“We Just Feel Like We Don't Belong Here Anymore”

Think it’s hard for the white working class in rural America? Try being a person of color.

- Becca Andrews

Since Donald Trump’s election, there has been ample coverage of rural white America—the rise of white nationalism, the white crowds in Charlottesville, Virginia, who violently defended a Confederate monument, the embattled white working class that makes up Trump’s core constituency. From the media reports, you’d think rural places were devoid of people of color. But that isn’t true—it’s just that their stories have largely been ignored.

I grew up in a poor farming town called Bells in Crockett County, West Tennessee. The county is 74 percent white—I am also white—14 percent black, and 10 percent Hispanic. Most of the people I went to school with are still there. The main highway that winds through the county is framed by cotton fields and pastures where cows keep a lazy watch over passing cars. Friday night football reigns supreme; game attendance is only second in importance to church. Many families have been here for generations, handing down their farmland and businesses to their children and grandchildren.

It can be a lovely place to live, but in counties like Crockett, it’s hard to be anything other than white. So I decided to go back home and talk to the people I should have been talking to all along—people of color who live and work and go to school with white Trump supporters. They told me how it feels to live among neighbors who voted against their best interests and— worst case—their basic existence.

When Madyson Turner began to see reports about the violence in Charlottesville, she thought it was a tasteless joke. Then she watched videos of the clash, and her phone rang—her boyfriend was calling, and he sounded upset. What he said tore at her: “I would rather the world end instead of us having to keep dealing with this stuff.” What hurt her more was the realization that she felt the same.