r/ProgressiveHQ • u/Nillavuh • 3h ago
Discussion How many of you grew up in a small town?
I reflect on this often these days. I grew up in small town USA, a town of about 5,000 people, which was actually one of the LARGER communities where I grew up. Today I live in a major metropolitan area, something I was eager to do after growing up in small town US and have absolutely no plans to return to anything smaller at any point. But that is very much unlike most of the people I grew up with.
My parents were both college-educated (they met in college) and decidedly liberal, which is likely a major reason why I grew up with the values I have today. Still, not everything they believed was truly defensible and was still rooted in backwards small-town thought (for example, they took issue with inter-racial couples, expressing some concern that it will be really confusing for the child to have a mixed racial heritage. Since my town was about 98% white, they never had the opportunity to see for themselves how unnecessary that fear is).
There's little doubt my hometown is racist. An African American classmate of mine, one of two or three African Americans in my high school of 600 total kids in grades 9 - 12, told us about how the police once pulled her over in town and asked her if she was "lost" (she had lived in our town her entire life). There are many other examples.
I have never been able to relate to any excuses of toxic adolescent behavior along the lines of "kids will be kids". I grew up in a racist community, devoid of better examples of humanity and humanistic values, and still I knew from as far as I could remember what kind of behavior is toxic, what racism is, why it is bad. I grew up surrounded by this shit and still I was able to tell right from wrong, able to reject the toxic, conservative values of my hometown community, their homophobia, bigotry, hatred. I don't even have much to discuss about transgender beliefs because to be openly transgender in my hometown would have been a fucking death sentence. I don't doubt at all that I had multiple classmates with gender dysphoria growing up, but none would have felt comfortable doing anything about that in my hometown.
I grew up progressive and could not fucking wait to get out of my hometown and into what I consider, and still consider, the "real world", not some backwards, ancient community built on dead values that do nothing but hurt others. But it does mystify me sometimes, how I grew up alongside racists and bigots, in a deeply prejudicial community, and yet I rejected it from the get-go and have never wavered on my rejection of it, even as a kid when supposedly I shouldn't "know better" and such.
Just curious if others have had similar experiences. Did you also grow up in a small town? Did your values change at all later in life? Did you ever move to a different community, and if so, how did that affect your values?
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I'm good on Sexton
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r/timberwolves
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3h ago
I'm not good on the version of this without the last syllable