Divides, People, and Oregon
Urban or rural? Red or blue? Black, white, or brown? The strengths and limits of getting to know one another through categories
A few days ago, I participated in an online conversation about Oregon’s rural/urban divide led by an Oregon Humanities facilitator from La Grande. The 25 participants’ hometowns ranged from Grants Pass to Newport to Sisters to Lostine to Corvallis to Talent to Wilsonville to Portland (where I live). In addition to this exceptional geographical diversity, there was also a high degree of racial, cultural, occupational, and generational diversity in our virtual room.
Several minutes into the conversation, a striking thing happened: One of the participants declared that she didn’t understand why we were paying so much attention to intellectual constructs such as the rural/urban split. By talking about this stuff, she said, we give more power to differences that don’t really have to mean so much. Couldn’t we just call each other by our names? Couldn’t we simply see each other as individuals?
As she made her point, some other participants used emojis and the chat to emphasize their hearty agreement with what she was saying: Let’s stop with all this attention to categories, they agreed, and just recognize that we’re all people.
Only a few minutes earlier, many of the same participants had introduced themselves not only with their names but also with their pronouns, without having been prompted to do so. And during other early moments of the conversation, several people had emphasized how they identified racially or ethnically, because that sort of identification and categorization affected their understanding of what it meant to come from their rural or urban place.
This emphatic highlighting of certain categories — gender, race, and culture — followed by a heartfelt and well-received entreaty to look away from categories altogether had me wondering: What good are categories like urban, rural, and frontier, or brown, black and white, or he, she, and they? When should we pay attention to categories like these, and when should we look right past them — if we possibly can?
Right there in our placeless and geographically diverse virtual room, I was trying to puzzle out why the very idea of talking about the rural/urban divide had quickly become a point of tension.
I wondered if this happened because, by setting our sights on the rural/urban divide, we were paying attention to general categories instead of just to each other, thereby tending toward caricature.
I wondered if we were paying too much attention to a less important category and thereby giving short shrift to more important categories.
And, I wondered if the tension was simply due to our talking in a diverse group in which there were bound to be many strongly held opinions, almost no matter what we were talking about.
But even amid all that wondering, I’m fairly certain that, given the many indisputable differences between life in rural and urban Oregon communities — between, say, life in Selma or Burns and life in Salem or Portland — attempts to think about these differences are not fundamentally or essentially misguided. The conversation, after all, was taking place online, and there are significant differences in broadband access depending on where one lives, so the conditions of the conversation in some immediate way attested to the importance and relevance of the topic. From resources (including many other essential goods) to political representation to culture, it is simply the case that there are, like it or not, meaningful differences between life in rural communities and urban communities in Oregon.
So, when and how should we focus on differences between us, and when should we not — and which differences?
In recent meetings with people from different backgrounds and places, I’ve been paying attention to when people (including me) feel that it’s important to call attention to the groups we belong to. I’ve been trying to notice what kinds of groupings and categories we seek recognition for — as with, for example, introducing ourselves by our pronouns. And I’ve especially been trying to catch when we prefer not to do so — when we would rather relate to one another as apparently ungrouped individuals than as members of one group or another (whether that group membership is put upon us from outside or taken on from within).
Here I should say that I was one of the few people in that virtual room who, during introductions, did not say my pronouns after my name. In choosing not to follow my name with my pronouns, I believe that I was trying to express, without full clarity, that I just wanted to be seen as me. Like the speaker who first called into question our focus on the rural/urban divide, I was resisting what felt to me like too much focus on categories, or on one particular kind of category. For the purpose of the discussion that was to follow, I wanted, dimly, to suggest that no particular way I might be categorized mattered more than any other — not my gender, not my race, not my class or education or age.
I had the sense in that room, as I have had the sense in many others, that this desire to be recognized only as an individual, not as part of one group or another, would be seen by some as at best naïve and at worst a kind of oppression — especially when coming from someone in a body (white, male) and background (little debt, lots of formal education, only rarely an object of systemic or individualized discrimination) such as mine. But I also had the sense — a sense that became clearer thanks to the speaker who first argued against our focus on a rural/urban divide — that all of us really did and do want to see each other and especially to be seen as the individuals we are.
The catch, of course, and the reason we insist on naming some categories and arguing about which ones most ought to be named, is that the world as it is — and Oregon as it is — still has so far to go before many of us can simply be seen as the individuals we are. It is precisely because of the barriers between today’s world, where the groups we belong to have so much and such complicated impact on the lives we live, and a world where no one sees race or other differences, that naming this desired end state (we’re all just people) can seem like a joke, and a cruel one at that.
But last Saturday, the desire for that end state — a state in which we see each other as individual people more than as members of one group or another — was no joke. It was stated clearly and passionately, and so was the support for it, and this left me wondering if, and maybe when, this state of Oregon will be ready to make that end state real. I wonder what it will take to get there, or at least to get closer.
Adam Davis works with Oregon Humanities to get people thinking and talking together, and he used to lead backcountry trail crews with the US Forest Service.