Sometimes I am going to cross post entries from my Tumblr. This is one such occasion.
The thing about the Midwest is that it is a place millions of people call home. The Midwest is not a punch line for smug jokes about backwards places. I was born in Nebraska. I have lived most of my life in the Midwest. I have spent the past eleven years living in rural America. I have been largely miserable living in rural America because, as a black woman, it can be really difficult to live in a place where you are the only one, or one of a few people who look like you.
But, I’ve also made these places my home. I didn’t have a choice. Wherever you live, there you are. In my field, you go where the work is. Or graduate school. Or the boyfriend or girlfriend. Whatever. Right now, Indiana, where I live, is a mess with this religious freedom law that has been passed. Anytime we see legislation like this in the Midwest, people act like bigotry is unique to the center of America. It is not. Racism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, whatever the hatred, it exists everywhere. Proposition 8 happened in California. In the Midwest, and perhaps the South, people are simply more open about how they really feel.
The Midwest, however, is not defined by ignorance. It has been wonderful to see the force of the backlash against SB 101 from the Republican mayor of Indianapolis, NASCAR, the NCAA, and corporations and other cities across the country. I don’t know what’s going to happen but it’s good to know that this intolerance won’t be swallowed quietly.
I don’t really want to live in Indiana, particularly in light of this legislation but those who know me also know something far stronger is pulling me elsewhere. Let’s call it gravity. In academia, you don’t just pick up and leave. I wouldn’t do that to my students, my colleagues, so I know I will live there for at least another year. I know gravity will probably have me living there for a while longer, until it decides what to do with me. Or until I decide, goddamnit, I am coming to you, sunshine. Get ready.
For now, though, I live in Indiana and I will always be from the Midwest. I have one foot in that state I don’t particularly love, a place I have no choice but to call home. I have one foot in the rest of the world with all the travel I am lucky enough to do. I see your jokes and your snark and your boycotts and the way you dismiss the lives of so many. I wonder if you realize that you’re talking about actual people, many of whom love where they live, many of whom don’t stand for intolerance any more than you do. Maybe a boycott will work because the people who support this kind of legislation and have the power to change it are generally ruled by the bottom line. Disdain, however, probably accomplishes far less.
I am a fiction writer who stumbled into writing nonfiction. Though I had written a handful of essays as a younger writer, I spent most of my time writing stories and trying to lose myself in the lives of imaginary others. I immersed myself in fiction because I had developed a practiced apathy toward the world. Everything was a mess and writing about that mess certainly wouldn’t change it. I also resented how as a woman, it seemed like to write nonfiction, I had to savage my own life to find stories people would be willing to hear. I wanted to keep my stories to myself.
In 2010 a young girl was gang raped in Cleveland, Texas and in March 2011, James C. McKinley Jr. of The New York Times wrote an article about the poor town, and how this crime had affected its citizens. “It’s just destroyed our community,” one woman was quoted as saying. The article was so tone-deaf it managed to both worry over a town and try to place blame on the victim. In a flush of emotion, I wrote an essay called “The Careless Language of Sexual Violence.” Apathy was no longer acceptable.
As an essayist, I think about what the essay should do. In writing on this craft, many refer back to Montaigne, his essais, his attempts, how he tried. “I am myself the matter of my book,” Montaigne explained. When he wrote, Montaigne drew from his own life exhaustively, exploring himself. He did so without apology.
When I began to write more essays, I thought carefully about the choices I would make in exploring myself. What parts of my life was I willing to expose? What parts of my life was I willing to share? I didn’t want to simply bare my pain and have that be enough. At the same time, I was tired of carrying my past around, unexamined.
Why do these explorations of myself matter? How do I make them matter? How do I make my words more than catharsis, more than mere excavations of pain?
I’m still finding my way to the answers to these questions.
There are never going to be universally satisfying answers to these questions. That’s okay.
I read the work of other essayists because I love learning, through their words, how they answer these questions.
