After years working as an activist in national politics, the forty-four-year-old Robinson wanted a change of scenery and a change of life. He moved from Washington back to Enfield, North Carolina, the small rural city of roughly 2,200 residents where he grew up, to run for mayor. Doing so was a gamble on himself: He was trusting that the same political ideals and calls for activism he had preached for years in his nonprofit work as an electoral mobilizer would help him win.
But Robinson does not fit the traditional image of the small-town, rural southern mayoral candidate that likely comes to mind. He is African American. And Enfield, the state’s poorest city and the nation’s eighth poorest,[1] is majority Black and located in Halifax County, a majority-Black rural county in North Carolina’s Albemarle region.
Founder of the Black Male Voter Project, Robinson spent years identifying, registering, and mobilizing apathetic and politically ignored Black men across the United States. He taught community leaders, progressive organizations, and Democratic Party officials how to do the same. In Enfield, he put his theories to the test. He and his campaign volunteers went door-to-door, repeatedly explaining his platform and making sure his supporters registered and voted. He coordinated his campaign’s efforts with the team from the Rural Democracy Initiative.[2]
On May 17, 2022, Mondale Robinson was elected Enfield’s new mayor, capturing 76 percent of the vote. And he did so by promoting a progressive agenda of self-empowerment on issues including livable wages, universal healthcare, and racial equity. “We reminded people that they weren’t subjects of elected officials, but instead bosses of them, and they responded demanding more, showing up to city meetings in record numbers and speaking about their needs—not what the well-connected and well-monied interests in town wanted,” Mondale told us. “This warmed my soul and it also saw us outperform every election on the ballot, from senate candidates to the bottom of the ticket.”[3]
The challenges facing leaders like Robinson who represent rural minorities are ample and profound. Unfortunately, despite all the attention paid in recent years to the “economic anxieties” of rural White voters, the national media have mostly ignored the concerns and worries of rural African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans. This appalling neglect is ironic because rural minorities often endure far greater economic hardships than do their rural White neighbors. We are not particularly surprised by this neglect: After all, rural folks living in the nation’s small towns and counties are not part of what we call America’s “essential minority.”
It’s easy to blame racism for the lack of attention paid to the long list of concerns and grievances felt by rural minorities. Surely, race contributes to their status as rural America’s mostly ignored and invisible subpopulation. But the deeper reasons have to do with ideology and partisanship: Rural non-Whites are easily dismissed not only by Republican politicians and conservative media but even in the mainstream media, because their votes rarely determine local or statewide elections.
Race and rurality in the United States intertwine in strange ways. At 76 percent, White residents constitute a clear majority of rural citizens. One-third of rural counties is more than 90 percent White, and another third is between 75 percent and 90 percent White.[4] Rural America remains the Whitest part of the country.
But the 24 percent minority share of the rural U.S. population is growing. In fact, the non-White rural population grew by 3.5 percent nationally between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, a significant increase given otherwise stagnant or shrinking rural populations. Most majority-minority counties in the United States are rural, including the vast majority of the more than one hundred majority-Black counties, another sixty-seven majority-Latino counties, plus twenty-nine majority–Native American counties. But in the vast majority of rural counties, racial minorities are numerical minorities.
African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans nevertheless play a vital, growing role in these communities. Two-thirds of rural counties contain at least 10 percent racial minorities, and half those counties contain at least 25 percent. Rural Latino population growth is especially notable: In the four states with the largest Latino populations—Arizona, California, Florida, and Texas—the Latino growth rate in rural counties since 2000 has exceeded statewide averages.[5]
Meanwhile, in a few corners of the United States—Appalachia, New England, and pockets of the Mountain West and Pacific Coast states—rural minorities are so few that they are effectively invisible. In these places, non-White residents often feel outnumbered and misplaced, a phenomenon Dartmouth University sociologist Emily Walton calls “misrecognition.” Wrongly presumed to be outsiders and routinely asked where they’re from, they feel subtly and not so subtly marginalized. “While some might read these interactions as a case of people being rude or thoughtless, there’s something deeply problematic about the systematic pattern of being asked to prove oneself,” Walton writes. “As a consequence of misrecognition, most of the people of color I interviewed think about their small, rural New England town as a temporary destination—a place to survive, not a place to thrive.”[6]
In places where minorities are more numerous and integrated, their lifestyles tend to reflect the broader rural experience. Rookie U.S. representative Don Davis’s North Carolina district includes large swaths of rural communities in the northeast corner of his state. Like any politician, Davis is eager to talk about all the efforts he’s making to bring economic development to his Albemarle region constituents. But the struggles of his constituents are evident, too—especially keeping young, rural African Americans from abandoning the towns where they were raised. He told us that he has talked to students, on “graduation day of all times,” and had some of them “look you in the eye and say, ‘I can’t wait to leave.’ And not stop there—and this is the most painful part—and then say, ‘I’m not coming back.’ ” It reflects “a loss of hope that ‘I cannot get a good paying job, raise my family, and live happy, peaceful, in this area.’ ”[7]
The rising diversification of rural America in recent decades has delivered economic benefits and new blood to many small towns and counties. Most notably, the labor contributions and consumer impacts of new, non-White residents—and immigrant populations especially—have invigorated many rural communities that had been in decline. Poultry farms in rural northern Alabama were saved by Latino laborers. In Central New York, the city of Utica blossomed after welcoming Vietnamese, Burmese, and other political refugees. After rural Iowans in Greene County lost a garbage truck manufacturing plant to Mississippi for lack of a sufficient labor pool, local leaders created a “New Vida” diversity program to lure Latino immigrants to the county, which had lost half its population since its post–World War II peak.[8] “Racial and ethnic minorities can provide a demographic and economic lifeline to struggling communities,” explain Kenneth Johnson and Daniel Lichter of the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy. “Decades of young adult outmigration have left many rural communities with a dwindling labor force. Migrants from other areas, many from minority populations, expand the local labor force, which enhances opportunities for economic development and an expanded tax base.”[9]
Although many Americans view immigrants as job-stealing interlopers, some rural Whites have begun to recognize the value of increased diversity. As a red-state liberal, Oklahoma journalist Mary Logan Wolf watched as Luther, her rural hometown of 6,500 people, declined. It “could barely sustain” its few chain restaurants—until newly arrived immigrants helped save those franchises and opened three new Mexican restaurants. Wolf believes that White Oklahomans recognize the benefits these new arrivals offer. “The immigrant labor supports the region’s massive corporate hog farms, and for that reason the influx is tolerated,” she admits. “No one hollers about job theft because precious few white folks are motivated to spend the day slaughtering pigs.”[10]
The rise of rural minorities also affords heartland citizens opportunities to embrace diversity. “Growing racial and ethnic diversity also provides new opportunities for a more inclusive society,” write Johnson and Lichter. “This is the case in rural areas, especially those experiencing chronic declines, population aging, and more deaths than births. For children, growing racial and ethnic diversity also provides new opportunities for positive interracial contact and improved race relations, for building diverse friendship networks, and for preparing them for life in an increasingly diverse nation.”[11] Slowly but surely, the growth and assimilation of rural minorities are making the American heartland look a bit more like the rest of the nation.
