Rural America: Let’s Talk About Race

For more than a year I’ve been debating whether or not to put a sign in my car window that says “Black Lives Matter.”

And for more than a year, I haven’t hung it up.

As a young white woman living in West Virginia — a state that’s more than 93% white — I find it easy not to talk about racism in our state. At the grocery store, in my neighborhood, when I go to work, when I’m out for dinner, when I among other white people — it’s easy for me to avoid conversations about race almost entirely.

In fact, even in these heightened moments when our county is ringing with grief and anger about the seemingly endless killings of unarmed black men and the recent killings of five on-duty police officers in Dallas, race hardly comes up in my day to day conversations.

The reasons, the excuses, among us white anti-racists in West Virginia are familiar to me — they’re familiar because I make them myself all the time.

For starters, in my county, I can go for days and never see a police officer and I can go for longer only interacting with other white people. In this moment when the national dialogue about race is centered around images of thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters in the streets and huge police forces lining the paths of those protests, well, it can feel like that conversation, those fights, are far away from here. I can pretend like this place, this state, folded up in these mountains, is somehow separate.

Of course, there’s the voice of convenience in me too. The voice that says “don’t alienate folks, don’t stir the pot.” The voice that assures me I can bring it up later, when the time is right, when it’s less awkward. The voice that knows, deep down, I mean well.

And there are other things too. There’s the way I was raised: like many white folks here, race wasn’t something my family talked about much when I was growing up. And so talking about race at all today, even in my young adulthood, still doesn’t always come easily to me. Words get stuck in my throat. It’s uncomfortable.

Then add to this other excuses I have about being busy, about already doing my share, about not knowing where to start. And throw in a little, “well, my people know where I stand” and I’ve got a fine recipe for hiding out.

The trouble is, the truth is, I know different. I know that inaction is never neutral. I know to say and do nothing about racism is to support the status quo — it’s to say I’m okay with the racial slurs spray painted on the side of The Pretty Penny Cafe in Hillsboro, West Virginia last year, or I’m okay with the huge racial disparities in the West Virginia prison population, or I’m okay with fact that 37% of black West Virginians live in poverty (as compared to just over 17% of whites). But I’m not okay with those things.

See, right now, as our country is in this new moment of reckoning, it’s forcing me to do some reckoning of my own. The scales of convenience and conscience are shifting in me. And newly, boldly, conscience is having it’s day.

So here is a call: white anti-racists in rural and small town America, it’s time for us to step out. It’s time for us to embrace the difficult, the uncertain, the uncomfortable, the risky. Will you join me?

I’m posting a “Black Lives Matter” sign in my car today as a place to start. I’m bringing it up. I’m being seen. How about you?