In my own work, I am finding answers that satisfy me. I think about the women I meet when I am doing events. No matter where I am, women thank me for talking openly about sexual violence, being a woman, being fat and the challenges this poses in a world that has nothing but disgust for unruly bodies, for being flawed, having a heart, being alive. They thank me for telling the stories they are not yet ready to tell. Sometimes, it’s teenagers. Sometimes it is women in their twenties or thirties. Sometimes, it’s a woman in her sixties who is just now finding the strength to face her past. Sometimes, they are crying or their eyes are red. Their voices shake or they grab my hand or they speak very quietly. I do my best to hear them, to be present in those moments for them, for me. I recognize that they want to be seen and I see them.
I am struck by the overwhelming number of women who have endured one thing or another. I am struck by the many violences to which women are subjected and how deeply those violences can reach. (Is this where I say, not all women?) I see in these women what I see in myself when I sit down to write—someone looking for a way to reach out and be reminded—they are not alone, they are not solely defined by the lesser days of their lives.
Tags: bigotry, gravity, SB 101, The Midwest, we overcome, women
As a Midwest (northern IL/IA) girl who went to college on the East Coast, and currently resides in at the intersection of Appalachia and the South, I can’t tell you how much this resonates with me. I love so much about the Midwest, and no one understands.
While it’s hard to live a place where you disagree with lots of people, and some days the general lack of exposure to “the world” makes me want to tear my hair out, I will always feel joy at the expansive sky, the highways that go on forever, the general agreement that only salad as a meal is a suspect concept, and that people who freak out too much about their appearance have their priorities out of whack.
I didn’t know people didn’t have this *normal* childhood, until I moved and heard stories of kids dealing with image-obsessed neighbors (CA), or WASPish class-consciousness to the *extreme* (East Coast) and while every place has these pockets, I found my New Balance gym shoes and Mom jeans-wearing, “pop” saying corner of the Midwest to be a cozy corner of the world to grow up in comparison. Now I get to take my well-adjusted self to all these “exotic” locations, like the South. 🙂
Thank you. I grew up in the South, and am currently in grad school in the Deep South, and it’s not my favorite place to live, but damn if I’m going to let people make fun of rednecks and hillbillies in front of me – I am lucky to know some really smart, kind “good ol’ boys”. One thing I really enjoy about living here is hearing Southern accents saying intelligent, reasoned things – they aren’t just the butt of jokes.
Thank you also for your essays and this perspective on non-fiction. I’ve been thinking about starting a blog for career reasons, and even exposing that much of myself feels dangerous, and I’m ruminating on what bits of my work would be worth scrutinizing / useful to others.
Amen, amen. I’m from the South too and and real tired of all the ‘lolol dumb redneck confederates are so racist and ignorant’ dribble on tv and from people around me who are (surprise) often pretty bigoted themselves. Pot, kettle, etc. And I’ve recently made the decision to stop trying to hide my accent, especially when I give lectures.
Lemme give this a HELL YES. I’m a transplant to the South — I grew up in California — but this is my home now. And I’ve had famous national “activists” tell me it didn’t matter if they enacted silencing of queer people, or used a sex-positive event to show unwarned triggering YouTube videos and promote their books instead of portray sex-positivity as advertised — they came all the way to the South, why am I not grateful, what do I want from them, #nogooddeedgoesunpunished. I’ve had “activists” tell me that Southern men with Southern interests are the U.S.’s dominant cultural group, because we had a Southern president, so to speak of being from the Southeast is in itself an act of violence against other cultural identities — and to object to being told that NASCAR is exclusively for redneck rapists with beer bellies is an even greater act of violence. I object to people “joking” that, as a lesbian moving to the South, I’d be “lynched,” pointing out that that’s not really a word that should be a punchline — and they tell me I’d better get used to it if I intend to live in the South.
My home is not the end of the world. And it is not beyond saving. My activism is not pointless because I live in a place they’d rather see as a reality TV show than a region.
