On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality
I grew up in the Midwest and moved to Silicon Valley. I think that people here don&#x27;t understand what this author describes as &quot;Midwestern history is a study in racial quarantine.&quot; I would go as far as to say that racial is the wrong word to describe what happens in the Midwest.<p>I think that communities in the Midwest have tighter cultural restrictions on what it means to be &quot;one of us.&quot; This can be affected by where you live, where you work, where you go to church, where your kids go to school, what kind of car you drive, what you do for fun, how you dress, even how you talk. Midwesterners are happy to accept someone who matches them in all these areas regardless of skin color. This is why you get backlash from them when you call them racist because the criteria they use is not skin color its all the other stuff.<p>Yet on the other hand, most PoC in the Midwest have a culture that is different on most of the above. So when a white Midwesterner doesn&#x27;t treat a black Midwesterner that speaks, dresses, even walks differently as a part of the community is it racism? I would say no since it isn&#x27;t about race but is about culture. But on the other hand, when most white people do this to most black people, it sure does start to look like it.<p>This puts the Midwest in a really hard place because just about any white person can claim (truthfully) they are not being racist. Yet, the outcome of the collective actions of all of them end up with a pretty strong divide that is mostly along racial lines.<p>Does anyone have suggestions on how to fix this? One option would be to have the cultures integrate so there are not sub communities for PoC. This doesn&#x27;t seem to have worked. But the other option is that you expect Midwesterners to treat people from outside their community the same as people inside their community. That isn&#x27;t going to happen. So it seems like it is an impossible situation.