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Comment by taurath | Hacker News Reader

I think there’s plenty of real reasons people don’t do this economically, but don’t downplay the social parts of it - we have very Balkanized communities in the US. Ask a minority what it’s like going on a road trip sometime - I guarantee there’s many places where they won’t want to stop.

Living in a place with no amenities, an extremely regressive/borderline extreme social climate and a lack of economic opportunity for people who don’t have remote tech jobs and it gets depressing really fast. Also when you try to buy healthy food from a dollar general.

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> Ask a minority what it’s like going on a road trip sometime - I guarantee there’s many places where they won’t want to stop.

Certified brown person here. The only thing I think about in terms of deciding where to stop is how far I can get before needing gas, and what the odds of finding decent food are. I've travelled in rural areas all over the country: midwest (my wife grew up in rural iowa), west coast (wife's family is from the rural oregon coast), and south (worked a summer in southern virginia, my best friend lived in south georgia for a decade). I just got back from a road trip through rural Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming with my white wife, mixed kids, and Latina au pair. In all this time nobody has even looked at me sideways.

Hell, the precinct where I live went for Trump 58-34 in 2016 (the year I moved here). The precinct a few minutes away where my parents live was 57-32. Most of the ones around us were 60-30. Again, no problems.

I have to agree with the sibling comment. I have no idea how these folks would perform on an IAT (and I don't care because they're bad science: https://qz.com/1144504/the-world-is-relying-on-a-flawed-psyc...). Southerners are nice to visitors and keep their thoughts to themselves for the most part. I'd rather deal with that than west coast frigidity or NYC aggressiveness.

Thanks for sharing your perspective, its nice to get another view.

This is immaterial. People can be very welcoming to tourists and hostile to the very same people as immigrants. As a brown person who drove extensively through the US both North and South you would mostly see very welcoming people, the same places you would hear horror stories from people like me who actually lived there.

The above comment was in reference to a road trip.

>I guarantee there’s many places where they won’t want to stop.

As someone who recently made the jump to a rural area, these problems are almost entirely imaginary. The notion of backwards, ignorant, racist rednecks occupying all the rural lands is nothing but a bigoted stereotype.

Southern hospitality is real; and while rural peoples will be more likely to notice and acknowledge cultural differences, they generally are open minded and just as respectful of nonwhite neighbors as white ones. It's the city folk who don't understand the roles that politeness and respect play in southern living, necessary for the unbelievably high trust society that only really exists outside of cities.

The truth is that urbanites have been hypersensitized to so called racism, and completely mislead as to what rural/conservative culture is actually like. But I don't mind a bit, that means more cheap land for me.

This contradicts with my experience growing up in WV. The last time I went back there (5 years ago) I still saw the same confederate flags and n-words being thrown around casually. The reality is that 'the south', like anywhere, has pockets of diversity and acceptance; but your stereotype of universal 'southern hospitality' is not in line with my experience at all.

Appalachia is very different than the rest of the south, much less rural areas in other parts of the country. It was populated by Scots-Irish herders, versus say German farmers in the rural midwest.

Appalachian culture is extremely insular, even with respect to other white people. I once had a conversation with a (white) guy who had married into a family in Appalachian Kentucky. Folks in town regarded him as an outsider even after a decade of living there.

I'm happy to hear that's your experience. My experience comes from being raised in such a place (not the south, just rural conservative), and fleeing to the nearest metro region as soon as I was able while growing up. That was a while ago though, and this was over LGBT things - a bit less about abject discrimination and more that it was impossible to even think about finding a date, and a fear of being found out with people regaling me of stories of houses of known queers being firebombed in recent years. I don't really speak about the stereotypes of the ignorant rednecks - the most virulent haters were the orderly christian pastors and the true believers who opened up multiple conversion camps in my area. There were 2 black students in my high school of 1500 kids, and both of them got pulled over literally dozens of times in just a few short years, and it wasn't for driving fast.

Culture has changed somewhat since then. I don't presume to speak for anyone's experience but my own, and I go off of the stories that my friends have told me for other things.

That said, Trump flags fly everywhere, and BLM flags get torn down/burned/vandalized. I don't think its really fair to say that its all politeness and mutual respect - in my experience that is how it is until you accidently fall into one of the cultural battlegrounds, and then its more conform or die. Lastly..

> The truth is that urbanites have been hypersensitized to so called racism

I think this can be true while the rest can also be true.

Well, to be fair, my experience is limited to a couple locales and only an hour or so away from major cities. I might have lucked out because I made a solid first impression on the community and don't have to worry too much about having the wrong opinions.

I suppose you could say that ruralites are more tolerant of intolerance in general, even when they individually may be welcoming. No argument about the flags around here...but I get the impression that, at least where I've settled, even if you're a little different, if you stick to your property and don't make waves nobody is likely to mess with you...and to be honest I kind of appreciate that sort of live and let live attitude, even if it requires some degree of conformity.

As far as I can tell, a somewhat rigid common culture is sort of the price of high trust living, where you can leave your doors unlocked and your keys on the porch. That doesn't justify violence against minorities/lgbt of course but... there's always the city for that I suppose. It's definitely a very different non-pc attitude around here. I certainly understand why a guy like Trump is so popular in these parts.

As a brown minority who travels regularly all throughout the US, I believe your statement only rings true for minorities with strong politically left-leaning identities. The only reason that persuades me against stopping in any location is the price of gas is too high or there’s better food options in the next town. Additionally, I find the contrary to be more true — people in major cities generally make me much more nervous.

That's an interesting point and I wonder what's the cause. It's possible that minorities who had bad experiences growing up in rural areas moved to urban areas and developed left-leaning political identities.

I think there's also an element of cultural mismatch. Trevor Noah has a great passage in his autobiography about how he could cross the intense inter-tribal antipathies in South Africa by speaking another tribe's language: https://www.josephineelia.com/power-of-language. Rural places in America are like places everywhere else in the world--you have to "speak the language" of the people in the place where you are. If you go to rural France and conspicuously don't speak French, you'll face hostility. Obviously in America we speak English everywhere, but if your mannerisms and attitudes give you away as an outsider, you might not get the same warm reaction as someone who knows the cultural cues.

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