die younger, and make less money. Those compounding factors have financially pummeled rural health infrastructure, triggering hospital closures and widespread discontinuation of critical health services.

Hospital closures (online tool showing a map of recent closures) exacerbate the present struggle to meet rural healthcare needs, where people are generally more vulnerable and less likely to utilize primary care services due to structural barriers like cost and provider shortages. In 2016, Dr. Julia T. Caldwell et al. published a paper in the American Journal of Public Health, which states that "[r]ural adults are less likely to be insured, less likely to use healthcare, and more likely to delay seeking care than urban residents." To put it plainly, access to acute care is bleak in much of rural America right now, and reductions in Medicaid spending and eligibility are poised to make things worse. 

Rural hospital closures, 2005-2010 (in blue) and 2010-present (in yellow).
Graphic courtesy of Sheps Center for Health Services Research, UNC. 

There is, however, another dimension of the rural health conversation that is gaining traction in public discourse – rural public health. Where the trends in healthcare are alarming, improvement in public health feels tractable. This post focuses on insights from two recent reports – this one from the Aspen Institute (Feb. 2026) and this one from California's Department of Public Health (Feb. 2026) – to highlight opportunities for high-impact rural public health intervention amid the ongoing healthcare crisis. 

Public Health: Rurality in Focus

In general, the healthcare industry aims to treat people who are sick or injured, whereas public health seeks to keep people from getting sick or injured in the first place. According to the American Public Health Association, healthcare focuses on individualized care; public health focuses on entire populations. Because a key responsibility of public health is to collect, analyze, and interpret health data to inform timely public health interventions, policies, and resource planning, it is more likely to analyze and include the axes of identity and experience that inform vulnerability. In fact, rurality has been an axis of analysis in public health research for decades. "Place," meaning where people live, work, and play, is widely understood by experts in the field as a fundamental social determinant of health.

In February 2026, the Aspen Institute and the California Department of Public Health each published reports that examine, in significant detail, the state of rural public health. The Aspen Institute Report is titled "Meeting the Health Needs of Rural America," and represents the tenth installment in the Aspen Health Strategy Group's mission to tackle a single health issue annually through year-long, in-depth study. The California Department of Public Health Report, the State's second-ever "California State of Public Health Report," ("Cal. DPH Report") carves out tens of pages devoted to risks, trends, and interventions specific to rural children, adolescents, and adults.

All-Cause Mortality Rate by Race and Ethnicity in Urban/Rural
Areas, California 2022-2024 (Cal. DPH Rep., p. 32)

This post focuses on one paper from the Aspen Institute Report titled Population Health in Rural America: Changes, Challenges, and Opportunities, authored by rural demographer Shannon M. Monnat and sociologist Tim Slack. Their paper tees up several useful policy proposals, which provide a path to remedying the so-called "rural mortality penalty" – the name for a widening disparity where rural U.S. residents experience higher age-adjusted mortality rates than urban counterparts. The authors suggest that the relative recency of the rural mortality penalty, which emerged in the data only four decades ago, "provides reason to believe it can be reversed." (Aspen Inst. Rep., p. 5). 

Systemic Risks and Opportunities 

Each report does a thorough inventory of factors driving mortality rates across the lifespan, from infants to working-age adults to the elderly. Unsurprisingly, barriers like lack of access to healthcare, transportation, healthy food, broadband internet, and other social services are central to their findings. But each goes a step further to do some accounting of recent social and economic trends driving the numbers: substance abuse and misuse; growing gaps in educational attainment; and persistent economic disinvestment that has hollowed out local institutions and workforce pipelines. Environmental risks (including climate change) and exposures also explain recent losses in resilience and increases in mortality rates. These overlapping stressors compound, reinforcing cycles of poor health outcomes that are difficult to interrupt through healthcare access alone. 

Adult Mortality Rates in Nonmetropolitan (Rural) Counties,
2000-2022 (Aspen Inst. Rep.)

Writing for the Aspen Institute, Monnat & Slack characterize "rural economic and human health" as "intertwined." The data in both studies bears this out. Lower income, wealth, and levels of educational attainment correlate strongly with shorter lifespans and fewer years lived in good health. Importantly, both reports frame these outcomes not as inevitable features of rural life, but as the product of policy choices and disinvestment patterns that can be changed. The California report, in particular, emphasizes that upstream interventions–those that target education, early childhood development, and economic stability–offer some of the highest returns for improving long-term health outcomes (Cal. DPH Report). 

The reports identify education policy reform as a major inroad for uplifting rural communities struggling with economic disinvestment and population decline. 

Education, particularly possessing a bachelor’s degree, has become an increasingly important determinant of health and longevity in the United States. Higher education confers economic, social, and lifestyle advantages that manifest as a “personal firewall” that protects health, even in the face of external and unpredictable threats, such as pandemics, recessions, and natural disasters.

(Aspen Inst. Rep., p. 76). Investments in vocational programs, community colleges, and early childhood education programs like Head Start not only improve education and employment outcomes, they also provide measurable health benefits over time. Many health outcomes and disparities in adulthood are rooted in childhood conditions such as family and community health, neighborhood safety, policies, and systems" (Cal. DPH Report, p. 58). By strengthening local economies and expanding opportunities, these interventions address root causes of poor health, rather than treating symptoms as they occur. In this way, rural public health policy begins to function as a cross-sector strategy for community resilience. 

Conclusion 

The current crisis in rural healthcare access underscores the need for action, but it also highlights the limits of a healthcare-only response. As the reports analyzed in this post make clear, improving rural public health outcomes requires sustained investment in the social and economic conditions that shape health, long before a person ever becomes a patient. Public health offers a framework for identifying upstream opportunities and making interventions where they can have the greatest impact. In the face of hospital closures and shrinking coverage, this broader approach might provide a path forward: one that treats rural health not only as a medical issue but as a function of place, policy, and long-term community investment.

