Introduction.
American flags flap against the wind. The elderly read the news on black benches, children gather in groups to bike around the neighborhood, local businesses advertise their wares, the church prepares for its weekly farmer’s market, and most recently, protests line the Main Street of Hatboro, Pennsylvania.
The death of George Floyd sparked protests around the country that have yet to die down, and small towns like Hatboro are not insulated from that. To these protestors, organizing means not only fighting against racial injustice in the world as a whole, but in their own communities, which hide inequality and homogeneity behind strong community bonds and “good American values.” And, despite calls for the protests to cease after officers are arrested, there are no signs of them stopping. Because this is a movement not only to get justice served, but to make sure unjust killings of black people by police officers never happen again.
Yet, small town citizens still ask, why protest in our quaint town?
Because, I answer, small town utopianism and patriotism paints them as not at fault for the country’s problems. Small town folks all love each other, God, and America, so there’s no way they contribute to racism and inequality. But, by never questioning their country and masking inequality with “small town hospitality”, they are a part of the problem. And here’s why.
Blind Patriotism and the Mythification of America.
“You hate America,” I was told, after sharing a Facebook post that I would no longer be celebrating Independence Day amidst the systemic inequality propagated by the US police system and the military-industrial complex.
That wasn’t the first time I heard that insult deployed against those questioning “good American values,” especially “small town values.” Because, to some, questioning America was an affront to the very fabric of society. An affront to them personally, to everything this great nation stands for, to-God forbid- veterans. What kind of heartless person would criticize the greatest country in the world, and the people that fought for it, especially those in pastoral, quiet little towns?
To really answer why small towns are part of the problem, one must examine the mythology that patriotism and “small town values” are based off of. The founding of America has been reduced to flashy fireworks and barbecues, the loving, patriarchal image of our beloved George Washington, who dedicated his life to pursuing freedom and liberty for all. These values are misguided and deeply untrue, leading American citizens to be prideful for a falsified version of America, a version that traps them into an echo chamber where questioning their country is treason.
Blindly accepting “the way things are” and thus, accepting a falsified version of the truth is not patriotism, but dangerous and willful ignorance, making small-town citizens complicit in inequality and injustice. I argue that one can love their country and still criticize it- those two things are not mutually exclusive.
One can appreciate veterans yet criticize the military’s killings of innocent families and children abroad, their recruitment tactics targeting the poor with no other option, and therefore dying in a war of greed and oil.
One can see that criticizing the police system doesn’t mean cops should die, but rather recognize that they’re serving a corrupt position, and are encouraged to commit atrocities by the silence of the cops who see themselves as “good.”
To criticize a country is to realize, as American citizens, that these issues can be mended. And by small towns insisting they are not the problem, they’re ignoring that every country, even America, is a duality of good and bad, and promoting an idealized version of “the greatest nation in the world” is breeding people who, whether they want to or not, promote prejudice and racism.
Hidden Inequality.
This line of thinking allows towns like mine to feign neighborly love, ignoring that, in “quiet” towns, racism culminates in microaggressions and comments and stares, not just direct acts of violence. Being followed in a store under the assumption that you’ll steal. A white person crossing the street when you pass by. Being told you don’t look black, you don’t sound black, as if fitting the “stereotype” is a crime in itself.
These little actions, while they don’t seem like much, speak to a systemic problem of casual racism, which spreads throughout generations and implies that black people are inherently lesser.
This casual racism and strictly upheld traditionalism leads to fear when being confronted with contemporary ideas, such as the Black Lives Matter movement. Slavery ended in 1865, small town whites reason. Black people secured their rights 60 years ago. This town is nothing but peaceful- racism isn’t a problem here.
I ask those people to look in the mirror and evaluate themselves. Is the town peaceful because racism doesn’t exist, or because you’re white? It’s easy to believe that everything is peaceful when a town’s population is 95% Caucasian, and voices of color are drowned out by whites in positions of power.It’s easy to ignore implicit racism in the small town police forces when you’ve never been pulled over for the color fo your skin, never been a black child getting their license for the first time and coached on what to do when police stop you. It’s easy to think that blacks are just committing crimes and that’s why they’re killed, when they’re killed for sleeping in their beds, for holding a toy gun, for pulling out their insurance card at a traffic stop. It’s easy to write off police brutality as “a few bad apples,” when, regardless of an individual officer’s racial opinions, the police system is diseased at the roots, training and rewarding discriminatory behavior, and insulating officers from accountability.
It’s easy to write it all off when you live in a fictionalized version of the world, where everything is perfect and we all get along.
It’s not. Small town residents need to wake up, to take accountability for their racial biases, and ask themselves why they take criticism on America and a need for systematic change as a personal attack.
If small townsfolk really valued neighborly collectivism and the power of the working-class American, they would stand amongst their brothers and sisters of color, and realize fighting for their rights is a sign of loving your country and wanting it to change. Imagine the hard-working working class that populated small towns banding together to fight the oppression that runs deep because helping out your fellow neighbor is a true small-town value, not misguided nationalism and homogeneity.