Fast-growing Latino populations have mitigated what otherwise would have been far starker population losses, particularly but not exclusively in Sun Belt counties. “Hispanic population growth has checked long-term population decline in many rural counties, especially in Midwestern and Great Plains States where natural decrease and outmigration by young native-born adults have been reducing population in some areas since the 1950s or earlier,” a 2005 report by the USDA’s Economic Research Service correctly foretold. “All else being equal, over 100 nonmetro counties would have lost population between 1990 and 2000 if not for growth in the Hispanic population.”[12]
Of course, the experiences of rural Whites and non-Whites differ in important ways. The Washington Post’s Jose A. DelReal and Scott Clement explain the divisions between rural Whites and minorities in this way: “The sense of shared identity that connects many rural Americans—which factors into rural America’s sense of fairness and estrangement—is less intense among rural minorities than among rural whites.” Although 78 percent of rural Whites believe other rural citizens share their values, only 64 percent of Latinos and 55 percent of African American residents in rural communities agree.[13] Polling gaps like these suggest that rural Whites and non-Whites are not fully connecting with each other.
The sad truth is that the media too often treat racial minorities as negligible if not invisible members of the U.S. rural experience. Few polls of rural Americans bother to disaggregate the differences between White and non-White rural respondents. “Narratives that erase the 24% of rural Americans who are people of color—as well as the many rural counties that are majority people of color—devalue the needs of rural people of color who face systemic barriers to opportunity…while giving rhetorical priority to the concerns of an imagined white monolith,” warn D. W. Rowlands and Hanna Love of the Brookings Institution.[14]
Since Donald Trump’s rise, the national media have devoted tremendous attention to the political grievances of rural White voters. Reporters and pundits routinely descend upon rural communities, sit down with locals at diners and sports bleachers, and listen earnestly to what downscale rural White voters have to say, but the same national media hardly notice that rural minorities exist or are aware that they have legitimate complaints of their own. The next time you see a reporter from a national newspaper or television network plop down at a local diner to interview a dozen rural African Americans, Native Americans, or Latinos about their fears and aspirations, it may actually be the first time.
Two months after Trump’s inauguration, Bates University rural education expert Mara Casey Tieken issued a rare clarion call for the politicians, policymakers, and media suddenly so focused on rural Americans not to present an incomplete portrait of the heartland:
[Non-White] rural America receives even lower pay and fewer protections for its labor than does rural white America. And, as my own research shows, this rural America attends very different schools than rural white America, schools that receive far less funding and other resources.
In fact, the relationship between rural white communities and rural communities of color is much like the relationship between urban white communities and urban communities of color: separate and unequal.[15]
Small towns and counties in the American heartland are not as heterogeneous as U.S. cities and suburbs, but they are diversifying. Under slavery, segregation, or enduring forms of systemic racism, the lives and livelihoods of rural minorities have always differed from those of rural Whites. To address rural problems in a meaningful and inclusive way, politicians, policymakers, and the media must recognize rural diversity and the unique experiences of rural minorities.
Like their White counterparts, minorities who live in the American heartland are struggling. But their economic hardships are severer and more persistent than those of rural Whites. With the exception of gun suicides and drug overdoses, on most every metric, rural minorities face more vexing economic and healthcare problems than their White neighbors.
Let’s start with unemployment. The years following the 2007 economic crisis and subsequent Great Recession devastated rural communities. But unemployment patterns in urban and rural communities following the economic crisis moved in opposite directions depending on race. In urban areas, White unemployment rates remained lower, but by 2019, the gap between Whites and non-Whites had narrowed. In rural areas, the reverse was true: Post-recession unemployment gaps between rural Whites and non-Whites widened.[16] More recently, unemployment between 2019 and 2021 surged among all rural groups during the peak Covid-19 year of 2020 and then settled back down to pre-Covid levels. But in all three years, rural White unemployment was roughly one point lower than for rural Latinos and five points lower than for rural African Americans.[17]
Poverty is deeper and wider for rural minorities, too. Rural poverty disparities between Whites and non-Whites persist: The White poverty rate in 2019 (12.7 percent) was substantially lower than for African Americans (30.7 percent), Native Americans (29.6 percent), or Latinos (21.7 percent).[18] The share of rural White babies born into poverty is twenty points lower than for Latinos and a whopping 33 points lower than for African Americans.[19]
Enduring poverty is also more common in rural communities where high concentrations of non-White citizens live.[20] So-called persistently poor counties are “geographically concentrated and disproportionately located in regions with above-average populations of racial minorities, including the Mississippi Delta,” explains Robin Davey Wolff, an advocate at Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit group that promotes affordable housing alternatives for disadvantaged communities. “Historically, rural communities of color that struggle with poverty receive less help and recognition, and as a result, many in rural areas suffer silently and alone.”[21]
Rates vary among non-White rural residents, but poverty is particularly crippling and difficult to escape when people both are individually poor and live in a persistently poor county. This phenomenon is known as “double exposure,” explains Tracey Farrigan of the USDA’s Economic Research Service. “Rural residents who identify as Black or African American and American Indian or Alaska Native were particularly vulnerable to the double exposure phenomenon,” Farrigan writes. “Nearly half the rural poor within these groups resided in high and persistent poverty counties in 2019.”[22]
Race also limits small business development opportunities for rural minorities. The good news is that there has been an uptick in the number of minority-owned small businesses over the past few years.[23] The bad news is that the share of rural African American, Latino, and Native American–owned businesses is far lower than their national population shares.[24] Led by Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine and Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators has twice introduced the Reaching America’s Rural Minority Businesses bill, which would authorize the Department of Commerce to establish small-business training centers at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) designed specifically to stimulate small-business development among rural minorities.[25] Unfortunately, the bill hasn’t come anywhere near a floor vote.