Rastafari roots of plant-based eating

An Ital meal of rice, ackee, callaloo, and veggie chunks.

Source: Wikimedia Commons (2009)

In considering a vegan diet, I imagine a young, progressive urban consumer motivated by environmental or animal welfare concerns. In other words, someone who likely shops at a Whole Foods. In the West, veganism is packaged as something performed through individual consumer choices. That framing obscures the structural conditions shaping diets, and reinforces the mistaken belief that veganism is a modern invention. The “Ital” tradition complicates the popular narrative of modern veganism. Long before plant-based eating carried a price premium in Los Angeles, it was ordinary in the hills of rural Jamaica. 

The Rastafari movement began in the 1930s in Jamaica among the working poor who had been devastated by the global financial crash of 1929 and prolonged colonial mismanagement. These forces created mass unemployment and rural-to-urban migration into the slums of west Kingston. Rastas fled to the rural mountains where they could access land and practice self-governance without persecution.  

Leonard P. Howell, an early Rastafari leader, drew on the practices of Hindu indentured laborers in Jamaica to promote what became known as Ital living. The word “Ital” comes from “vital,” dropping the first letter to emphasize the pronoun “I”. This linguistic practice signals unity with the speaker, the listener, and Jah (God). Ital eating is an expression of “livity,” a Rastafari concept that the individual can embody and express spirituality through the practices of daily life.  For Rastafarians, Jah exists in all of creation, including plants, animals, and people. As such there is a divine force or energy in everything. 

What one puts in one’s body either enhances or degrades this life force. Food that has been processed or chemically altered is considered corrupted and further from Jah’s creation. Life force does not begin at the moment of consumption. Powell’s research participants described farming, cultivation, and conservation as the literal pouring of one’s energy and emotion into the earth. The sincerity of this effort determines how the earth responds and reciprocates that energy. 

Rural Rastafari food is shaped by what the land yields. Coconuts are naturally abundant across Jamaica. They are cracked, drained, grated, and squeezed into milk that forms the base of most dishes. Vegetables and aromatics are sautéed in coconut oil. The food typically contains beans, spices, chili peppers, and the coconut milk, stewed for hours over low heat and eaten communally. A strict Ital diet rejects salt as “a needless adulteration” of what Jah placed on the earth, so herbs and dry seasonings are key. Scotch bonnet peppers, thyme, lemongrass, allspice, and nutmeg build complex flavor without salt. 

The one-pot stew is a practical response to the rural conditions of Rastafari life. Land access is limited, so the range of available produce is narrow. A single pot stretches what is on hand to feed the community. Cooking takes place outside in clay pots often balanced over a wood fire by three stones. Metal cookware is avoided on the belief that it harms the body. 

In Saint Lucia, a young Rasta farmer described conversing with plants throughout their life cycle to transfer positive energy to them. He explained that during planting one must ensure a positive heart is present because this very energy will be transmitted to the earth. The same is true of cooking. Ital food involves preparing food with a clean heart to transfer life force into the food. Food must be cooked slowly, with intention and gratitude. This preserves and transmits the life energy that began in the soil. Food is not just physically nourishing; it is also spiritually nourishing.

Food that is rushed or processed severs the energy force and transmits a lower form. It follows too that food grown under corporate conditions is spiritually degraded. Jahson Peat, who runs a vegan restaurant in London called Zionly Manna, presents Ital as a process of relearning that strips away the method of eating brought about by colonialism. This is inseparable from a rejection of capitalism itself. Commitment to Ital eating is tightly linked to a broader turn away from the imported industrial and materialist ways of life, which are all combined under the Rastafari concept of “Babylon.” 

By contrast, mainstream veganism operates according to market logic. It converts diet choices into an ethical identity. For some, it is an exercise in personal branding, where what you eat signals who you are. This channels genuine ethical concerns for animals and the environment into demand for plant-based products. In this sense, the market-based vegan movement can be seen not as a challenge to the current food system, but a force that risks expanding it further, as seen through the IPO of Beyond Meat. The growth of this plant-based segment does not depend on replacing meat consumption, only on expanding overall consumer demand. The Ital diet is not a consumer identity. It seeks to reject the economic system and the very notion of consumerism upon which it relies. 

However, Ital does not operate entirely independent of market forces. Jaffe’s concept of “Ital chic” describes the convergence of middle-class consumerism and the Ital diet. In Kingston, Rasta symbols have been used to market artisanal soap lines and premium vegetable products. When a brand sells coconut-milk products with Rasta packaging, it co-opts a tradition built on self-sufficiency and places it inside the very market that tradition was designed to reject. This dynamic is similar to that explored in a blog post from this semester about rural tourism. It noted that rural culture is often packaged to meet consumer expectations, with authenticity operating as a selling point. 

Plant-based eating did not begin with a farmer’s market or with a marketing campaign. It owes some of its roots to rural Jamaica, where people grew what the earth offered based on a theological conviction. That story deserves to be remembered before it is repackaged.

The Grange: Community building in rural America

                      

Credit: Anderson Valley Grange

Some of my earliest memories are attending the yearly variety show at the Anderson Valley Grange in Mendocino County, California. During these performances the bustling Grange hall felt like the busiest gathering of the year, besides the county fair. The Grange gives fair warning that “this is a variety show NOT a talent show.” In catching up with my grandma about the Grange, which she was a member of for many years, she remembered most performances as “really bad,” noting affectionately that the emcee was “extremely corny.” She and her hippie friends were often among the acts of the night and may have been at least in the neighborhood of “really bad” also.

