One of the good ones

Results from a recent Cooperative Election Study (CES) reveal that what most distinguishes rural from urban voters is attitudes toward race. At least by what the study measured: faith, gun ownership and race. Those categories, I’d argue, limit the meaningfulness of the study.

The researchers discussed their findings earlier this week in the Washington Post. Rural voters tend to be more evangelical, own more guns, and measure higher on a scale called racism denial. That is, researchers asked subjects whether they felt White people have certain advantages:

Levels of racism denial have been shown to strongly predict vote choice in recent elections. A 2018 Pew Research Center report found that a majority of rural Americans deny that White people in the United States benefit from societal advantages that Black people lack. These differences between rural and urban opinions on racial advantages held even among non-White Americans. The 2020 CES also asked whether respondents agreed or disagreed that White people in the United States have certain advantages because of the color of their skin. Notably, more than 45 percent of rural Americans disagreed with this statement, while just 1 in 5 urban Americans denied that Whites have advantages.

The trio of researchers examined how faith, gun ownership and race impacted support for Donald Trump in rural areas already “32 points more likely to vote for Trump than urban voters.” Controlling for evangelism and gun ownership, the team concludes “if voters in urban and rural areas acknowledged White privilege at the same rate, the urban-rural voting divide would be relatively small, just eight points. That the divide is actually 32 points speaks to the powerful role that racism plays in fueling this gap.”

But is it really racial hostility reflected in the data?

“Trying to understand what causes this political rift between rural and urban counties is a complex and nuanced undertaking,” the researchers admit. Articles such as theirs fail to account for that nuance.

I’ve argued repeatedly that what underlies much racial animus is fear of loss of social status. At Slate last week, Julia Craven conjectured that backlash to critical race theory is really “an extension of those desperate grasps to maintain power and limit interactions with people of color,” and “motivated by the same desire to protect whiteness, its stature, and the privilege it bestows.“

But there are factors other than race in play as well.

Comments last year by my friend, playwright David Castro, about his urban upbringing point to another difference not accounted for in the research above:

Castro: I grew up in lower-middle class/working class diversity in the Bronx and I’ve often joked that I grew up among the 5 major food groups of NYC at the time – Irish, Italians, Jews, Blacks and Puerto Ricans. And it was an education. By the age of 10-12 I’d eaten at everyone’s house, stayed over, went to their churches and synagogues for confirmations and bar mitzvahs, weddings and funerals, listened to their music and saw with my own eyes, as my first generation American mother said, “Don’t let anyone ever tell you that so-and-so’s parents don’t work as hard as anyone else. EVERYBODY HERE WORKS HARD.”

What’s more, David said once, although the foods and religious iconography changed from house to house, growing up none of that was threatening. They were just your friends’ parents.

Those are experiences many raised in rural America rarely have. Lack of exposure to people unlike themselves contributes to fear of the other and to suspicion and distrust of what they fear. There is more to it than guns and evangelical Christianity. Growing up in a more diverse community, Castro does not find people unlike himself threatening. This difference between urban and rural life is the snake that would have bit you.

In college, I caravanned to a wedding with a group of friends from Greenville, South Carolina to South Florida. One, a former biker, had never been farther than 20 miles from home. By the time we reached Augusta, his eyes were as wide as saucers. There’s a whole world out here!

Near a farmhouse we own in a remote valley in a rural county an hour northwest, a Vietnamese woman with a southern accent sells barbecue in the diner of a tiny country store Google MAPS cars don’t drive by. She may be the only non-White person locals know. That makes her one of the good ones.

Update: Fixed a mangled sentence in the first para.