Opinion: Rural Americans should identify as part of nation's diversity and seek roles in economy, centers of influence

Doug Burns

Rural Americans have a diverse set of experiences that are being increasingly left out of the modern economy, and they need to assert themselves by using a term that they may think doesn't include them, argues Douglas Burns in a column on his Substack newsletter, The Iowa Mercury: "For too many rural Americans, the term diversity is synonymous with otherness because residents of remote regions don’t realize that we, too, are underrepresented and misunderstood. Policies and structures strand and marginalize us. We rural Americans need to focus on correcting this, finding allies in other demographics who are similarly left out of the modern American economy and higher education and top levels of the judiciary — and yes, even my profession, journalism, where rural voices can be absent or hard to find in key power centers. Rural Americans served in wars and farmed and mined coal and built the manufacturing base, and increasingly there is little, if any, role for them in the new economy — one in which wealth is scooped and segregated to coastal tech clusters."

At his family's Carroll Times Herald, Burns works "aggressively" to get a mix of students from urban and rural areas for their internship programs, to let them "see rural Iowa up close and personal," he writes. That way if those students end up going to larger news media organizations with more reach "they bring an understanding and empathy of rural Iowa to decisions on how we will be covered at the national level."

Residents of remote regions are often "underrepresented and misunderstood" and are marginalized by their lack of representation in the wider culture, Burns writes, Citing a Daily Yonder interview with a legal scholar and his own conversation with former President Barack Obama, he notes how the rural experience is misunderstood by the legal system and the Supreme Court lacks a rural voice.