"I don't see race": Living in a bubble of whiteness

 I've been thinking about this, from Roger Marshall, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Kansas:

"I don't see race" is a line that has become a punch line, but it occurred to me that for Kansans, it is literally true: They think they don't see race because so often they don't actually see Black people: 13.4 percent of the U.S. population is Black, according to the U.S. Census, but just 6.1 percent of the Kansas population is. In Great Bend, where Marshall lives, the number is less than 2 percent.

I went to a central Kansas high school where (reputedly) one Black person had ever graduated in the entire history, and that was before my era. For many rural or rural-ish Kansans who live outside the cities of Wichita, Topeka and Kansas City, it is pretty easy to go about your life -- work, education, church, everything -- and only occasionally, if ever, encounter a Black person.* That means your primary source of understanding comes from media sources instead of anything remotely resembling real life. 

*There's a related but also separate discussion to be had about the state's Latino population, but Marshall's quote comes in the context of Black Lives Matter.

Which is how you can start a sentence saying that you don't see race and finish it by talking about "the ghetto."

As a political matter, it's pretty easy to vote for somebody like Marshall, then, because -- even though he's going to go and caucus with a party that do esso much, for example, to gut the Voting Rights Act, and which supports a president who is plainly racist -- you don't see the ramifications of that party's acts in your real life. The color line is a theory, and not one that bears much thinking about in one's politics. A lot of us in Kansas "don't see race" because -- all to often -- we don't have to see Black people. I suspect that makes a difference. 

These folks are in a bubble of whiteness, and it's no less pernicious than any other bubble we've talked about in recent years. Maybe even more so: As Nate Silver notes, America's rural areas get 2.5 times the representation in the U.S. Senate than do urban areas. It probably goes without saying that those rural areas are considerably whiter than America as a whole. Some of the folks who live in those areas are surely racist. But a lot of people are probably comfortable with the racially disparate impact of their votes because they think they don't see race -- and in a very real sense, they don't.

Updated with some copyedits.