Good stuff from Kevin at BCR

As usual. Go read it all:

To those seeing Durham through the lens of the lacrosse case alone, it might appear to be your stereotypical post-Drudge, post-Hannity pile on. A one-off flurry of arrows and barbs that will disappear at the next media conflagration.

Except for the fact that Durham is, collectively, used to such rhetoric. Web message boards at the local TV stations already fill up with comments any time a shooting happens in the Bull City. At the least, expect snide comments about the need for a bullet-proof vest in Durham. Followed more typically by comments of the need to get the “thugs” out of Durham, where thug generally seems to be a code-word for young African-American male. (Occasionally, such comments about thugs are followed by jokes about fried chicken, you see.)

The external negativity about Durham did not begin with Duke lacrosse. It won’t end with Duke lacrosse. At its heart, to my mind, is the same source of the rabid complaints about New Orleans after Katrina, or the jibes at other major urban centers: namely, Durham is a diverse, socioeconomically integrated city in an increasingly fragmented United States.

One of the reasons I chose to live in Durham, despite the presence of so many other cities I could have called home in the Triangle, was that I wanted to live in an economically diverse community, a place that looked like America. I mentioned this to a former colleague in my old lefty haunts of Boston last weekend and he looked at me, completely puzzled. The expression seemed to say, why would you want that?

After all, the American dream is to move up the economic ladder, and in a world of suburban and exurban lifestyles, that means moving to new subdivisions surrounded by the comfortable trappings of a mass retail existence. Wake Forest’s boom, linked so closely to Triangle Town Center and I-540, is one example of what is, for many, the desiderata of modern life. I mean, who wants to live where there’s poor people, right?

To abuse the late Douglas Adams for a moment, to many Americans, it seems that if you can’t see poverty, it really isn’t there. And so many of us do our best to live in isolated pockets at the demographic extremes.

Which leads many on the outside to a typical conclusion: if poverty exists, it’s certainly due to dysfunction in whatever place the poverty resides. Be it an inner city, or a mobile home park, or a Native American reservation. If they’d just work a little harder, if they’d just stop having kids, if they’d just put down the bottle, if they’d give up the drugs -- their life would be like mine.

Frankly, a large segment of the U.S. population can’t understand why anyone would choose to live inside Durham. What they may not realize is, many of us who are here wouldn’t choose to live anywhere else.