Beyond the “Real Americans”: The Case for Expanding Our Vision of Rurality in the United States

Introduction

From electoral politics to cultural markers, the rural-urban divide has been well-documented in the United States. Starting from the founding, there is a rich tradition in the U.S. of contrasting the Jeffersonian ideation of citizen farmers with the Hamilton’s vision of an aristocratic nation (Krause, 2015). Through the later part of the 20th century, the development of the national interstate system and growth of suburbs (e.g., Kruse, 2007) helped shift the national consciousness of the rural-urban split. As a result, the term urban came to conjure people of color, poverty, and crime, whereas rural came to symbolize an idyllic lifestyle of neighbor helping neighbor in a slower, purer pace of life. Among other things, the rural idyllic overlooks or ignores the richness of non-white cultures in rural areas across the United States, including black communities in southern states, Latino communities in southwestern states, and tribal lands across the country (Ratledge, 2020). Additionally, the rural idyllic narrative minimizes the complexities and struggles of rural communities in the U.S. (Azano & Stewart, 2016). Embedded in this view is a homogenous rural culture that is the negative contrast to those who live in non-rural areas, casting urban and suburban Americans as less than the ‘real Americans’ in rural areas. This chapter focuses on areas of educational research that are ripe for better understanding and defining the rural landscape of life and education.

There are at least 17 U.S. states that lie in a rural research desert (Thier et al., 2021) with the Upper Midwest and Northeast states comprising the majority of these states. This means that almost half of the U.S. lies in an area with an underdeveloped conception of rurality and rural schooling. Within the body of educational research, there is an opportunity to revisit education in a rural context and build a body of research that can reconceptualize the lived experiences of people living in rural communities across the U.S. Qualitative research, because it is reflexive and able to account for social and cultural context (Kozleski, 2017), is particularly well-suited to better understand the nature of rurality of place and what makes it similar and distinct from other regional ruralities. Definitions of rural may be sociological, demographic, or statistical, but by expanding educational research beyond the numbers and incorporating qualitative research, we may come to a more complete understanding of rural spaces in the U.S.

The meaning of Americanness has historically been one of exclusion (Alfonseca, 2022), resulting in unequal distribution of power. Who gets to be an ‘American’ is a political question as much as a categorical one. While there is a legal definition of a U.S. citizen, ‘real Americans’ and its derivations (i.e., ordinary Americans, everyday Americans) connote cultural markers more than legal status. U.S. citizenship confers all rights and privileges to the individual citizen, but cultural markers may be just as important to ‘Americanness’ than legal classifications. This opportunity also allows traditionally marginalized voices within rural communities to be heard and be more fully integrated into their communities. Future research should explore the extent to which rural communities get to define their cultural values by considering who has traditionally been included in the rural discourse and who has been historically marginalized within these communities.