Regardless of the varying quality of the performances, the Grange provided a sense of community in a place where many people lived too deep in the woods to see their neighbors regularly. There was always some friend of my parents or grandparents who had apparently known me since I was a baby, and I likely would not see them again until the next variety show. Unbeknownst to me as a child at the variety show, the Grange had been playing a similar role in rural communities across America for almost 150 years.

The origins of the Grange

The Grange, formally known as National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, began as an organization dedicated to agriculture when it was founded in 1867 by Oliver Kelley, a Minnesotan with an interest in reorganizing and educating agricultural workers. Kelley had been sent to the South after the Civil War by President Andrew Johnson to assess the agricultural conditions of the region and formed the Grange partially in reaction to this tour.

I Feed You All! Image Credit: Library of Congress 

The Civil War had marked the culmination of a rapid series of changes to farming communities. The draw of urban economies and the increasing efficiency of agricultural technology had steadily reduced the share of the US population engaged in farming, declining from 90% in 1790 to 42% in 1880. This demographic shift brought changes to the social fabric of rural communities.

Once, farmers had engaged in subsistence agriculture and frequently labored together if one member of the community needed help planting or with harvest. Now, innovations like the cast iron plow greatly reduced the need for farmers to work together in the fields. Additionally, most farmers had shifted from subsistence farming to commercial farming, rendering them competing market actors rather than a community with shared goals.

Kelley began the Grange with the increasing obsolescence of traditional farm life in mind, and his vision for a new farming community was a rather radical one. The National Grange claims that “[s]ince our founding in 1867, we have lived by our motto, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.,” and that “[w]e have always welcomed and invited people of all races, creeds, religions and nationalities into our membership.”

The Grange did in fact embody principles of equality in many ways. The institution not only welcomed women, it required that at least four members elected to the board be women in order for a Grange to be chartered. Recognition of the labor that women provided in agricultural life was central to the Grange from its inception.

In addition to the social principles espoused by the Grange, the group was strongly motivated by Kelley’s longstanding interest in developing and proliferating farm technologies in an equitable manner. Kelley saw people engaged in agriculture being left behind. In his words, "Everything is progressing. Why not the farmers? The inventive genius of the country is continually at work improving tools, and farmers remain passive."

A particularly interesting feature of the Grange is their Masonic-inspired secrecy and ritual. Kelley had found that his membership in the Masons was a helpful foot in the door during his time in the South. He believed, quite correctly it would seem, that “[t]he secrecy would lend an interest and peculiar fascination.” Grangers ascended through a variety of ranks, known as “degrees”; wore sashes, badges, and regalia corresponding to their rank; and had secret handshakes and passwords. These features faded in modern Granges, but my grandmother still recalls a secret handshake and being given a “goddess name” when she joined in the 80s.

Expansion, goals, and advocacy

The Grange was a near-immediate and explosive success, with over 24,000 chartered local Granges and almost one million members within eight years of its founding. While Kelley had founded the Grange with central planning in mind, hoping to eventually incorporate the Grange into the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Grange chapters quickly became extremely independent, with the National Grange exerting little control over their operations. The Grange was focused on farmers, but were very lenient regarding who could become a member. Even from shortly after its founding, Granges members often included lawyers, judges, and educators.

The early National Grange strongly advocated for cooperative farming. While we commonly think of cooperative farming as groupings of producers, the Grange additionally endeavored to unify production and sale of agricultural products to extract greater profits, a practice known in economics and antitrust law as vertical integration. At the peak of the Grange collectivization attempts in 1877, about 30,000 co-ops existed. The Grange also operated the infrastructure necessary for these co-ops, facilities like mills, grain elevators, and warehouses.

Though the Grange is ostensibly non-political and discourages discussion of politics at their meetings, their concern for the agricultural class manifested in advocacy for a variety of political causes, especially in their early history. Perhaps most prominent was the effort of the Grange to combat the high rates charged by railroads, an effort that resulted in the Granger Laws and inspired modern antitrust law. A contribution that perhaps has the most lasting impact on rural communities is their campaign for rural free delivery of mail.

A critical view of the early Grange

While many accounts of the Grange dote over its inclusivity, Prof. Charles Postel provides a rather scathing perspective on the Grange in his book Equality: An American Dilemma. He notes that gender equality was a relatively palatable position in Washington D.C following the Civil War, where seven of the eight founding members of the Grange were working as members of the federal government at the time of the founding. While women did occupy prominent leadership positions in some Granges, many female members were relegated to secretarial roles.

Additionally, the Grange was somewhat wavering in its support for suffrage. The National Grange came out in support of suffrage in 1885, but the next year reverted to support for state rights to set suffrage policy. Granges did provide an audience for suffragettes, and the National Grange finally backed the suffrage amendment in 1915.

The Grange did not explicitly discriminate against African-Americans; it was nevertheless clear to many that they were not welcome. Kelley was a lifelong Democrat, and many Granges made quite obvious overtures to white Southern farmers. Prof. Jenny Bourne of Carleton College notes in her book In Essentials, Unity: An Economic History of the Grange Movement that the National Master of the Grange in 1873 said that admitting “colored” members was a question best left to local interests. Unsurprisingly, many communities in the South answered this question with exclusion. Black farmers responded by creating the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance near the end of the 1880s.

Many positive accounts of the Grange’s early history acknowledge and discuss the exclusion of African Americans, but the relationship of the Grange to Native Americans is often left unexplored. Prof. Postel notes that Kelley was largely disinterested in the Civil War because his “deep antipathy towards the Indians of Minnesota” motivated him to cooperate with Republicans, despite being a lifelong Democrat. While the Grange performed a variety of charitable work for Native Americans from the 1940s onwards, it must be acknowledged that the interests of white farmers were often in direct opposition to those of Native Americans during the early history of the Grange.

As aptly put by Prof. Bourne, “the history of the Patrons of Husbandry exposes the classic tension between the desires for achieving overall economic success and for dictating how the spoils are split.”