As we learned from Al Gameros, minority leaders in rural communities will try almost anything to boost their local economies. Gameros is the sixty-six-year-old Latino mayor of Globe, a small city of roughly 7,500 people in Arizona’s Copper Corridor that adopted a sophisticated tourism marketing strategy. “We bought a program that tracks who comes here by cell phone,” Gameros told us. That software program recognizes phones as they ping upon entering and leaving a specified perimeter surrounding Globe and then reports the phone traffic data to the city’s marketing team. Thanks to this software, Gameros knows that in recent years, Globe has experienced an uptick among both young and retired out-of-town visitors.
Armed with this information, the city placed ads in the greater Phoenix metro area to target those who live within driving distance of Globe and who fit the likely tourist profile. “We rebranded our city with new marketing. We really want to be a tourist attraction and destination [that] people want to visit,” Gameros boasted. “We’ve got bikes, we’ve got trail hiking, we’ve got UTV [utility terrain vehicle] rides. We have Besh Ba Gowah Indian ruins, and we have a winery now. So, that attracts a lot of people.”[26] Globe isn’t exactly booming, but its economy is far healthier than that of many of the surrounding towns in the Copper Corridor. And across the country, rural minorities face acute housing, education, and healthcare crises.
Home ownership rates in rural America far exceed national averages, and nearly half of rural homeowners own their homes “free and clear” of any mortgage. But that’s largely because homes in rural areas are much cheaper than in suburbs or cities. Given higher rates of mobile home ownership, rural home values are lower than national averages. In fact, 38 percent of rural homes are worth one hundred thousand dollars or less, which means these homeowners typically have little equity at their disposal. Although rural minorities are more likely to own a home than urban minorities, there remains a twenty-point gap in home ownership rates between rural Whites, at 75 percent, and rural minorities, at 55 percent.[27]
Millions of rural minorities lack either the capital to afford a down payment or the creditworthiness to qualify for mortgages—or both. For those unable to buy a home, quality and affordable apartment rental units are sparse. “Rural minorities are more likely to live in substandard and cost-burdened housing, and are more likely to be poor,” concludes a 2012 study conducted by the Washington, D.C.–based Housing Assistance Council. “The geographic isolation and relative segregation of rural minorities living in majority-minority census tracts continues to be an important component of poverty and substandard housing in many rural and small town communities.”[28]
Education patterns are equally dispiriting for rural minorities. Although rural Whites graduate high school at rates higher than the national average, the 77 percent graduation rate for rural minorities falls below the national rate and is ten points lower than for their rural White classmates. The abysmal graduation rate for Native Alaskans is less than half the national average.[29] Whatever their racial background, rural high school graduates are less likely to go to college than their urban and suburban counterparts.[30]
According to a study by Penn State’s Center for Education and Civil Rights, rural school districts with high shares of minorities are also more likely to still be segregated. Such districts often endure the departure of White families and a declining property tax base, both of which create fiscal challenges for the impoverished families of minority students in these school districts. “Exposure to poverty in rural America’s public schools is more pronounced among minoritized students than white students,” the report concludes. “These patterns illustrate how segregation by race often also means segregation by income as well.”[31] White flight is still very real, even if it happens now within rural areas.
Rural Whites and non-Whites also experience divergent health outcomes, healthcare access, and coverage affordability. According to the Rural Health Information Hub (RHIB), rural non-Whites report higher rates of “fair or poor health” than their White neighbors. Though rates for specific maladies vary among African American, Latino, and Native American subgroups, rural non-Whites battle a variety of chronic health and mental health challenges—which isn’t particularly surprising, given the limited resources available to them. Indeed, RHIB identifies the two factors that most contribute to racial differences in health problems as “inadequate access to care and the provision of substandard quality healthcare services.” Although federal programs track these disparities and provide resources to mitigate them, racial health gaps across the rural United States endure.[32]
Premature deaths among rural seniors also differ by race. Rural residents are more likely to suffer from premature deaths, and the rate of mortality among rural seniors in the past half century did not fall as fast as it did in urban counties. But premature death rates are highest, and mortality declines slowest, among non-White rural seniors.[33]
A zip code–based analysis conducted by the Rural and Minority Health Research Center (RMHRC) found that rural areas with higher concentrations of minority residents tend to be farther removed from a Federally Qualified Health Center or a Rural Health Clinic and from “emergency rooms, pharmacies, trauma care, cardiac care, intensive care, substance abuse disorder treatment, and obstetrics” facilities. The study also found that distance from healthcare facilities can be particularly punitive for Native American populations. “If you are further away from that access, or further away from those services, then you are less likely to take advantage of them,” says Janice Probst, lead author of the RMHRC’s study.[34]
Public health experts Stacy Grundy and Beth Prusaczyk describe how the intersection of their scholarly and personal experiences illuminates rural healthcare disparities. Although they grew up in the same rural area, Grundy is Black and Prusaczyk is White. The two women noticed the glaring differences in hospital quality and access between Whites and minorities, African Americans especially. The media have reported at length on rural hospital closures, but Grundy and Prusaczyk discovered that “of the 12 existing federal policies aimed at supporting rural hospitals and preventing additional closures…none are intentional in (or even nominally identify) their efforts to prevent closures specifically among rural non-White communities.”[35]
National studies confirm Grundy and Prusaczyk’s observations. Between 2005 and 2015, the 105 rural hospitals that closed were more likely to have served predominantly African American and Latino populations.[36] The effects of limited or long-distance access to healthcare is not merely a matter of inconvenience to rural minorities, mind you: It can be a matter of life and death. Limited healthcare access makes rural African Americans and Native Americans more likely to develop cancer and experience negative outcomes in cancer treatment and less likely to survive a cancer diagnosis.[37]
Then there is the matter of affordability. A 2023 national study of nearly five thousand rural adults confirmed this unsurprising fact: The rural folks who most need medical care tend to be least likely to afford it. Consequently, budget-strained sick people in rural communities are more likely than their urban counterparts to forgo needed care. Researchers discovered that affordability also has racial implications: Because they are poorer on average than Whites, rural minorities “were more likely to delay or go without medical care due to cost” than rural Whites.[38]
There is a final, asymmetrical challenge rural minorities face: racism itself. There’s no reason to suspect that rural White citizens who score high on what pollsters call “hostile racism” indicators somehow reserve these sentiments for outsiders. When rural schools in minority areas are most likely to be segregated, when rural hospitals that serve mostly minority patients are more likely to close, and when rural poverty is more persistent in minority areas, it is hard not to see implicit or even explicit racism at work in the heartland.
