Why I am writing NPR a letter/email tomorrow (hopefully)

Yesterday, as I was traveling home, I listened to a readers leader (presumably read by the reader) about how she feels that people in Kentucky are misunderstood. Or was it West Virginia. I'm not really sure.

At any rate, the story came on at approximately 5:15 on station 90.7, the NPR station broadcast from UMSL (University of Missouri in St. Louis). I was, quite honestly, very disturbed. And here is why: the letter was dishonest, and ignorant. And from NPR, I expect better. It was totally CNN/FoxNews worthy.

Now before you google the story, and then take offense at my portrayal, let me give you the base of my argument: the reader/writer uses generalities to attack generalities, a horribly circular argument, and is offensive while doing it. She says, quite plainly, that she feels discriminated against by Black people she knows because she is white and southern, and that Black communities have more in common with her community than they realize. All I could say was wow. You don't want me to lump you in with other people from Kentucky/West Virginia, but you lump me in with every Black person in this country. Why, again, should I listen to you, and think that all Southern people aren't racist again (I do not feel this way, having lived in the South for about a year during my teenaged years).

And then, NPR commentators failed to give the "letter" any perspective. While, young college aged woman, I appreciate your opinion, I am offended by your logic, and fail to understand your perspective. You cannot refute a generalization with a generalization. I understand that people are justifiably angry at the way that their state is portrayed. I have felt such indignation being from Ohio, and hearing people say all kinds of things about it, and assuming that I grew up on a farm. However, I am not delusional, at least not enough to think that my own generalizations are as much to blame as theirs. For example, I still believe my friends from law school feel I grew up in some sort of rural community. I grew up in a small city, but it is very urban, and very much the kind of city discribed in countless novels which discuss factory cities. We have crime. And I grew up in a working-class Black urban community. I would argue that I saw more urban life than many of my friends who grew up on the east coast. But, I also acknowledge that I honestly believed, until I visited a friend in Queens, that houses in NYC had no grass, and quite frankly there were no houses, just apartments, townhomes, and brownstones, with a stamp sized browing patch of green seedlings at best. So, if I were to attack anyone else, it would be a pot calling the kettle black situation.

This is exactly what this "letter" was, and I felt sad listening to it, and hearing how NPR seemed to place some inheirent weight in her uninformed and generalized words. NPR, you should be ashamed. I am calling you out. But I doubt my email will ever make it on the air. And people who noddeed in their heads listening to the intense but wrong statements of the "letter" will never hear the other side.