The fall, rise, and second fall of the Grange

While declining profits from farming rendered cooperative efforts very attractive, Grange efforts to collectively sell and purchase agricultural products suffered from defection by individual farmers. A lack of effective cooperation between the National Grange and local and state Granges was an additional challenge. Additionally, the cooperative methods employed by the Grange often required an upfront investment that many farmers were unable to afford as the economy became increasingly strained in the late 1800s.

Grange membership had fallen precipitously in the 1880s and 1890s, as many members found that the costs of their membership outweighed the perceived benefits. It did not help that some members apparently found the agricultural programming “dull as well as not worth the money.”

In terms of rural political advocacy, the space once occupied by the Grange had been effectively co-opted by new organizations like the Farmers Alliance, the Farm Bureau, and the Greenback Party by the late 1800s. While the Grange thus receded from national politics, it was a significant influence on these successor organizations and on modern farm interest advocacy groups, like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and state dairy marketing boards.

   Combined Grange and Farm Bureau Facility in Del Norte County, California

 (c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

While the Grange had largely withdrawn from the political stage by the early 1900s, membership had begun to rebound as Grange organizations started to offer important services to rural communities. In particular, the Grange began offering insurance and created power cooperatives in the 1930s.

While nonprofit utilities and insurance providers initiated by the Grange still serve rural communities, these enterprises are now mostly under non-Grange management and no longer exclusively serve Grange members. The fact that these services gradually stopped being linked to Grange membership and decreasing rural populations has caused a steady decline in Grange membership. Since the 1955 Grange membership has fallen from 850,000 members to 140,000.

The National Grange currently advocates on the level for relatively modest and non-partisan goals, like increased spending on agricultural research. They maintain their longstanding anti-tariff views and have generally favored immigration, but the organization seem to be tempering their language to assuage Trump voters in recent years.

The Anderson Valley Grange and the new role of Granges

The Anderson Valley Grange has a particularly Northern California themed history. This wonderful article by Lisa Morehouse, published recently by KWED, the San Francisso details the initial frictions at the Anderson Valley Grange in the 70s and 80s as the longtime residents of the area, largely loggers, apple farmers, and sheep herders, were suddenly overwhelmed by hippies hoping to use the Grange, home of the best dance floor in town.

The Anderson Valley Grange, Mendocino County, California

 (c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2022

The current head of the Anderson Valley Grange is a man known around town as Captain Rainbow who “wore a loincloth [and] lived up in the woods” when he first moved to Anderson Valley. He tells the story of how a crisis led to a reconciliation of this "old-timer" vs hippie conflict. 

In his early days in Anderson Valley, “if you were a hippie, you weren’t particularly welcome here.” He didn’t go to the local bar, nicknamed “the Bucket of Blood” for about 10 years “because it was chainsaw haircut time if you did." 

Things changed in 1985 when the old Grange hall, built in 1939, burned down. When the Grangers came together to build a new building, the hippies begged the Grangers to include a dance floor and offered to help rebuild the hall if the insurance money ran out.

Captain Rainbow recounts that even if you had a bad encounter with an old timer, “The next day, hungover, both of you would be hanging sheetrock together, and you’d find out that, hey, you’re all right.” After the hall was built, Captain Rainbow was delighted to receive an invite to join the Grange, along with the many other hippies who had been involved in the effort to rebuild the hall.

A post buried about half way down this archive of the Anderson Valley Advertiser shares a similar sentiment, noting that running out of insurance money, “was a blessing in disguise, forcing us to rely on each other, it forged new friendships and respect.”

My grandmother recalls joining after this cultural divide had somewhat mended. She joined because she wanted to find a venue for her Congolese dance teacher to offer lessons, and both were welcomed with open arms.

Today, the Anderson Valley Grange still acts as a center of community for the region. They host their annual variety show, monthly pancake breakfasts, dances, and quinceaneras. The Grange maintains ties to its agricultural roots, collaborating with Anderson Valley Brewery, using the hall for agricultural education, and hosting seed exchanges. Mendocino County Grangers also started a retirement facility that houses 170 people.

Food Bank Sign at the Anderson Valley Grange (c) Lisa Pruitt (2022)

While still lively, the Anderson Valley Grange faces the same issues as Granges nationwide. In Captain Rainbow’s words, “We need some fresh blood.” The Grange is active, but the membership is aging. “When my generation came in and became part of the Grange, the old-timers, they needed us. And [], I’m a geezer now!”

While Grange membership has been on a long downward trend, there has been some incremental growth in the last few years. The Anderson Valley Grange, like many in California, has an increasingly Latino membership. It is also making overtures to Native Americans in the area.

Conclusions

The Grange is an institution with an extremely rich and complicated history that this post has barely scratched the surface of. While its political relevance has faded, local granges still remain as a hub of community in many rural areas. Living in the city, it is easy to forget how crucial simple infrastructure like a large hall with a stage is to cultivating community. As rural communities struggle and decline, we should be mindful of the role that organizations like the Grange play in supporting them.

NYT's Thomas Edsall on the current food stamp controversy, including rural and racial differences

Thomas Edsall's column in the New York Times this week is under the provocative headline, "It Would be Trump's Honor to Pay for Food Stamps."  Here's the part of Edsall's column that mentions rural Americans:  

In “Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy,” the coauthors Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown point out that while urban and rural counties relied on government transfer programs at similar rates in the 1970s and 1980s,

They diverged from the 1990s onward as rural places faced economic tumult and residents came to rely more on government benefits. By 2019, the eve of the pandemic, rural people benefited from social transfers by $1,749 more per person per year than their urban peers.