Rural Americans are battling a variety of interconnected economic and health problems. Their struggles are exacerbated by insufficient, dwindling, and hard-to-reach economic and medical resources. Sadly, on almost every measure of economic or healthcare vitality, the challenges for rural minorities are more pervasive and more punitive. Whether anyone has noticed or cares, rural minorities are “anxious,” too—and they must deal with that anxiety while living in the Whitest parts of the United States.
According to the 2020 Census, there are more than one hundred majority-Black counties in the United States. Most are medium-to-small rural counties in the Deep South, almost half of which are in Georgia and Mississippi. Dozens more are crowded along both banks of the Lower Mississippi River Valley in Arkansas and Louisiana.[39]
Clustered near the Virginia border where Interstate 95 slices through North Carolina are seven majority-Black rural counties: Bertie, Edgecombe, Halifax, Hertford, Northampton, Vance, and Warren.[40] With about 55,000 residents, Halifax is the most populous, but four of the six other counties each contains roughly 20,000 residents. Like many majority-Black counties nationally, all seven lost population between 2010 and 2020.
These counties depart from the common perception that African Americans live almost exclusively in dense urban communities. The counties are small and sparsely populated. Although residents are to some degree racially self-sorted, rural Whites and African Americans in all seven counties often live in commingled neighborhoods. It wasn’t always this way, of course: Trailing only the Cape Fear area, the Albemarle region was once home to the state’s second-highest share of enslaved residents by population.[41]
Among the four majority-Black Albemarle counties we visited, Northampton is particularly fascinating. Named by English colonists for the Fifth Earl of Northampton, the county, with 22,000 current residents, ranks eighty-third in total population and eighty-ninth in population density among North Carolina’s one hundred counties. Each of Northampton’s two largest towns, Garysburg and Gaston, is home to only about a thousand people. Jackson, the county seat, is half that size. There is plenty of room and ample parking in Northampton County.
The county’s racial history is clouded by dark moments. During the first half of the nineteenth century, somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of Northampton County’s White families owned slaves.[42] The county seat, Jackson, is named for one of the most notoriously racist presidents in U.S. history. The county courthouse is flanked on its western edge by Thomas Bragg Drive, named for a local politician who served as the attorney general of the Confederacy. In this majority-Black county, the stain of racism lingers.
In 1959, Northampton’s election board was at the center of an ugly episode in U.S. voting rights history. An African American woman named Louise Lassiter refused to abide results from the county’s voter registration literacy test. Lassiter was literate, but because an election board examiner ruled that she had mispronounced a few words from a section of the state constitution, she was barred from registering.[43] Lassiter immediately appealed the decision in state and federal court.
The U.S. Supreme Court took Lassiter’s case. Just six years prior to passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Court ruled unanimously in Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections that literacy tests were constitutional so long as they were administered uniformly to all voters, regardless of race, so as not to serve as “merely a device to make racial discrimination easy.”[44] But White examiners were empowered to decide who was and was not “literate.” And even if the tests had been administered in a race-blind manner, they inherently discriminated against African Americans educated for generations in dilapidated, underfunded classrooms. Obviously, to make “racial discrimination easy” is precisely why the tests were created in the first place.
The Supreme Court’s failure to recognize literacy tests’ true purpose is stunning. More stunning is that Chief Justice Earl Warren and noted liberals Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and Felix Frankfurter all concurred in Lassiter’s 9–0 decision. Just five years earlier, all four justices had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools were unequal and thus unconstitutional. The effect of the Court’s puzzling decision was clear: African American voters in Northampton and other counties throughout North Carolina and the rest of the South would have to wait at least six more years to begin experiencing anything close to equal voting rights.
Electoral politics in Albemarle’s majority-Black counties remain racialized today. In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden carried all seven jurisdictions with between 59 and 67 percent of the vote. Voters split along predictably racial lines, and Northampton was no exception. “If it wasn’t before, Northampton is now an inelastic county—whites by and large vote Republican, blacks vote Democrat,” wrote John Wynne of the news site Politics North Carolina. “In 2012, it trended to the Democrats more than any county in the state…probably thanks to the county’s large black population.” In fact, Northampton owns a unique partisan distinction: It is the only county in the state to vote for every Democratic presidential nominee—even landslide losers George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984—over the past 120 years.[45]
Farming has long served as the economic foundation for Albemarle’s Black residents. Cotton, peanuts, lumber, soy, and tobacco are among its key agricultural commodities. But the story of Black farming in the Albemarle region and across the United States mirrors the broader story of rural agricultural decline—only worse.
Peaking in 1920, when there were nearly one million Black-owned farms in the United States, Black farmland ownership has fallen in each subsequent decade, plummeting from 7 percent of farmland a century ago to less than 1 percent now. The declining fortunes of Black farmers resulted partly from the out-migration of African Americans who abandoned agriculture-based rural southern economies in favor of urban manufacturing jobs in northern cities. But there is also a well-documented history of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s discriminating against Black farms and farmers. “For black farmers, the effect of discrimination by the USDA has been particularly devastating,” Abril Castro and Caius Z. Willingham wrote in a 2019 Center for American Progress report on the history of Black farming. “All told, black farmers lost 80 percent of their land from 1910 to 2007. As the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded in a 1982 report, this pattern of discrimination virtually eliminated black farms, dealing a serious blow to rural black communities.”[46]
Today, Black farmers seem to be heading for extinction. They account for only 2 percent of all farmers, own a mere 0.5 percent of all farmland, and produce just 0.2 percent of U.S. agricultural sales. “Overall, African-American farmers have been devastated economically, politically, and socially, and as such, [they] are more likely to commit suicide, become depressed, and live in poverty compared to white farmers,” rural scholars Andrew Laurence Carter and Adam Alexander write. “These dire circumstances have all but eliminated African-Americans from the contemporary agricultural landscape.”[47]
U.S. senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia is pushing for federal restitution to Black farmers discriminated against by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for decades. With fellow senators Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, Warnock advocates for compensation based on the 1982 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report that chronicled the USDA’s discriminatory actions. In 2021, Warnock and his colleagues sponsored the Justice for Black Farmers Act.[48] It remains unpassed. And when Congress included four billion dollars in debt relief for minority farmers in the 2021 American Rescue Plan, Republican officials and White farmers immediately sued to stop the program, leaving it in a court-imposed limbo. Two years later, the Inflation Reduction Act replaced the program with one providing aid to “economically distressed” farmers, which led to fears that most of the recipients of the aid would be White.[49]
A fourth-generation farmer in Warren County, forty-one-year-old Patrick Brown learned how to gather and hang-dry tobacco in the barn by age nine. His mother was a teacher and principal who passed away in 2020. His father, the Reverend Dr. Arthur Brown, grew tobacco on the family farm by day and led six congregations across Virginia and North Carolina on nights and weekends; he died in 2023.