Nothing will send me into a blind rage quicker than when people are like “Well, [awful thing] only happens in [area that’s not actually that different], so why don’t the good people just [move away from jobs and homes and families and lives] and everyone just get over it already and [let the South secede and then we’ll be a 100% tolerant country and never have any more problems ever again]”
Oh, God, I’m a transplanted Asian-American Yankee who’s spent most of my life in the South and those people can shut the hell up because you know what NOT EVERYONE CAN OR WANTS TO MOVE and it’s horrifying to me that you say so flippantly you should leave them behind. No, which is why this bipartisan outrage in Indiana is so gratifying, because yeah, DON’T TAR PEOPLE WITH THE SAME BRUSH.
Oh, God, I’m a transplanted Asian-American Yankee who’s spent most of my life in the South and those people can shut the hell up because you know what NOT EVERYONE CAN OR WANTS TO MOVE and it’s horrifying to me that you say so flippantly you should leave them behind. No, which is why this bipartisan outrage in Indiana is so gratifying, because yeah, DON’T TAR PEOPLE WITH THE SAME BRUSH.
Thank you!
This is the second year of my life I will have spent outside of the midwest, and I am often surprised by the assumptions people in my new home make about the places I am from. Yes there are farms, and boarded up factories, and some ignorance and lots of poverty. But there are beautiful, amazing, generous people too! No, I am not from a place where you would want to go on vacation. I’m midwestern, so I’m okay with that.
I was surprised to learn that the most common thing people will ask when they find out you’re from Iowa is, “Do you eat a lot of corn?”
For a long time this pissed me off, because oh come on. But the truth is that I fucking love corn, I eat it all summer long, and I’m not ashamed.
Fellow native Nebraskan here! This spoke to me so much. Do I see anti-abortion billboards every time I drive the 50 miles through cornfields to my hometown? Yes. Do I spend a lot of time wanting to punch ignorant Fox-newsers and dudebros in the face? Yes. But, I also have met some of the most progressive and kind and forward-thinking people of my life here. And, the runzas are like what.
Melissa McEwan’s twitter feed has been sustaining me over the past couple of days. As a dyed-in-the-wool Midwesterner nothing pisses me off more than the notion that state politics are the only thing about a place, or that the crappiness of local politicians is indicative of the crappiness of citizens’ lives or character. I sometimes try to stay away from these “outrageous state law” news cycles because it’s when people who don’t give a single fuck (or know a single thing) about a place or the people who live there decide that they need to take to the internet and let everyone know that they are smarter and better than the people who actually have a stake in the issue.
Not too long ago my boyfriend told me that he couldn’t imagine how I got by in (state where I used to live), because he sure wouldn’t want to live there. Here’s the thing– as a college-educated white dude, his life wouldn’t be much different there than it is where he lives now. These terrible laws aren’t aimed at people like him. He could get a nice apartment in a major city and spend his time drinking at the same kinds of bars with the same kinds of yuppies and joking about the same shit that he reads on the internet. He could go his whole life without ever worrying about how the police interact with his community, or how his local school system is underfunded, or how terrible the state’s social safety net is. In fact half the problem, in that state and in every other state in the country, is that so many people don’t see the problems. What problems are we ignoring in other parts of the country?
Here’s the thing– as a college-educated white dude, his life wouldn’t be much different there than it is where he lives now. These terrible laws aren’t aimed at people like him … In fact half the problem, in that state and in every other state in the country, is that so many people don’t see the problems.
I have nothing to add here but PREACH, sister (or appropriate sibling term).
It’s such a form of coastal provincialism, that they can’t even imagine what it’s like here in “Flyover Country,” or the people who live here, and they refuse to even try.
I mean, I worked for 10 years on marriage equality in Illinois. I went door-to-door. I go to democratic party meetings in my county, and I go door-to-door for democratic candidates in rural, downstate areas. How many of these folks who know everything about how backwards we are in the Midwest has ever bothered volunteering for a political campaign? (Let alone a local city council campaign to get a democrat in who will keep nursing homes funded.) It’s so much easier to make fun of backwards places than to actually work for progressive causes where you are.
