“WE JUST FEEL LIKE WE DON’T BELONG HERE ANYMORE”

Since Donald Trump’s election, there has been ample coverage of rural white America—the rise of white nationalism, the white crowds in Charlottesville, Virginia, who violently defended a Confederate monument, the embattled white working class that makes up Trump’s core constituency. From the media reports, you’d think rural places were devoid of people of color. But that isn’t true—it’s just that their stories have largely been ignored.

I grew up in a poor farming town called Bells in Crockett County, West Tennessee. The county is 74 percent white—I am also white—14 percent black, and 10 percent Hispanic. Most of the people I went to school with are still there. The main highway that winds through the county is framed by cotton