Hey, it’s been a couple weeks since I updated y’all on my project, but I wanted to let you know that I’m still here. I finished my time in South Bend - completing 32 interviews in 25 days 🤯- and now I’m on a long, meandering journey to Johnson City, Tennessee through Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia (my 48th state visited) and, as of today, Virginia.
I have a lot of reflection, synthesis and sharing to do with all of you, but for now I wanted to share with you an insight that I gained this morning…
I took a detour from my trip through West Virginia to stay in Charlottesville last night. It was an intentional choice.
Prior to August 2017, I don't know if I could have pointed this place out to you on a map, but then the Unite the Right rally happened and this city and community were thrust into the national spotlight - for all the wrong reasons. It quickly became the primary anecdote for our social and political divides in the Trump era.
I came here to prove to myself that Charlottesville, Virginia is more than just the leading results of this Google Image search.
I only spent 12 hours here - grabbing dinner, having a drink, sleeping at my Airbnb and enjoying the iced coffee and a breakfast burrito at the cafe where I'm composing this post this morning - so I wouldn't dare to provide a comprehensive take on the community. But I think it's important to acknowledge that places and communities aren't monolithic. That's why I chose to spend a night here and develop some context for myself.
There are people that live here, a world-class university, an exciting modern restaurant scene and access to some of the most beautiful natural resources in the country. There's a diverse population and, if I spent some more time here, I'm sure I'd find out about the challenges they are facing in co-existing and what is being done to address that. Because that work is being done EVERYWHERE on a local level.
I think I'll sound like a broken record before too long, but we do ourselves a disservice when we draw our own conclusions based on the information that is fed to us through our screens and the inherent biases that guide our judgement.