Hey all, do you guys know Linda Tirado? She went viral a couple years ago writing an article about what its like be poor in America. She’s since become “not poor” and has a writing career, and she wrote this recently and its really really good.
(She’s also a friend of mine, I was there when she went viral, that was nuts.)
Thanks! I read her book, which is GREAT!!
She’s your friend?? Squeeee
They do, actually. You would be surprised how many people think that the Midwest is a total wasteland, where people live in tarpaper shacks on desolate farmland, drive rusted-out pickup trucks and are all on welfare. Oh yeah, and we’re all Evangelical Christians and Young Earth Creationists. It’s not that people sit around saying these things and actively look down on us, it’s just an implicit bias that people have who have never been to the Midwest or have never really met anyone who lives there.
Chicago actually is not so much like this. There are less old-money biases there IME, and people care more about who you are than where you came from. There are also a lot of people coming into the Chicago area from surrounding states looking for work, but these people typically don’t move to the coasts permanently unless they went to school there or they’re veterans. So, Chicagoans basically understand that there are smart and normal people coming out of Kansas, but the typical person on the East Coast might not know anyone from there, and only associates Kansas with whatever bullshit Gov. Brownback is up to.
Nope, food. Oranges, corn, soy, lots of peanuts, not to mention livestock (lots of beef especially).
Don’t forget people look down on the Midwest as well, so I would lump the Midwest in there. Big Ag is huge over here. We have more corn and soy than we know what to do with.
Um, isn’t it more that Big Ag has more corn and soy than it knows what to do with? How much of the wealth generated by those miles and miles of nothing but corn and soy gets shared with the local double-wide dwellers? (Not much I’m guessing, hence the double-wides.)
OK… that’s awesome. Full stop.
I’d be lying to say none of it has seeped in, ever, at all. But as a whole, the concept has no resonance with me, and I am actively trying to force out what little drops in the bucket have seeped in.
Maybe as a disabled queer man from a less privileged background I’m less receptive to this toxic mindset than most, though.
Yes. Big Ag has it, not the double-wide dwellers. But see what I said above. We do not all live in double-wides. Many of us go off to college specifically to go work in Big Ag. That was my intention originally, but the biomedical device industry was much more appealing to me.
All i see with ‘toxic patriarchal culture’ and the reactionary ‘let’s make fun of anyone and everyone that has any ties to such even if incidental’ is one group trying to either bully another or another group managing some small shadow of safety and allowing themselves to ‘repay in kind’, ie bully when they have some sort of power.
I hate bullies. It’s a mentality that keeps the world divided and everyone distrustful and not wanting to actually speak, or when speaking does happen assumptions run rampant. I am not innocent of this by any stretch. I have faults aplenty.
I would trust what @singletona082 has to say on this.
I don’t think @anon67050589 should trust what anyone has to say about how new her own mindset on the matter is.
Did I misread something somewhere? I thought the new mindset was @singletona082, not @anon67050589. I’m confused now.
I’ve been at the ‘I will lash out at people constantly’ mentality. Well… worse than usual. It’s not a happy place to be especially since it feeds on itself that everyone around you is an enemy that you must defend against.
I don’t want to be lumped in with those assholes, but I also know it’s only a matter of time before someone says I’m responsible to a degree because I’m taking advantage of an unjust system that doesn’t dock me points on account of my gender. Nobody said it here, because I think overall we’re too smart to fall for that, but it has been said.
You know, there’s a certain irony in you making this point repeatedly in this thread, given its title.
I think there are very few of “us” here who think that every single person who lives in white rural areas is “uneducated,” voted for Trump because or at best despite his horrific bigotry and misogyny, and so on. I don’t think much of anyone here needs a lesson on the problem of overgeneralizing. It’s pretty obvious that if say, in a certain rural county, 90% of the 98% white population voted for Trump, that means 10% didn’t, and that those 10% differ from the other 90%.
I’m a Midwesterner living in a big city, and I frequently travel to the coasts for work. I’ve never heard this point of view. I’ve heard people say that Evangelical religion is more common in rural areas, that many small-town Midwestern people are on welfare, that we should donate to the Lilith fund because rural women in the south and Midwest have to travel farther to get abortion access, etc. But I’ve never heard anyone say that everyone in any state or region is an Evangelical. If anything, I’ve heard more people talking about gerrymandering this year, and how we aren’t hearing the true voice of the Midwest because power has become canalized in the hands of those who already hold it.
And, as a Midwesterner, I’m not bothered by any of those assessments. Sam Brownback didn’t just fall into the governor’s mansion. It’s fair for people who aren’t from Kansas to think that people in Kansas support him. But, as a former Kansas state employee, I’m grateful that more people are waking up to the fact that representation is being manipulated in those states.
She got so much flak and accused of being a fake and a hoax and all of that. Because people started paying her to write and paying her to talk… so weird. Write about what you know but don’t you dare become successful!
You can approach it the same way that you approach discussing the bad things that some members of other groups do.
When privileged groups complain about non-privileged groups they are mostly complaining about their ideas of those groups. When non-privileged groups complain about privileged groups, they are mostly complaining about their experiences of those groups. When someone says, “black people are lazy” that’s ignorance. When someone says, “men talk down to women” they are saying “men have frequently talked down to me.” Obviously this isn’t universal, but, basically, don’t take criticisms of privileged groups you belong to the same way as you would take it if you made the same criticism of an less privileged group.
When I hear black people or indigenous people talk about white people, or when I hear women talk about men, I mostly think, “Yeah, you got us.” When I hear people without mental health problems talk about people with mental health problems I think, “What the fuck are you even talking about?”
I just have to say, @anon67050589 is not a bully in any sense of the word, and if you are reacting to her in that way I would say maybe take a break, read the article I posted, and try not to lash out so much. Cheers.
And then when i hear people going on and on about WASPs I am in the middle of ‘well… shit… do they realize I’m not with these people?’
I could be wrong but I think, judging from puely local conditions, that’s the major problem a lot of ‘privilaged’ people face. They don’t know howto approach the issue without either getting lumped in with the intolorant assholes, or feeling like they have to make up for the asshole percentage of the population.
As someone that’s thin on solutions to problems… I’d be interested in an example or two? That’d probably be helpful to me personally.
