Small town life

Abstract

■ Moving to southern Ohio from upstate New York was a necessity: I needed the job. I wondered what it would be like to live in the Midwest as a single African American woman. I soon learned that racial, social, and sexual homogeneity compounded to make my new neighborhood into a cohesive whole from which I was excluded. Confronting daily expressions of hostility from neighbors and pointed comments about race from students, I wrote notes on my kitchen calendar to record these odious events. I was an ‘exception’ but still an ‘outsider’, a reminder of what people who belonged to this nearly all-white gay-partnered community did not want. My ‘outsider-ness’ afforded me some immunity, yet veiled conversation said ‘she’s not so different from the rest of them’. This article discusses my reawakening to homogeneity as the basis for solidifying social bonds, while I learned more about myself.