Patrick’s early career took him away from the farming tradition that began with his great-grandfather, who was born into slavery. After completing college, Patrick worked for nearly a decade at the Defense Intelligence Agency, where his agricultural skills were put to use spearheading a federal program designed to help Afghan farmers offset with alternative crops the poppy plants they had customarily harvested for heroin production.
After returning home, Brown realized he had to get creative to keep afloat the family farm he had inherited. Instead of tobacco, his farm now grows hemp, a niche commodity that qualifies for a carbon credit and yields a higher profit margin. Brown’s “Hempfinity” brand of CBD and related products is growing. He has also converted a portion of the family’s land once farmed by slaves into a tourist attraction.[50]
Brown explained to us how programmatic racism contributed to the near-total extinction of modern Black family farmers like him. “A lot of Black farmers are no longer able to farm because they are indebted to farm agencies or the USDA based on discriminatory practices,” he said, citing the federal Pigford case that forms the basis for the efforts led by Senator Warnock to provide restitution to Black farmers. The case alleges that White farmers qualified for and received loan monies from federal programs faster and without having to provide the type of detailed records and tax returns required of Black applicants. Because the loans were collateralized with either farmland or equipment, Black litigants claim their farms were bankrupted by the discriminatory implementation of these loan programs.
But Brown recognizes that small, Black-owned family farms suffer many of the same predations that White-owned family farms do. Notably, family farmers have been victimized by the alliance of Big Ag, the federal government, and lending institutions that favor large, corporate-owned farms. “We are monopolized to only deal with [the] Farm Bureau for insurance,” says Brown, because the Bureau is uniquely suited to settle insurance claims resulting from, say, low crop yields caused by adverse weather. As frustrating as that reliance is, Brown says the alternatives are worse. “Carolina Farm Credit? My dad used to deal with them, and I won’t step my foot in their office because the structure of their loans is based on waiting for you not to pay it back so they can take whatever you collateralized to get the loan.”[51]
At this point, even if Warnock could assemble a coalition in Congress to pass his restitution policy, any sums provided would likely be too little, too late to fully restore a rural farming town like Enfield, in majority-Black Halifax County. When we visited, the downtown area had a distinctly ghost town feel to it. Most storefronts were vacant and boarded up. One seafood and one Italian restaurant were open, plus a yoga studio and an “express tax” center. But the Western Auto, Jennie’s Cafe, and even a Super 10 (a discount retailer selling items for ten dollars or less) were shuttered.
Mayor Mondale Robinson has his work cut out for him, but he is neither easily deterred nor maudlin about Enfield’s bygone glories. “There isn’t a building downtown left untouched by the systemic underinvestment in Enfield. More than ninety percent of the businesses are boarded with cheap and unskilled graffiti, trees growing in the middle and busting through the roofs,” he lamented. “And while I’m bothered by this level of dilapidation, I’m not completely broken; nor am I nostalgic about what downtown Enfield was, because a short while ago, my mother was sprayed in those very streets—by fire hoses—for being downtown after the accepted time for Black people to be there.”[52]
Healthcare disparities between rural Blacks and their neighbors are yet another area where the rural experience differs dramatically based on race. African Americans have shorter life expectancies, suffer disproportionately from a variety of chronic illnesses, and experience higher infant mortality rates. Congressman Don Davis, whose district includes the majority-Black Albemarle counties, can rattle off health patterns affecting his constituents without missing a beat. “We see the highest rates of infant mortality amongst African American women. We see high rates of chronic illnesses, stroke, diabetes.”[53]
For rural residents, the fight over Medicaid expansion has been painful, both literally and figuratively. For rural African Americans in North Carolina’s Albemarle region, the consequences have sometimes even been lethal. Political resistance to expanding Medicaid in the Tar Heel State had been strong. When we reported from there during the latter stages of the state’s debate over expansion, the rural Democrats we spoke to could barely contain their frustration. “We need it. We need it. We need it,” said Northampton County commissioner Geneva Riddick-Faulkner, who explained that her poor, rural, majority-Black county lacked not only a hospital but even an urgent care center. Many of her constituents weren’t eligible for the state’s existing Medicaid program, but they also couldn’t afford the insurance their employers offered. Riddick-Faulkner spoke of people who needed insulin and couldn’t afford it, which left them to use their relatives’ supply or buy it on the black market.[54]
The legislators who dealt with the issue in the state capital of Raleigh told us their Republican counterparts knew perfectly well the benefits it would bring. Rep. Shelly Willingham, an African American legislator who represents Bertie and Edgecombe counties, said that when he talked about the issue privately with Republicans, “they’ll tell you they accept the fact that it’s needed.” But they “didn’t want to give the impression that they’re helping to support this socialized medicine stuff”—not because their own constituents wouldn’t benefit as much as Willingham’s but because they fear a primary challenge from the right.[55]
The Republican resisters asked what would happen if the state took billions of dollars from the federal government to give people insurance and then, one day, the feds stopped sending the money. “Then they say, ‘Well, we don’t want to be giving Medicaid to people who don’t work,” said state senator Kandie Smith. “They will vote against their own family.” But the real root of the resistance that dragged on for so long, Smith told us, was the man who signed the ACA, a law still informally known as Obamacare. “You know what it boils down to? A Black man introduced all this,” she said. “That’s why.”[56]
A number of factors—a couple of key Republicans changing their position, pressure from the business community, and the weight of public opinion that overwhelmingly supported expansion—finally broke through that resistance, and in early 2023 the legislature voted to accept the expansion. But while they waited, hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians went without insurance, rural hospitals were endangered, and thousands of lives were lost. According to one estimate, 350 North Carolinians died every year who would have survived had the Medicaid expansion been accepted immediately.[57] Over a decade of delay, that’s more victims than died in the September 11 attacks.
