I’ll be honest: I arrived in the Midwest with the expectation to observe and document blatant racism. What surprised me, though, was not the presence or absence of racism; it was the absence of the discussion of racism.
Interviewing people in big US cities has been empirically easy, because evaluating the way race and racism has affected their life is often an issue that had been considered before, even if only briefly. Washingtonians commenting about the social geography of Washington DC took little analyzation, as it’s not a taboo discussion topic of dinner parties and Metro public service advertisements.
I interviewed people at the University of Indiana at Bloomington which, to me, was farmland. It was corn field, corn field, corn field, general store, cornfield, cornfield, university. But to several that I interviewed, Bloomington was a dynamic big city with a wealth of ethnic diversity and equality challenges. The majority of interviewees were students coming from even smaller towns in Indiana, towns where all residents know each other on a first-name basis and Friday nights are spent gossiping at Applebees about the new family who just moved in.
When asked “what’s your experience with race and racism in the US?”, the most common response I get on the east and west coast is equivalent to “oh boy, where do I start?” In Indiana, without deviation, every oral history started with the outright denial of the existence of racism in their hometown. One angle was “my hometown is so diverse that everyone gets along and we never have any trouble.” When asked about the diversity, one informant regaled the various high schools that boasted Irish, Italian, and Jewish attendees. Where larger cities assume racial tension implies a color variation, these towns in Indiana fall back on former delineation of racial categories reminiscent of the US censuses of the early 1900s. The other angle was “my hometown has no diversity, so when we get the occasional Asian person or Black person, we don’t even know how to racially stigmatize because that’s not what we do.”
I am, in no way, intending to belittle or reject my informants’ evaluation of the situation. What’s interesting to me is not the existence of racism in small towns; it is the insistence that racism did not exist to a significant enough degree to warrant a discussion. Whereas past informants have often been quick to tell tales of personal victimization- or observations of structural discrimination in their city- or even times when they may have done or said something for which they feel ashamed, these informants were equally quick to defend their hometown. People reacted as if the question of perceptions of racism in their home town was an offensive attack, putting them in a position to fight back; as if the mere question was an outright accusation.
I think part of the defensive response arose from hometown pride- this gut reaction to protect and uphold the dignity and good name of their home. I think part of it was unfamiliarity- with racial tension, but more so with the discussion of racial tension. Bloomington, for me, was illuminating not for the stories gathered but for the difficulty I had in the process of collecting stories. People, although always friendly, wouldn’t speak to me for long or in much depth. This project is necessarily asking for personal stories and few people offered any without sandwiching it between the insistence that racism does not exist. These interviews were difficult to obtain, sift through, and analyze, because most of Bloomington’s racial story was told in the words that were left out.
