How many silos do you see?
How many silos do you see in the picture at the top of this article?
I’m not trying to test your eyes here to see if you can make out buildings cascading into the horizon. Let’s just focus on the two structures readily visible in the image, one red and squarish and the other metallic and circular. Of those two possibilities, how many silos are there?
If you saw one silo, then you’re a city person. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you’re not going to fool me into thinking you’re a down-home sort of guy or gal by wearing work boots or driving a pickup truck. Wear what you like and drive what you want, but don’t try and convince us that you live and die for rural America if you don’t know the difference between a silo and a grain bin.
I’m not going to write a dissertation about agricultural storage structures here, but silos and grain bins are different structures that store different things. Grain bins, such as the beauty depicted in the picture at the top of this article, store dry grain. Silos, on the other hand, store silage, which is chopped green plants. Silos also encourage the fermentation of the chopped plant material to produce high-quality silage to feed to livestock. Bad things will happen if you put grain in a silo or silage in a grain bin.
Here’s a picture of a silo that’s seen better days beside a glorious old barn:
Silos and grain bins are both cylindrical, but other than that they look a lot different because they are very different. The differences aren’t subtle or tricky, but most people in this world never have reason to notice the differences and therefore can’t tell a silo from a grain bin.
Country folk are like that, too. We tend to all look alike to people who don’t know much about us, even though we’re very different. People from the big urban areas tend to lump us all together, as if hillbillies and cowboys/cowgirls were interchangeable. We’re not interchangeable; we’re as different as Bluegrass and Western Swing music. Both are great musical genres, but since they’re art from different places and different cultures they sound very different. If you sweep us all together into a single category, you’re not doing us a service and you’re not likely to change our minds about much of anything.
I didn’t fully realize how big of a problem sweeping different groups together into a single category was until I met with an elderly Mexican-American gentleman. I was there to discuss ways of increasing Latinx involvement in Democratic Party politics. This old fellow immediately objected to the language I was using. In perfect English, he explained to me that he didn’t care for the terms “Latino” or “Latina,” much less “Latinx.” He preferred to think of himself as Hispanic or, better yet, Mexican-American. He did not care for these fancy new categories created to glom a lot of people together based on superficial similarities. He explained that he had no idea what Honduran-Americans or Guatemalan-Americans or other groups within the “Latinx” category might think about politics or nomenclature, since he wasn’t a member of any of those groups. He was a proud Mexican-American, a native born citizen, and an Army veteran with wonderful stories of his service in the uniform of his country, but he also made it very clear to me that he was just one leader in a single community. He did not presume to speak for anyone other than the Mexican-Americans in his town and suggested that I needed to talk to other groups if I wanted to learn what their concerns were.
Even though I was thinking in terms of “Latinx voters,” the actual human beings I wanted to vote didn’t think of themselves like that. If Democrats were going to reach those voters, we had to do so on their terms, not mine. It was lazy of me to think that everyone with a Spanish sounding surname could be lumped into a single group, even a group with a hip sounding name like “Latinx.” I am grateful that an older patriot set me straight.
I worry that Democratic candidates and Party groups seeking to engage rural Americans are making the same mistake I did early on reaching out to “Latinx voters.” It’s not just that rural America is less overwhelmingly white than is imagined — although it’s a massive mistake to think of rural Americans as only “white” people— it’s also that there’s enormous diversity even within the “white” parts of rural America. Attempts by well-meaning progressives to reach “rural America” aren’t going to work if their target is some generic “rural America.” New England farmers aren’t the same as the folks farming the red clay of Alabama, and neither of those are the same as people in the Black Belt. As for me, I’m an Ozark hillbilly who moved to the plains, so when it comes to New England farm country, Alabama’s red clay, or the Black Belt, all I can do is listen to people from those communities. We all have a lot in common, but we’re not the same, either. And we’re going to feel insulted or misunderstood if you insist that we’re somehow interchangeable.
Not all cylindrical farm structures are silos. Americans with Spanish surnames aren’t a unitary block of “Latinx” Americans. Rural Americans aren’t a single group, either. If you treat silos and grain bins as interchangeable, you’re going to get bad results ranging from spoilage to explosions. If you treat groups of Americans as interchangeable, the results aren’t going to be any better.