In 1970, Mettler and Brown calculated, rural and urban households received social benefits of $2,220 and $2,244, respectively, a 1.1 percent difference. By 2019, the average annual government benefit for rural residents rose to $10,558 and for urban residents to $8,809, a 20 percent difference. 

Mettler and Brown cite research by Jennifer Sherman, a sociologist at Washington State University, to describe the agonized struggle of the rural poor who, when faced with a major economic setback, are forced to turn to government for help:

When they themselves need to use such benefit, they experience a deep sense of stigma and shame. They drove to stores far away to use SNAP benefits, hoping to avoid the gaze of their neighbors and community members.

Given the way people have traditionally talked about these programs, one of the most striking things about government data on SNAP use is just how high the white share of food stamp recipients actually is.

In West Virginia, 97.7 percent of SNAP recipients whose racial and ethnic identity was recorded are white; Indiana, 66 percent; Iowa 75.5 percent; Kentucky, 83.4 percent; Missouri, 67.1 percent; Montana, 76.6 percent; North Dakota, 66.9 percent; Ohio, 64.9; Oklahoma, 60.9 percent; Utah, 86.6 percent; and Wyoming, 78.8 percent.

On this issue of "white share of food stamp recipients" I am pleased to see Edsall note that.  It's an issue I've often foregrounded, along with the fact that middle class folks who are resentful of those who receive public benefits are as resentful as the whites who do so as they are of the people of color who do so. The resentment is not driven by racism, certainly not solely so.  The intra-racial tension is as significant as the inter-racial tension.  Read more here and here.

An unduly provocative headline from the Ezra Klein Show about rural-urban tension

Image from today's New York Times Ezra Klein Show podcast.

The headline for the Ezra Klein podcast today--the one that popped up on my NYTimes audio feed--is "The Rural Power Behind Trump's Assault on Cities."  I found that very provocative--unhelpfully so.  It seems to place blame on rural America and rural Americans for Trump's assault on urban America.  In fact, it's not only provocative, it's a bit misleading regarding the content of the podcast, which is an interview with Suzanne Mettler about her book, with Trevor Brown, Rural versus Urban:  The Growing Divide that Threatens Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2025).  I'll come back to that, but first I want to excerpt the part of the interview where Klein gets closest to backing up the provocative headline: 

Klein:  

I’ve heard a lot of people who study civil wars say it is a bad sign when the federal government is ordering armed troops from some states into other states over the objections of those states’ governors and — these are all cities they’re ordering them into — those cities’ mayors.

And you can look at this, and I think I have been looking at this, and say: This sure looks like a rural coalition militarily occupying the cities it has come to see as the power centers of their enemies. (emphasis mine)

What I don't understand is how Klein can assert that a "rural coalition" is militarily occupying U.S. cities.  Who makes up this purported "rural coalition," exactly, when there are too few rural voters to have put Trump in the White House?  Klein's assertion completely overlooks the much more robust numbers of urban voters who chose Trump.  (Nicholas Jacobs, co-author of The Rural Voter, has commented on this in various publications, most recently here).  Perhaps Klein is thinking about the disproportionate power of red states in the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College?  If so, he should consider that the rural voters in California and New York are as underrepresented as those states' urban voters--and that "red states" like Idaho and Arkansas have "blue cities" like Boise and Little Rock, whose urban residents are overrepresented.  (I wrote more about this here and here).  

Or is Klein somehow claiming that rural is occupying urban because a disproportionate number of rural young people join the armed services?  whatever Klein means, I see this framing--this attribution of what Trump is doing to a "rural coalition"--as inflammatory and therefore unhelpful.  Of course, it is also inaccurate unless one uses a really capacious definition of "rural."     

Here's Mettler's response to Klein's comment.  Unfortunately, Mettler doesn't actually respond to Klein's assertion that some rural coalition is militarily occupying U.S. cities.  She says:  

Well, it’s unthinkable. It’s so un-American to be telling the military you can use cities as training grounds and to be sending in federal troops and federalized National Guard into cities. And this comes on top of Trump, for the past few years, using a lot of rhetoric against cities — but now using actual violent force against cities.

So how is this possible? It’s possible because of the rural-urban divide. It’s possible because this us-versus-them politics has become so deep.

By the way, the headline for this podcast on the NYT home page right now is a less sensational "How the Democratic Brand Turned Radioactive in Rural America."  Both the provocative and less provocative headlines show up when you click through. 

Here are some of the more interesting exchanges about the book that are featured  in the podcast:

Klein: 

Before we get into what created the divide, beginning in the ’90s, what kept urban and rural America politically united for so long?

Mettler:  

If you go back to, say, the late 19th, early 20th century, as industrialization is happening, rural areas really feel left behind. There’s a big agricultural depression in the 1920s. Then the Great Depression comes. And rural people at that point are really upset, and policymakers are worried there’s about to be a revolution in the countryside, as they call it.

But what happens is that Franklin D. Roosevelt steps in and creates this big rural-urban coalition. And to an extent that I was unaware of until we wrote this book, he really put rural Americans front and center in his vision of what needed to happen for the country and created all of these policies that were really designed to lift up rural America.

Archived clip of Franklin D. Roosevelt: 

I cannot escape the conclusion that one of the essential parts of a national program of restoration must be to restore purchasing power to the farming half of the country. Without this, the wheels of railroads and of factories will not turn.

* * *  

Rural Americans really appreciated that. They felt the Democratic Party was there for them, and many of them remembered it for their lifetimes. And then their kids did, as well, all the way up until the 1990s.

In the 1980s and early ’90s, rural places were more likely to send Democrats to Congress than Republicans. Only a few decades ago, there was still a coalition where there were rural politicians who were really at the forefront in Congress in brokering compromises on all sorts of important policies.

Klein:

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. And that kicks off this process of ideological polarization, where the parties sort into liberal and conservative. The Dixiecrats die out.