I have watched, over 10 years, my neighbors on my mixed-class, mixed-race block turn from being almost universally suspicious of gay marriage, to thinking it was nobody’s business, to putting up rainbow flags when the state finally passed it. 10 years ago when a “defend the family” group canvassed, 75% of my neighbors signed their petition; 5 years ago, only two people did. The year gay marriage was passed, the bigots didn’t bother canvassing my neighborhood because they knew it was a lost cause. And I know I was a little bit a part of that, by just being a person in my community, who goes to church and shops at the Kroger and wears pearls to funerals and complains about jaywalking and goes to PTO meetings and drinks Budweiser at block parties, who kept saying, over and over, “Yeah, guys, this is a thing that I support and I think it’s important.”
(I also got a whole bunch of them into organic lawn care. Yes we can!)
People listen here, and they can hear me, and they genuinely have a sense of community and want it to be a good community. We don’t always agree what that community would look like, but they are usually willing to hear me out, and they give me plenty of social space to be a progressive (in a more conservative community) without ostracizing me for it. They consider it one of my personal quirks and treat me as an informational resource on liberals. (In fact I was at a holiday party a while back and some ritzy Republican ladies waved me over and said, “Hey, explain to us about systematic racism in policing. We’ve been hearing about it in Ferguson and they’ve been talking about it locally in the paper, and we’re not sure we totally understand the problem, but we remembered it is definitely one of those things you’re always on about, and we have questions.” And they listened, and they heard me, and they were like, “Wow, that is really a problem,” and one of them later ended up joining a community task force on the issue. Our police department is not magically better, but that’s how change starts, one conversation at a time.)
I’ve lived other places, but I love the Midwest and Midwesterners too much to ever leave for good. I’ll always come home. I probably bleed corn.
You are incredible, and you made a huge difference, and you spoke to ears that weren’t ready to hear from others. Rock on.
Thank you, thank you for writing this.
I’m from Indiana. I love Indiana. I hate what Indiana is doing to itself. I live in a “more progressive” state (note: that doesn’t prevent a really hideous piece of racial nastiness from blowing up on local social media, nosirreebob, nothing like that around here), and I would move back home in a heartbeat because maybe there’s juuuuust possibly the chance to be part of the change.
I’ve recently visited Indianapolis twice (job) and for a few days there it looked like RFRA and its fallout might directly affect me. I had no previous ties to the state. My mom is from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and I went to college in Michigan so I do tend to be pretty kindly disposed to the region for a liberal East Coast lady.
What I’ve seen in the last couple weeks are scads of locals protesting RFRA and the even more horrifying 20 year sentence doled out to a woman of color for “feticide” a/k/a miscarrying at 20 weeks with no ring on her finger. The people I’ve met are kind, the culture supportive of DIY and local arts, and NO MASSHOLES. Btw, Mass. has a feticide law too.
I’m actually quite proud to have a bona fide nexus to the Hoosier state and I look forward to returning.
This seems like a good place to mention how much I hate the term “flyover states”.
“Doesn’t the middle of the country have like crops and industries and millions of people with jobs and lives and opinions and–”
“Nope there’s nothing there at all, just fly the fuck right over it.”
I’ve never actually heard that one used non-ironically, but I do hear a lot of comments that are like “she looks really midwestern” or “it’s very Middle America” and I’m always like, why don’t you just come out and say “trailer trash?” Or “eww, fat people?” We know that’s what you mean.
Amen. I hate when people treat this part of the world as one big People of Walmart joke. (Speaking of classist, sizeist awfulness…)
OH MY WORD YES. I had fellow students speak disdainfully about the “flyover states” and I never knew how much I could get up in someone’s face until I realized they were *serious* & I had to re-adjust their notions.
My favorite comeback was some variation on: “Do you enjoy eating? You’re welcome. And we would laugh that shirt you’re wearing right out of town.”
This is beautiful and wonderful and just…yes. I was raised in Indiana, and now I live in Kansas (god, what a combination). I love much about the Midwest and I hate a lot of it, too, but honestly, I can’t imagine living anywhere else.
I see your jokes and your snark and your boycotts and the way you dismiss the lives of so many. I wonder if you realize that you’re talking about actual people, many of whom love where they live, many of whom don’t stand for intolerance any more than you do.
