What image comes to mind when someone from Iowa is mentioned? Most likely a white guy with overalls wearing a green John Deere hat (with the plastic mesh and one-size-fits-all adjusting strap) riding a tractor in a corn field or feeding his hogs.
Aside from the fact that farming in Iowa now has more to do with giant agribusiness companies than with the small farmers they’re driving out of business, and aside from the fact that more than 25 percent of Iowans live in urban areas, this stereotype has some truth. But the traits most of us associate with rural Iowans and other nonurban people are mostly negative and condescending.
We think of them as provincial and unrefined. They don’t appreciate things like theater or classical music. They certainly know nothing of style. They’re isolated from the excitement and cosmopolitanism of the city and are overwhelmed and naïve when they visit. They’re poorly educated, closed-minded and prejudiced.
These conceptions are stereotypes, and don’t apply to everyone who lives away from urban centers. But to an extent I know from experience these stereotypes are true. Does this justify a condescending attitude?
Rural people are often culturally conservative and prefer to stay within the bounds of the familiar. But this is hardly unique to them most of us aren’t interested in visiting farms to find out about the rural life, so we can hardly claim transcendent open-mindedness to diversity. And while prejudices of all sorts flourish in rural areas, our own crude negative stereotypes about those who live outside cities indicate that we are no more pure.
Rural culture is sophisticated and diverse, adapted to its environment. Farmers might not know much about apartment living or mass transit, but they have a knowledge of the cycles of nature we will never claim. They might not get too involved in the debate over affirmative action, but then you probably haven’t been paying much attention to the question of crop subsidies. Rural people have their own cultural pursuits: religion, sports, a taste for fine pork. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing better or worse about these than spending the weekend staring at paint on canvas.
Our disdain for rural life distorts our understanding of the rest of the world as well. We identify solely with the urban populations of other countries, despite the fact that unlike the United States in many nations a significant percentage of the population is engaged in farming.
In China, for instance, two-thirds of the population live in rural areas. Nevertheless, we make a big deal out of a few urban intellectuals having their freedoms of speech and assembly violated by the government, but take no note of the much more difficult struggles of peasants. At the same time, we’ve cheered on China’s economic reforms which have greatly increased the gap in wealth and power between rural and urban individuals.
Essentially, we look down on rural individuals because they live at the margins of economic and political power. When we recognize that their culture and knowledge are equal to our own, we’ll be one step closer to correcting that imbalance.