And I think the most commonly believed story about what happened in the urban-rural divide is that they hated the Civil Rights Act. I think if you look at a lot of Democratic accounts of this, you’ll see something like that.

But you don’t buy that account. Why?

Mettler:

Yes, that’s wrong. So for one thing, just look at when the rural-urban divide emerged: It’s not until the late 1990s.

The story that you’re telling, usually the follow-up is that the South left the Democratic Party. Well, in fact, there were a lot of urban Southerners who left the Democratic Party. But rural Southerners stuck with it up until the 1990s, and then they left.

Klein:  

The way your book is structured, you sort of say: There’s this economic divergence, and then layered on top of that very quickly is what you call elite overreach. That’s what we’re talking about here.

The way you describe it is: “It was not any one issue that tipped the scales but rather the persistent commonality that ran across them. From 2008 onward, rural Americans perceived an urban elite that sought to impose itself on far-flung places, controlling residents’ lives through new rules and procedures, in which they felt they had little voice.”

And you argue that the issue here is not the policy but the sense of respect or disrespect, of listening or not listening, of representation or absence of representation — that there was something sort of beneath policy that drove this.

Klein: 

Political scientists use this slightly strange tool called the feeling thermometer, where they ask people to rate other groups on a 1-to-100 scale.

You have this data for white rural America, and on a scale of 1 to 100, they put Black Americans at a 70 — pretty good; Hispanic Americans at 67; gay men at 57; illegal immigrants at 39 — pretty low; and Democrats at 14 points.

So Democrats are rated at less than half illegal immigrants’ rating.
By the way, this is not just rural America — white urban Democrats put Republicans at 17 points. But the hatred is much more concentrated at the political outgroup, at least in these measures, than at any other group.

Klein:

White rural America’s sense that the Democratic Party sees all these other groups as in need of help and respect and is prioritizing them ahead of them — Arlie Hochschild’s idea about other groups getting to cut in line. And then there’s a real rise of discourse around white privilege. And this creates — we’ve seen this in our politics — a lot of anger.

Like: You’re telling me — in a poor community that has very few jobs now, where life expectancy is going down — that I have white privilege, and your urban coalition is what needs the help? Or that illegal immigrants need the help?

I’d like you to talk a bit about that distinction between the divide being discriminatory, and the divide being a feeling: That coalition doesn’t prioritize me, so I’m going to go with a coalition that does.

Mettler:  

It’s a really important issue in that I think a lot of urban Democrats assume that what’s at play in this rural-urban divide is that rural white people are racist. What we find is that it’s not reducible to that.  (emphasis mine)

The way we understand it is that it’s in this same period that there’s the sense of elite overreach on the part of Democrats, where rural Americans are looking at the Democratic Party and thinking: They don’t understand us. They don’t care about our communities.

And on this, they’re viewing the Democratic Party as really prioritizing the needs of people of color in urban communities and immigrants — but not really understanding or caring about rural people who are struggling, as well.

This last bit from Mettler is, to my mind, so important.  What Mettler doesn't say is how academics contribute to this problem of saying that so-called rural resentment is all due to racial animus.  See some nuanced and thoughtful pushback to that notion--or at least the notion it is all so simple--in this academic article.   

I'll no doubt have more to say about Mettler and Brown's book in future posts, after I've read it.   For now, I'll just say that three of my recent publications aim to take a more optimistic tack regarding rural voters.  They encourage progressives to play to rural residents' rural identity--to show them that they and their needs are seen.   Read more here, here, and here.  I'm somewhat less optimistic here, while still taking seriously the need for politicians--including those on the left--to respond to rural needs.  

Rural schools in Texas, Arkansas and elsewhere threatened by vouchers that divert tax dollars to private schools

Jasper School District Truck, Jasper, Arkansas, February 2025
The Jasper District includes schools in Kingston (neighboring Madison County)
and Oark (neighboring Johnson County).  
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2025

The Texas House of Representatives voted this week to create "one of the largest taxpayer-funded school voucher programs," which the New York Times characterized as "a hard-fought victory for private school choice activists as they turn their attention to a nationwide voucher push."

I and students in the Law and Rural Livelihoods course have previously written a number of blog posts here about this issue in the context of Texas and other states, with particular concern for the consequences for rural schools. Those concerns were also called out this week by Dallas-area Democratic Representative Chris Turner, who commented that the measure “will harm students with disabilities. It will harm rural students.”  He also expressed concern that it will effectively "resegregate education."  

The New York Times provides this further context on this week's vote, including attention to the rural angle: 

[S]ome Democrats argued that what they called a “voucher scam” was a giveaway to parents who have already opted out of public education.

* * * 

Vouchers have been a priority for [Governor Greg] Abbott for several years. But strong resistance from Democrats and some rural Republicans in the Texas House — who feared the program would undercut their local schools — prevented it from becoming law.

* * * 

There has often been resistance to private school vouchers in conservative rural regions, where few private schools exist and public school districts are sometimes a county’s largest employer.

That dynamic was further documented in the Texas Monthly story that is the focus of this mid-2023 post.  The NY Times coverage of events in Texas this week continues:   

But the growth of alternative models for education has convinced some policymakers that rural students will have more options than they would have in the past. Those models include for-profit virtual schools and microschools, which are often run by a single educator working out of a home or a rented space.

Meanwhile, in Texas' neighbor to the northeast, Arkansas-Democrat Gazette columnist Rex Nelson has written a few pieces on that state's voucher scheme, part of the LEARNS Act that Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed into law in 2023.  In a March 23, 2025 column titled "An Education Debacle," Nelson begins by couching what is at stake for rural schools in terms of rural population loss and the collapse of communities associated with the loss of a local school.  He leads with the illustration of Lake View, in Phillips County, in the Mississippi Delta region.  Nelson observes that the town's population dropped from 609 in the 1980 census to 327 in 2020, a rate of loss faster than most places in the nation.  He also points out that Lake View is one of just a few incorporated cities in Arkansas where the population is more than 90% Black.   