Thank you, Roxanne.
Thankyouthankyouthankyou for offering this perspective on the Midwest. I’m from Indiana and am finishing up grad school in Indy (must admit, I kind of freaked out and had a weird rush of star-struckedness when I read you are living in IN 🙂 very unexpected and awesome, but I digress…), so I appreciate this idea of the “pull of gravity” because, honestly, I never expected to still be living here after finishing undergrad. And yet, the best place for the graduate program I was interested in is here, and I have to say, I grew a very deep appreciation for what the city (and even the state) offers; there was a shared sense of excitement for the potential of industry and innovation and the capacity for creative collaboration and cultural shifts. In short, cool things were happening, and cool people were coming in, and I was proud of it and hoped this new identity would be recognized outside the Midwest.
And then, RFRA…
Nearly everyone I know in Indiana (I do come from a rural area in southern Indiana…) opposed this legislation, vehemently so. I would argue that across the state, the majority of people were against this law, and still it happened. As I read the onslaught of media coverage and, inevitably, the comment sections (some part of me must be a masochist), my heart literally hurts to see some of the horrible, generalized assumptions and accusations people outside the state make about Indiana as a whole and the people that live here. Don’t get me wrong. We have our fair share of bigoted, backwards fucks and ignorant assholes (clearly), but I truly believe they are not representative of most of the people who call themselves Hoosiers.
This past week has left me feeling very helpless as so much of the country is reaffirmed in their previously conceived notions of Indiana and its residents (and the Midwest in general, really), leaving so many of us here who – are progressive – have liberal views – believe in and work for equality in all aspects of life – to be swept up in the tide of intolerance and bigotry. So again – thank you. Thank you for pointing out that the Midwest is more than just a hellhole where all -phobists and racists come to brood and roost 🙂
*Think I needed to get that off my chest…*
Thank you, Roxane. I’m a New Yorker who lives in Bloomington IN now, and I like it here. I’m obviously aghast at what’s going on here but I’m also none too pleased with the kneejerk reactions that assume we have some monolithic hivemind here and the dingus governor got 100% of the vote. For some weird reason it especially gets my goat that people even make the word “Hoosier” the butt of the joke, like, “that’s not a real word and I refuse to call people from Indiana Hoosiers.” Come on, ostensibly progressive coastal people, you won’t even allow us to name ourselves?
This thread just reminds me how much I need to buy this shirt. http://raygunsite.com/products/midwest-map-1
My mom has that shirt, and it’s her favorite!
Texas expat here. Couldn’t wait to get out as a teen. I continue to have passionately ambivalent feelings about my home state. But I think that the friends I have there working to make it a better place are doing more for the world than I am, living in the bluest of states where I almost never have to think that hard about my politics if I don’t want to. And when people paint a state with 27 million people and a rainbow of racial/ethnic/religious/sexual/gender identities as a monolithic bloc of dumb, gun-worshipping bigots, it’s enraging.
Still, I’d rather live here, where there isn’t an ongoing assault on my basic rights, than back home. So, yeah. Ambivalence.
Yeah, I’ve grown up in Texas and refused to go to college here (so instead I went to Indiana, lol, but I really enjoyed it), and now I’m looking to move to the PNW this year — but I’ve realized that I almost feel guilty for leaving behind my fellow Democrats in Houston who are trying so hard to make a difference in such a red state. I want to find another political club in Oregon, but I don’t think there will be the same sense of purpose or urgency.
Yes.
The most irritated I’ve been recently was when I listened to a public radio story about a small town in the middle of nowhere in eastern Kentucky – maybe 250 people – that passed an antidiscrimination ordinance. Some people out in California heard about it and were so shocked, shocked I tell you! that some tiny town could defy their regional stereotypes, they donated a playground to the town.
I don’t object to the playground itself but the condescension in donating one because you thought all Kentuckians were bigoted assholes until now is a bit much. I’m ambivalent about where I live in Appalachia and this region has a lot of work to do in so many areas, but that doesn’t mean progressives don’t exist here, it doesn’t mean the whole area is worthless.
