vox
One tweetstorm that perfectly captures the problem of being walled off to other communities
“Coastal elites” are in a bubble. So are white working-class Americans. See the full story (and the rest of Patrick’s tweets) here.
larathia
Actually, I would like to say - since I am also in the rural Red Zone - that while he’s right about this part of the country being like 99 percent white with a power structure heavily slanted toward ‘dude’, the answer isn’t going to be “they need to get out more” because, frankly, they can’t.
Lemme put it to you like this: I’m in a Town. If you’re on the coast, you’d consider my Town to be a badly dislocated suburb. One. Suburb. It has one starbucks. One mcdonalds. One (small) strip mall. I’d have to travel 30 miles to get a full service FedEx place or bookstore. I’d have to drive a hundred miles to get to a City, and quite a bit more than that to reach a Major City. “get out more”, for what you want, would involve basically taking a vacation because it’d be at least 12 hours of driving. And on minimum wage (which is nearly all the jobs out here) vacations are few and far between.
And therefore my response to you is this: REPRESENTATION MATTERS. You know what people around here use to see the rest of the world? TV. That’s what. And if all your villains are foreigners, or non white, and all your good guys are straight white dudes, there is nothing in the world hereabouts to contradict that. That’s what we see because there sure aren’t a lot of non-white, non-straight, non-christian types here. What people here know of all that diversity they get from hollywood.
You want to teach the locals that black people aren’t all thugs? Cast more black heros and romantic leads. You want to teach them that muslims aren’t all terrorists? Start making a point of representing them more positively in oh, I don’t know, everything?