But Nelson leads with Lake View for a reason in addition to its population loss.  He writes: 

Lake View became a household term in Arkansas as a case named Lake View School District No. 25 v. Huckabee wound its way through the courts. When the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in November 2002 that the state's system of funding public education was unconstitutional, it in essence said this: The child who lives at Lake View deserves the same educational opportunities as a child living in Bentonville.

Nelson names Bentonville, in particular, because it is one of the wealthiest communities in the state.  It has become affluent not least because it is the home of Walmart and one of the richest families in the nation, the Waltons. 

Eventually, Nelson uses his column to dig into Governor Sanders.  This is an especially interesting turn since Nelson previously worked for her father, Mike Huckabee, when Hucakbee was the state's governor.  This column is such a straight-talking doozie that I'm going to indulge myself a long quote from it.  

In 2022, Arkansas voters elected a young political operative named Sarah Sanders governor. Sanders had achieved minor fame in the MAGA movement for serving as Donald Trump's press secretary and lying to the media on Trump's behalf. She raised money from MAGA cultists across the country... 

Though she remained far more interested in Washington politics than Arkansas public policy, Sanders took office in January 2023. Indebted to her out-of-state funders, she needed to produce what they would consider "wins." One such win would be a statewide school voucher program under which taxpayers would foot part of the bill for children attending private schools.

The bill was based on a template from out-of-state organizations. There was little input from teachers and administrators in Arkansas.

Until this year, bills promoting vouchers in Texas consistently were defeated by a coalition of urban Democrats and rural Republicans. Rural Republicans realized such a scheme would be devastating for their public school districts.

Sanders faced no such problem in a state where GOP legislators are scared of their own shadows. They fear those out-of-state MAGA adherents will fund primary opponents. They asked no questions and went along with the voucher plan, often against the advice of superintendents and teachers back home.

I waited two years before writing about the voucher scheme. I don't like knee-jerk reactions to calls for school reform. I've been a strong supporter of public charter schools. But after two years, the picture is becoming clear. A statewide voucher system doesn't improve outcomes in a poor rural state such as Arkansas. In fact, it's nothing short of a debacle.  (emphasis added)

It's also unconstitutional under the reasoning of the Lake View ruling. The state must give the same support to that child in Lake View as a child in Bentonville. In much of Arkansas, there are no close private schools that offer a good education.

A few days after this column appeared, the Democrat-Gazette published a story headlined, "Arkansas sees more than 33,000 students applying for next school year’s vouchers."  The lengthy story by Lena Miano leads with this further background and data breakdown: 

Created through the LEARNS Act of 2023, the Education Freedom Account program provides state funding for private and home school costs and was gradually rolled out over three years, with next fall marking the first time vouchers are available to all school-age children in the state.

The window, which opened on March 3 and closed Sunday, saw 23,357 students selecting private schools while the remaining 10,393 applicants indicated homeschooling as their choice for next school year,

The story uses the word "rural" only once, in this quote from Representative Jim Wooten of Beebe, who has proposed a bill requiring that private schools participating in the voucher program must comply with the same state laws and Arkansas Department of Education reporting requirements as public schools.  He states that he does not oppose private schools, but that "the voucher program is 'damaging, hurtful and harmful to public education,' particularly in smaller, rural parts of the state."

Then, on March 30, 2025, Nelson published, "Welfare for the rich," from which I drew this excerpt.  As you'll see Nelson ultimately returns to the matter with which he led in the prior week's column--the matter of rural decline: 

As one longtime educator told me: "You can pretty well paint the word 'Christian' on the side of a barn, call it a school and start collecting state money. It's troubling."

An Arkansas historian I know was even more frank, calling the voucher program "the greatest grift in the history of Arkansas, and that's saying something given the history of this state."

Rural Arkansans don't have the opportunity that my wife and I had because we happened to live in Arkansas' largest city. Either there are no private schools close, or the ones that are close don't shine academically.

That reminds me of this bit from the Miano story above, out of Ash Flat, Arkansas, population 1,109.  There, the voucher program has allowed The Underwood Branch Homeschool Cooperative "to provide personalized, special education services to dozens of homeschooled students this year."  I guess this is what the New York Times calls a "microschool" in its coverage, quoted above.  The Miano story in the Democrat-Gazette continues:  

The state's program has "really impacted us, just being able to let families afford to be able to do what we're doing -- and then also on the business end, we are able to provide it because without it, there's just no way that we could do it," [the founder] said, adding that the voucher program has gone toward building costs, tuition, therapy services and more her team offers.

The Ash Flat cooperative, which welcomed its first students this fall, now serves 45 students--35 of which are voucher program participants -- and has 90 K-12 grade students on a waitlist.

Tuition is $10,000 per year, with the vouchers covering just over $6,800 of that and financial aid options provided by the cooperative offered for families who can't afford to pay the remaining costs, Horton said.

The cooperative team expects to move from its current, temporary church building to its own permanent facility this May. The new building, made possible by a loan and increased enrollment, will house three classrooms, a main area, full kitchen and storage spaces along with a porch, playground, mud kitchen, nature trails and a myriad of animals -- horses, goats, sheep, chickens and pigs -- to meet students' outdoor needs.

Whether this Ash Flat institution is tantamount to a barn with "Christian" painted on the side, I cannot say, but it is interesting to have some details about how the voucher funds are being used in one rural community.  