I don’t think Indiana’s worthless either.
I spent my whole life in Indiana before moving to New York seven years ago. There are things I hate about it (starting with that anti-abortion billboard right across from the Indy airport), but so so many more things I love. Many of my friends from high school and college are now smart, creative, amazing contributors to Indiana’s culture, and I hate to see them painted with the same brush as the people who passed RFRA.
Almost two years ago, I got married in Indianapolis – to another woman, before it was legal there, and every single vendor, store clerk, and random passerby was nothing but lovely. (Except, well, half my family.) RFRA is not Indiana.
Indianans, what do you think of the boycott? Helpful or harmful?
Both helpful and harmful.
Helpful: outside economic and social pressure sped up the “repair” legislation – one week vs likely a year of continuous effort (I guess).
Harmful: The boycott was OUTSIDE pressure that tended to render invisible all the efforts coming from INSIDE the state. It allows those outside the state to view Indiana as a monolithic blob of intolerance which it is not. I think we need a progressive coalition of liberals-in-red-states to find ways of effecting change where we are and to find ways of no longer being invisible.
Indianans, what do you think of the boycott? Helpful or harmful?
Currently living in St. Louis, reporting for duty. It's been a wild eight months. I'm with venicespent and have both a love and a hate reaction to this place and like you I worry about it a lot.
Lived here in STL for 4.5 years and it's… been a hell of a ride. I love this city and every time I visit a state park off somewhere in other parts of Missouri, my heart sings.
But damn. There's so much love and so much hate and so much everything. I want to see this place thrive, which is why I stay here.
Of course, I feel bad for leaving Michigan too. The pains of the midwestern heart.
When I moved to LA from MA 7 years ago I heard nothing but disdain for it. From people in my grad program who had never been or who had hardly been. And these were people living in Worcester MA, which is not really known for being a worldclass beacon of anything. Except maybe the movement of heroin on it’s way to kill everyone in Maine and Vermont.
Well when I got out here I found a place that I feel deeply deeply in love with. It’s got a lot to be critical of, but the County of LA is also home to 10 million people! if you can’t find anything nice to say, or anyone to love out of 10 million diverse people living in a sunny Mediterranean climate in a tolerant state with an arts and science economy…I don’t even know where you’d possibly be happy.
I think disdain for the culture of a place is one of the last safe prejudices- the kind a liberal person can hold and be totally ignorant about and still think “I’m a good tolerant person who doesn’t judge people.” I think the idea that geography determines intelligence, which has roots in some of the early racism of scientists of the 1700s has survived and thrived. It’s class hatred turned geographical and it’s horrible. And one of the things living in LA has given me is that native Angelenos all seem to uniformly fail to hate ANYWHERE. No matter where you are from they’re like, “oh i’ve heard that’s a cool place!” and then they usually ask about what food is best there. It sounds silly but that mindset of gentle accepting curiosity really changed who I was in a profound way.
It’s not just a coast-vs-interior thing or a north-vs-south thing: when I lived in Boston people made disparaging remarks about San Francisco; when I lived in Berkeley people made fun of Cambridge, and the whole time everyone was careful to wear their liberal heart on their sleeve. It’s just a reminder that life as a grown up is merely a pale reflection of High School – I was with the freaks & geeks then and things haven’t really changed!
I have watched, over 10 years, my neighbors on my mixed-class, mixed-race block turn from being almost universally suspicious of gay marriage, to thinking it was nobody’s business, to putting up rainbow flags when the state finally passed it. 10 years ago when a “defend the family” group canvassed, 75% of my neighbors signed their petition; 5 years ago, only two people did. The year gay marriage was passed, the bigots didn’t bother canvassing my neighborhood because they knew it was a lost cause. The food in Bloomington is the best. Visit the bloomington food hq . And I know I was a little bit a part of that, by just being a person in my community, who goes to church and shops at the Kroger and wears pearls to funerals and complains about jaywalking and goes to PTO meetings and drinks Budweiser at block parties, who kept saying, over and over, “Yeah, guys, this is a thing that I support and I think it’s important.”