Educational challenges for rural African Americans are pervasive, too. School districts in rural Black areas are often substandard and starved for vital resources. In fourteen of the nineteen counties in his North Carolina congressional district, Davis said, 100 percent of the school districts are classified as Title I schools by the federal government, which means they’re poor enough to qualify for various forms of assistance.[58]
Where they aren’t getting enough assistance is from the state of North Carolina. In 1994, students from five poor rural counties sued the state, saying that because of inadequate funding and overstretched schools, they were being denied the North Carolina State Constitution’s guarantee of a “sound basic education.” As of this writing, nearly thirty years later, what is referred to as the Leandro case is not resolved, despite the plaintiffs’ winning repeatedly in court and the state being ordered to appropriate money to improve the schools. Each time, the state legislature appealed, resisted, refused to provide the funds, and found new grounds to avoid complying with court orders. In the latest twist, after the GOP took control of the state’s supreme court in the 2022 election, Republicans in the legislature sought to have the case reheard by that court, which their party now controlled, in the hope that the new majority would reverse the prior decision ordering the state to give more aid to those poor districts.[59]
From disparate resources to unvarnished racism, rural African Americans continue to fight many of the same political and social battles their urban counterparts do. But the rural Black experience differs in important ways. The devastation of rural Black family farming has been more calamitous than family farm declines nationally. Rural Black families who did not abandon rural areas for industrial cities during the Great Migration have experienced struggles even worse than those of rural Whites, including an interconnected set of employment, poverty, and healthcare problems.
Latinos are now the largest racial minority in the United States. They are not yet the largest minority group in rural America, but thanks to their rapid immigration and higher birth rates, Latinos very soon will surpass African Americans to become the largest racial minority in the rural United States, too.
Although most Latinos are clustered in large urban areas, 67 of the 101 majority-Latino counties per the 2020 Census are rural. Of these 67 counties we identified, 49 are in Texas alone and 8 of the remaining 18 are in New Mexico. To be fair, Texas’s 254 counties are the most of any state, and many of them feature very small populations. But Latinos accounted for a stunning 95 percent of Texas’s population growth between 2010 and 2020. Although half the Lone Star State’s Latino citizens reside in the state’s five largest counties—Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar, and Travis—a significant chunk of that growth occurred in rural parts of the state.
Because rural Latino population baselines are so much smaller than in urban areas, Latino growth rates in rural counties are much higher. This is especially true outside the Sun Belt, as evident in the surge in Latino county shares across the Rust Belt states in the Northeast and Midwest. In fact, the ten counties with the fastest Latino growth rates since 2010 all have populations under 39,000. Although five of these counties are southern—Charlton County, Georgia; Pickens County, Alabama; plus three parishes in Louisiana—they’re anomalies because these counties contain federal prisons where Latino felons are counted for census purposes. More reflective of broader trends are the other five fastest-growing counties, all of which are in Michigan or the Dakotas. Driven by North Dakota’s oil boom demand for labor, McKenzie County’s Latino population increased elevenfold in the last decade, and Williams County increased ninefold. That’s right: The two fastest-growing Latino counties in the nation are in rural North Dakota.[60]
Rural Whites who fear the steady expansion of Latino populations beyond urban areas into rural communities can direct their ire at the president who signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986: Ronald Reagan. “The amnesty provisions included in the [act] gave Latinos a new freedom to move outside immigrant enclaves, positioning them to take advantage of new opportunities for low-wage jobs in other parts of the country,” conclude rural Latino scholars Rogelio Saenz and Cruz Torres.[61] With the encouragement of corporate recruiters, hundreds of thousands of Latinos have since moved into smaller rural communities where locals often refuse to work in dangerous jobs like food processing, oil and timber extraction, and textile manufacturing. From homes to hummus—if not for skilled and relatively low-paid Latino laborers, especially in the construction and agricultural sectors, the price of almost everything Americans buy would be significantly higher.
Wisconsin’s renowned dairy industry and Alabama’s chicken producers are case studies in how beleaguered rural towns and counties have revitalized thanks to Latino arrivals. “Jobs in the dairy industry are diminishing and many of the jobs that still exist are now worked by Mexicans and Mexican Americans,” writes University of Wisconsin–Green Bay professor Jon Shelton. “Any progressive future must incorporate Latinos in the process of reversing the decline—caused largely by conservative policies—in working people’s standards of living.”[62] Three decades after a poultry processing plant opened in Russellville, Alabama, Latinos are now 40 percent of the city’s nearly 11,000 residents. Their arrival has radically transformed the town. “Russellville has like nine tiendas Latinas [Latino-owned stores], three of which are Guatemalan,” twenty-four-year-old Salvador Blanco told the Los Angeles Times in 2022. “But it’s also the same town that’s 30 minutes south of Florence, which is where I live and you can’t get a Jim Crow statue in front of the courthouse taken down.”[63]
Compared to national averages, rural Latinos are more likely to be of Mexican descent. In addition to stemming what otherwise might be even deeper population losses, the influx of Latinos into rural areas since passage of the 1986 immigration reform law has had another important impact: Their arrival has expanded the rural labor pool and boosted local economies. A report issued by the U.S. Congress’s Joint Economic Committee states, “Higher immigration levels and state-to-state migration of Latino workers is critical to the economy as a way to increase labor force participation rates, especially in newly developing rural areas.”[64]
Despite their positive impact on rural communities, Latinos in the heartland share many of the same struggles that other rural minorities do. According to a Stateline study, nearly half of rural Latino babies, 47 percent, are born into poverty. One in eight rural Latino families receives some form of government assistance, and half of rural Latino families receive food stamps.[65] Sadly—and ironically, given their importance to farm production—rural Latinos are more likely than their urban counterparts to experience food insecurity. “Rural Latino communities often work on the farms that grow the nation’s food, yet their living circumstances and geographic locations create barriers to accessing healthy foods and perpetuate a cycle of food insecurity for them,” concludes a 2023 report by UnidosUS, a Washington, D.C.–based Latino advocacy organization.[66]
In contrast to rural African Americans descended from slaves brought here by force or rural Native Americans whose ancestors arrived long before White settlers did, rural Latinos confront a particular kind of racism associated with being relative newcomers to rural communities. Because of their disadvantaged cultural position, language barriers, and citizenship issues, rural Latinos have historically not demanded workplace protections and equality.
