Why a liberal stays in the South

[RainDog]

17. If African-Americans had stayed in the south

instead of immigrating to Chicago, New York, etc. during the 1st half of the 20th c, an entire cultural moment would not exist in our society - and that moment was the cultural emergence of African-Americans in literature and music and other arts - and the birth of 20th century American arts.

They had to leave in order to find jobs that paid enough to get out from under sharecropper peonage. Should they have stayed, as well?

Seems to me they did a good thing by leaving the south.

So, I guess I find it sort of... I dunno... straw person bashing to talk about liberal bubbles, etc. when people choose not to live among others whose values are abhorrent to them and, instead, choose to create another version of what's possible in this nation.

People move for jobs and opportunities. Many jobs and opportunities exist in cities, not in rural areas...in the south as well as anywhere else, but you really can't blame people for moving for job opportunities... unless you want to create straw people to knock down for being all uppity liberal and all.

And there's nothing "gated community liberalism" about choosing to live in places where there's more racial diversity, for instance, that is culturally enforced in a hundred different ways. When my next-door-neighbor is an African-American woman married to a white man, and my other neighbor is from Thailand, and another is a gay man living with his husband - in a not fancy middle-class community - I guess I don't get what's so "gated liberal" about that - it's the opposite, in fact.

That's living your liberal values.

People can vote with their feet, too, when they have options that create the life they want, as far as living their values are concerned.