From One Blue Bubble to Another

Maya Angelou once said that “it is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.” Although I recognized the validity of this statement before, moving across the country is what really cemented it into my moral code.
I grew up in an extremely conservative suburb of Cincinnati. It was the kind of place where young women laughed off sexism, almost everyone in the schools was white, and rich couples with McMansions and two smiling blonde children voted Republican because they “worked hard for their money” and “everyone else should have to as well.”
For a long time, I was one of them. I absorbed every Fox News-ism that my grandpa spouted and supported Republicans when I was too young to even realize what Republicans (or Democrats for that matter) stood for. In high school, everything changed. I saw the sexism, the classism, the racism — all of the negative “-isms” — for what they were. I wanted nothing more than to go to a very liberal university in a very liberal place so I could finally be around people who supported me and my ideas.
My dream school was always NYU. I got in, but we could not afford the ridiculous price of $60k per year. So I accepted a full academic scholarship at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Bloomington was supposed to be very liberal. Though it was in the red state of Indiana, aka “the South of the North,” this college town was supposed to be open, and diverse, and accepting.
Hint: It was not.
Bloomington

Bloomington was a bubble of blue in the middle of a sea of red, but not in the way I had hoped. It was not very diverse, and no amount of IU preaching diversity was going to change that. It was also not very accepting, as you could easily see if you checked in to the anonymous app Yik Yak to take a look at all of the posts bashing international students. There was also obvious sexism in the dispassionate and unconcerned way that IU handled sexual assault cases.
These are problems that many cities have, not just red ones, not just blue ones, and not just blue bubbles in red states. The thing that really irked me about the seemingly open and liberal culture in Bloomington was the frequency with which liberals would police other liberals.
If your ideas were not open enough, you would ironically be shut down by your oh-so-open and accepting peers. Instead of having a conversation, you were yelled at for considering the other side of an issue. In Bloomington, without very much racial and ethnic diversity, the biggest issue left to discuss was the level of one’s liberalness.
South Florida

After graduating in 3 years with a degree in studio art, I packed up my things and moved to South Florida with my partner. South Florida is another blue bubble in the mostly red state of Florida. I thought liberal viewpoints here would be similar to those in Bloomington. To my surprise, I have not been yelled at yet for not being the right kind of liberal. There are bigger issues to worry about here. Here, I have found truth in the idea that there is unity in diversity.
In the Miami Metropolitan Area, almost 40% of households speak Spanish at home. Only 34% of the population here is white. This is the extreme opposite of Bloomington, where the language most spoken at home (besides English) is Chinese, and even then the percentage of households that speak Chinese at home is less than 5 %. Households that speak Spanish come in at less than 3%. In addition, the population of Bloomington is almost 80% white.
Conclusion
The differences in diversity between these two blue bubbles is staggering. I believe that the lack of diversity in Bloomington has bred a disunity among liberals. Without as many diversity issues to worry about, restless, young, mostly white liberals have turned against themselves. There are better things to concern yourself with than being the “correct” type of liberal.
Obviously, I can’t magically make Bloomington as diverse at South Florida. But Bloomington, and other blue bubbles, can follow South Florida’s example of focusing on real issues rather than policing your peers.