Reflecting on his experience representing rural Latinos in Phoenix, former Arizona state senator Pete Rios told us he witnessed how different the level of political engagement was among rural Latino workers. Those working in unskilled and nonunion jobs, especially in the farm fields, were the least empowered. “A lot of my Latino compadres did not want to get involved in politics,” Rios recalled. “They had a fear—an actual fear—of authority. They would say they didn’t want to get fired because Rancher Smith did not want them to get involved in politics.” And these farmhands, Rios told us, were citizens—not undocumented workers, nor registered with temporary guestworker programs. At the other end of the spectrum were unionized copper mine workers from the Copper Corridor region east of Phoenix. “The one group that I found was raring to go, and most of them were Latinos, were the mine workers,” he said. “All of the Copper Corridor was pretty well unionized and together.” Somewhere in the middle, said Rios, were prison workers, who were unionized but had less power than private-sector mine workers because Arizona law prohibits public-sector union employees like those working in state prisons from striking.[67]
The recency and manner by which many Latinos arrived in the United States sometimes creates legal issues for them when they move into long-isolated, predominantly White rural towns and counties. In her 2017 study of police departments’ racial profiling of Latinos in North Carolina, Carmen Huerta-Bapat found that profiling gaps in routine traffic stops of White and Latino drivers fell steadily statewide, but mostly because of changes in urban police departments supervised by Democratic politicians. In rural, more Republican parts of the Tar Heel State, racialized patterns in profiling persisted, especially in counties “led by popularly elected Republican sheriffs.”[68]
Within a few years, Latinos will surpass African Americans to become the largest rural minority population. As their populations swell and continue to expand into more rural settings, Latinos’ labor and consumer activities are reviving dormant rural communities in need of precisely the sort of infusion that immigrants have long provided to urban and suburban communities across the United States.
No racial group in the United States is more rural than Native Americans. Depending upon how rurality is defined, as many as half of Native Americans live in rural communities,[69] a share far higher than for any other racial or ethnic group. In stark contrast to Latinos and especially African Americans, millions of whom live in major U.S. cities or sprawling suburbs, the Native American population is uniquely rural.
The rurality of Native American populations—except in cases where specificity requires, we use the term Native American rather than American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN)—did not occur by accident, of course. The systematic and racist displacement of Native American peoples onto remote, rural spaces created a painful, discriminatory, and enduring “out of sight, out of mind” effect. “I would say the major challenge is that, to the American public, Indian people are invisible,” laments Michael Bird, a Pueblo Indian from New Mexico and the first Native American president of the American Public Health Association. “They don’t see us, they don’t think about us, and they don’t know the history.”[70] If Bird’s comment seems exaggerated, think again: According to a 2018 report published by Reclaiming Native Truth, a majority of Americans and 62 percent who live outside so-called Indian Country admit that they are completely unacquainted with the 5.2 million Native Americans who are members of the 573 tribes officially recognized by the federal government.[71]
Proximity to tribal communities may make citizens more familiar with Native American populations, but not necessarily more favorable toward them. In fact, views of tribal communities are likely to be harsher among their neighbors. The Reclaiming Native Truth report concludes, “Bias toward Native Americans changes from region to region, with the greatest bias showing among people who live near Indian Country. This may be in part because areas in and around Indian Country tend to be more rural and politically conservative.” Because so many rural Native Americans live on far-removed tribal reservations, invisible is a term frequently used to describe them and their social and political experiences. This invisibility is meant to be metaphorical, but for many Americans—especially in eastern portions of the United States far from the Indian Country of the Plains and Western states—Native Americans are rarely if ever seen in the literal sense, either.
Worse, the default association of contemporary Native Americans with the casino industry reinforces crude, comforting myths that tribal members are getting rich from gambling receipts. In fact, only a small sliver of Native Americans profits from casinos. During his 1993 congressional testimony on the issue of Native American gambling rights, none other than Donald Trump tried to cast himself as a victim of reverse discrimination because Native Americans use their special federal status to build casinos on designated lands. Trump complained that people claiming Native American ancestry “don’t look Indian” to him. And then he told California representative George Miller this: “You’re saying only Indians can have the reservations, only Indians can have the gaming. So why aren’t you approving it for everybody? Why are you being discriminatory? Why is it that the Indians don’t pay tax, but everybody else does? I do.” Not only did Trump demonstrate his ignorance about the citizenship status of Native Americans but, as the nation would later learn, he routinely brags about how “smart” he is for paying little or no taxes.[72]
Setting tribal citizens apart from the U.S. economy and culture for centuries has caused incalculable damage. On almost every economic, health, housing, education, or other measure of vitality and wellness, Native Americans rank at or near the bottom. Given how much rural prosperity is anchored to urban proximity, is it any wonder that Native American citizens—the Americans most set apart from their fellow countrymen—have enjoyed far less economic and health-related progress than other citizens?
Let’s start with economic indicators. According to the Red Road, a nonprofit that promotes Native American empowerment, Native Americans have the highest poverty rate in the nation, the lowest workforce participation rate, and a median household income roughly 30 percent lower than the national average. One-quarter of Native Americans suffers from food insecurity, twice the national rate. Keep in mind, these statistics would be even worse were non-rural tribal populations removed from the calculations.[73]
The housing situation Native Americans face is bleak: Forty percent of Native American homes on reservations are considered substandard, half are unconnected to public sewer systems, and 16 percent of unconnected units have no indoor plumbing. Until thirty years ago, it was illegal to secure home mortgages on reservations. Even today, it remains difficult for aspiring Native American home buyers not otherwise disqualified because of bad credit ratings or a lack of money for a down payment to secure mortgages.[74] In 2021, The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Eisen explained the legal needle that Native Americans must thread to become homeowners. “Traditional mortgages in the U.S. are secured by two valuable pieces of collateral: the home itself and the land on which it sits,” Eisen writes. “But in Indian Country, swaths of land are held in trust, preventing lenders from staking a claim if the homeowner stops paying.”[75] The debilitating effects of the forced relocation of tribal peoples onto reservations is an enduring form of socioeconomic discrimination no other American group has faced.
The healthcare situation for rural tribes is even more dire. Since 1955, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has delivered direct-to-patient healthcare to Native American citizens via the Indian Health Service (IHS). Through care facilities it manages on or adjacent to reservations organized into ten geographic service areas, the IHS serves roughly 2.6 million Native Americans living in the United States.