Nelson's column continues: 

Funding the voucher scheme will cost the state more and more in the years ahead. That will come at the expense of public school funding. As one who travels through and writes about rural Arkansas, I worry. Rural schools won't have the funds they need to operate. Parents will move elsewhere. Enrollment numbers will fall to the point that those schools cease to exist. Once schools die, the communities around them will die.

Nelson notes that these concerns to preserve rural schools and communities are what have led Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska to reject similar schemes.   

With rural Texas lawmakers failing to hold the line against vouchers after a years-long struggle, this is an issue rural education advocates will surely continue to watch closely.  With Arkansas a few years ahead of its behemoth sister state to the southwest on the voucher path, the consequences of these programs on rural schools may be revealed in Arkansas before they are known in the Lone Star State. 

Postscript:  On April 24, 2025, the Arkansas Times published this commentary on the Arkansas voucher scheme.  Benjamin Hardy writes under the headline, "Texas joins Arkansas in the great Republican school voucher experiment."  He leads with news that the Texas Senate has now joined that state's lower chamber in support of the program: 

After years of resisting Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s plans to create a universal school voucher program like those in Arkansas and other red states, rural Republican legislators in the Lone Star State finally caved.

On Thursday, the Texas Senate gave final passage to a bill that will devote $1 billion over the next two years to set up “education savings accounts” to pay for private school tuition and other expenses beginning in the 2026-27 school year.

Hardy also provides additional information about the implementation and cost of the program, in both Arkansas and Texas:  

Arkansas gradually phased its program in, perhaps so as to soften the gigantic blow to the state budget. LEARNS vouchers were available only to certain groups of students in the first two years.

In Year 3, the upcoming 2025-26 school year, the vouchers will be available to all students in Arkansas — and will cost the state a whopping $277 million. On a per capita basis, that’s way more than the $1 billion the Texas program is supposed to cost over the first biennium. But the price tag in Texas will certainly balloon: A fiscal statement estimated vouchers will cost the state $3.8 billion on net by 2030.

It's going to be interesting to see how these states' budgets will absorb these costs in coming years.  It will also be interesting to see the impact the schemes will have on rural schools' budgets--especially in an era when many expect Title I funding to dwindle under the Trump administration.   

Country music isn’t for everyone, but maybe it can be

I’ve always been hesitant to say I like country music. It’s an unexpected character trait for someone like me who was born and raised in San Francisco, but I grew up listening to artists like Johnny Cash, Brooks & Dunn, and Garth Brooks. Admittedly, I’ve attended about a dozen country concerts, despite the slightly judgmental comments from my country-averse friends. So, when Beyoncé and Post Malone came out with country albums this past year, it surprised me when these albums suddenly peaked my friends’ interests in country music. 

Perhaps I wouldn’t listen to country music if I hadn’t been listening to it my whole life because I can’t always relate to common motifs in country music. After all, although I enjoy singing about dirt roads in the car, I will say that I usually stick to city streets. I also don’t always agree with the political views of some country singers, and often need to separate the music from the singer. Even though I’ve loved country music my whole life, I must admit that I haven’t always felt completely safe when attending country concerts.  

This new era in country music’s popularity made me think about the importance of representation in music. Although country music has evolved over time, as highlighted by this blog post from February 2023, I’ve never seen a country artist who looks like me. In 2021, a study found that only 4% of the commercial country music industry identify as BIPOC. Beyoncé’s new country album, Cowboy Carter, reminded me of how exciting it can be to hear country music that wasn’t made by a straight, white man.

Modern country music, or what some might consider “pop country,” has made country music accessible, or more digestible, for people who historically despised country music. Pop country has also opened the door for more people to be represented through country music. As someone who appreciates both classic and pop country music, I am happy that more people are embracing and feel included by this new take on country music. For example, a 2024 article by Ebony Wiggins from The Tennessean highlighted how Beyoncé’s album had an emotional impact on her, stating: 

She’s made people like me, a Black woman, come full circle by including me in something I once felt excluded from. She’s not only opened the door, but she completely knocked it down for Black people to enter unabashed.

Wiggins recounts how Beyoncé’s album “turned [her], a non-country music supporter, into not only a fan of country music, but a fan of Beyoncé’s form of country music.” 

Unfortunately, Beyoncé’s album has not been without its critics. Candice Norwood noted in her article entitled, “With ‘Cowboy Carter,’ Black country music fans are front row and center, at last,” that an online commenter stated, “[Beyoncé] is on a mission to take country music away from us, hardworking white people!” Norwood recounted: 

This moment in music history, while high profile, is not surprising—particularly for Black fans who have been navigating this dynamic for years. Though country music is an art form developed from the sounds of Black musicians, the commercial country music industry was explicitly created to court rural, White listeners in the 1920s. 

Norwood’s article also highlights the struggle that Black country artists have experienced due to criticisms that their music does not “represent ‘authentic’ country music” because they “mix country elements with blues, soul, or hip-hop.” 

The changing demographics of country music and its fans were also highlighted in an article by Alexander Gelfand of the Berklee School of Music, who wrote: 

Much of the current demand is coming from Millennial and Gen Z listeners; and there are signs that the country music industry, which has historically sidelined women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community, is becoming more inclusive. 

Gelfland noted Beyoncé’s becoming the first Black female artist to top Billboard’s country album chart as well as Nigerian American artist Shaboozey making history by topping the country, pop, and rhythmic radio charts. Country artists like Luke Combs have also used country music to make a statement about the racial divides in the United States by covering Tracy Chapman’s song, “Fast Car.” 

The rise in inclusivity within the country music genre may represent a shift in how we think about country music. By holding space for artists who have unfortunately been kept out of the country music spotlight, the country music community has the opportunity to expand and diversify its audience. And, perhaps if we all listen to the same music, maybe that will make it easier to have difficult conversations with one another when it comes to politics. On a different note, I am definitely excited to have more friends who would be willing to attend country concerts with me.