IHS investments are insufficient to meet the needs of target populations. Consider this staggering fact: IHS spending per recipient on Native American healthcare is less than half what the Federal Bureau of Prisons spends on incarcerated felons. Although Native American patients have access to other resources, including both tribal and public health departments within their communities, Native Americans continue to suffer from the lowest life expectancy of any racial or ethnic group: On average, they die 5.5 years younger than other Americans. Most appalling is the fact that, because these disparities result largely from deaths from preventable diseases, additional state or federal investments in early or preventative care would dramatically reduce the number of premature deaths among Native citizens.[76]
The IHS is fully aware of the reasons for these dramatic and pervasive health disparities. “Lower life expectancy and the disproportionate disease burden exist perhaps because of inadequate education, disproportionate poverty, discrimination in the delivery of health services, and cultural differences. These are broad quality of life issues rooted in economic adversity and poor social conditions,” the IHS website states. “American Indians and Alaska Natives continue to die at higher rates than other Americans in many categories, including [from] chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, diabetes mellitus, unintentional injuries, assault/homicide, intentional self-harm/suicide, and chronic lower respiratory diseases.”[77]
Suicide rates are staggering within Native American communities and roughly 50 percent higher than for White Americans. A variety of factors contributes to Native American suicides, including both economic despair and insufficient mental health resources. Alcohol is often an accelerant: In roughly half of all Native American suicides, the victims were intoxicated. Suicide is reaching epidemic proportions among Native American youths. “Childhood adversity is also associated with AI/AN suicidal behavior and ideation. Young AI/AN men—in particular those who are unemployed, do not complete schooling, or both—and those with a history of trauma are at greater risk for suicide attempts,” researchers of one 2015 public health study concluded. “Compared with other ethnocultural groups, AI/AN youths have more severe problems with anxiety, victimization, substance abuse, and depression, which may contribute to suicidality.”[78] A report issued by GoodRx Research found that more than 113,000 Native Americans live in one of 492 counties designated as “mental health deserts” that feature fewer than one psychiatrist or psychologist for every 30,000 residents.[79]
We caught a quick glimpse of despair during our visit to Chinle, a remote city in Apache County, Arizona. There, Shawna Claw, a forty-one-year-old candidate for a Navajo Council seat in 2022, told us that her Chinle Chapter (the Navajo unit of local geography) shares one regional hospital with twenty-three other chapters. As she handed campaign leaflets to Navajo voters, Claw pointed across an unpaved parking lot to a building a hundred yards away that previously served as the area’s lone drug and alcohol treatment facility. Now the building is shuttered because its foundation was deemed unstable, a casualty of the unstable floodplain upon which it sits. Claw said locals can obtain outpatient services, but that these resources are severely inadequate given the rates of alcohol and drug addiction on tribal lands. Almost on cue, about ten minutes later, a dented pickup truck with three middle-aged men inside it pulled up and summoned Claw in Navajo. After a brief exchange with them, she returned to our conversation. “You see,” she whispered. “Those men are drunk right now. They should not be driving around.” It was not yet 10 a.m.[80]
The rural Native American experience includes many successes, some of which are the by-product of new ventures, others of which stem from federal exemptions that authorize tribes to own and operate casinos. Since 1999, the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe (SRMT) has operated a casino, hotel, and entertainment venue in Akwesasne, a small town in Upstate New York a stone’s throw from the Canadian border.
The SRMT recently capitalized on yet another unique opportunity: marijuana sales. After New York State authorized tribes to sell cannabis, the SRMT in 2021 issued its first licenses to grow and sell cannabis products. Mohawk reservation retailers can also sell tobacco products at cheaper, tax-free prices. The lures of gambling, marijuana, and cheap cigarettes draw tourists and buyers from across the state and from Vermont and other nearby states and Canada. In October 2022, actor Jim Belushi, who owns and operates a major marijuana farm at his Northern California ranch, presided over a ribbon-cutting ceremony to open his farm’s new Akwesasne dispensary outlet.[81]
The growth of Akwesasne’s cannabis industry generates income and wealth not only for tribal entrepreneurs and citizens but also for non-tribal locals. We visited two cannabis dispensaries in Akwesasne, both staffed by young men in their mid-twenties. The first vendor was a native Mohawk, but the other was a White resident named Austin who had grown up and lived in nearby Malone. Austin works at Weedway, which is owned by Rick Hamelin, proprietor of a large Speedway gas station and commercial plaza across the street. Hamelin’s firm, First Americans LLC, was one of the original three proprietors to whom the SRMT issued a “conditional cultivation license” in 2021.[82]
Emergent industries like gambling and marijuana have spurred needed economic development in certain Native American rural communities. But the economic impacts are limited and cannot possibly reverse centuries of systematic deprivation resulting from relocating Native American populations onto reservations far removed from most of the rest of U.S. society.
Douglas Burns is an Iowa blogger and columnist for the rural Carroll Times Herald in Carroll County, home to about twenty thousand residents in the west-central part of the Hawkeye State. In 2022, Burns penned a powerful column in which he urged rural citizens to rethink their attitudes toward diversity. “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,” he wrote. “Policies and structures strand and marginalize us.”
We might quibble with his “underrepresented” complaint, but Burns offers an otherwise compelling and earnest plea. Although we are not certain his referent group in mind for rural Americans is White, Burns calls upon heartland folks to seek out and build coalitions with other dispossessed groups. “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.”[83]
We echo Burns’s call for rural Americans to think broadly about where they can find suitable allies to join their efforts at remedying what ails rural communities. But anxious rural White voters need not venture into racially diverse, urban polyglots to garner sympathy for feeling “underrepresented and misunderstood.” For rural Whites from Maine to Montana to Mississippi, there is ample diversity in rural communities and plenty of potential allies among their dispossessed non-White neighbors—most of whom face the same economic, social, political, and health-related problems as rural Whites do.
Although many of the challenges rural minorities face are similar to—if a bit more daunting than—those of their White neighbors, shared experiences have never qualified minorities for inclusion as part of America’s essential minority. “In defining rural white America as rural America, pundits, academics and lawmakers are perpetuating an incomplete and simplistic story about the many people who make up rural America and what they want and need,” warns Bates College professor Mara Casey Tieken. “Ironically, this story—so often told by liberals trying to explain the recent rise in undisguised nativism and xenophobia—serves to re-privilege whiteness. Whiteness is assumed; other races are shoved even further to the margins.”[84]
Despite the dual burden of their numerical and racial minority statuses, the one in four rural citizens who is a minority is no more or less rural than members of the dominant White majority. Sadly, minorities garner little to no attention from a media that purports to concern itself with rural anxieties. The economic, healthcare, and cultural concerns of rural minorities matter, too, and no rural renaissance can be complete without their inclusion. For that reason alone—to say nothing of the political benefits to be reaped from building a truly pan-rural movement—rapprochement among rural residents of every race, color, and creed presents an opportunity for rural citizens to speak with one voice. Unfortunately, if the partisan and electoral divides within rural communities are any indication, a multiracial rural revival is unlikely to emerge soon.