My Old Kentucky Home: Improving Lexington

This is going to be the first of what will probably become many rants about Lexington, Kentucky; where I've called home for the last seven years.

I was reading "Madison Trip Shows Importance of Attitudes" this morning on Lexington Herald-Leader columnist Tom Eblen's blog and I thought he brought up some pretty good points:

"Metro Lexington is a more beautiful place, with better year-round weather, than either of those cities. So why do they rank higher on national surveys of quality of life and economic vitality?"

U.S. Mood Map: Kentucky Saddest, Hawaii Gladdest

While Eblen might be exaggerating the "better year-round weather" bit (at least this year), our worst winters are not even in the same league as the winters in Chicago, Detroit, or Buffalo. Yet, for some reason, these oppressively cold cities consistently rank higher than Lexington in terms quality-of-life indicators. Why?

Obviously there's not a single answer; my gut feeling is that it has to do with the lack of economic opportunities in Lexington and Kentucky as a whole. Not that this problem is unique to Lexington by any means, but what is someone graduating college with a liberal arts degree right now supposed to do here? This was a problem even before the recession because the root of it is that, while there are a good number of white collar jobs and manual labor-intensive jobs, there really isn't much in between. The biggest employers in and around Lexington: Alltech, Amazon, Smuckers, UPS, Lexmark, to name a few (not to mention the horse-racing industry), do not offer the entry-level positions with the potential for advancement that college grads are looking for. Not that college grads are "better" than these jobs; it's just that you don't need to go $50,000 in debt in order to get a job at Amazon. Although Lexington is a college town, many of its graduates are ultimately forced to leave because there are no jobs for them. Which leads to the next point:

"We don’t integrate our universities into the rest of the community as well as Madison and Austin do. We don’t value education — or educated people — as much as those cities do. We won’t embrace and celebrate our creative entrepreneurs as much as those cities do."

This could not be more true, and I think it also helps explain the lack of economic opportunities in and around Lexington. It's no coincidence that the state's top university can afford $40 million for a new basketball coach yet their professors are not allowed to make paper copies of the syllabus because there isn't money in the budget for copying.

Again, this is merely my experience, but there's kind of a toxic attitude towards education that seems ingrained in the culture here. I didn't have the best grades in high school, which is part of the reason I ended up at UK, but when I got here I felt like if not the smartest person in most of my classes, I was certainly the hardest-working. Having been a C student in high school I was shocked (though not as shocked as my parents) when I made straight A's in my first semester. I won the award for best research paper in my department when I was a sophomore. Sure, I was an under-achiever in high school, but the difference in my public education and that of my peers was astonishing; many of my peers were not even capable of writing a five paragraph essay, yet somehow graduated from high schools in Louisville like Ballard with B+ averages. I cannot stress enough the academic laziness instilled in my fellow students while an undergraduate.

Just to illustrate: in college I sat through class after class where the majority of students flat-out refused to read assigned material. Refused! It was guaranteed hilariousness to have foreign professors who were clearly from countries where students do their homework and respect the professors (remember we're talking about college students here not 5th graders), because of the shock of these professors upon realizing that they had been duped into playing head babysitter in the day-cares with beer that we call college. The cherry on top is that, although many of my peers were too lazy to read a three page reading assignment, in the end most thought that they were smarter than the professor anyways because, in their minds, the professor was probably just a dumb foreigner who couldn't speak English.

"One message came through loud and clear: It’s not about the place so much as the attitudes of the people who live there. Lexington must do more to leverage its “social capital.” All of it.Cities such as Madison and Austin are more open to people who are different. They value diversity and strive for inclusion...Too many aspects of community life are as starkly black or white as the plank fences that surround our horse farms. For example, many Lexingtonians do not welcome Latinos, even though the local economy would collapse without them. Gays and lesbians often feel shunned. Young people of all races complain they are not valued — or listened to."

Ding! Ding! Ding! Let's be clear: there are many great folks here. But, at the same time, there's a lot of racism, both overt and covert.

Having lived in the northern suburbs of Chicago my whole life, I don't think I had ever heard someone actually use the "N" word until I came to school here as a freshman and joined a fraternity (this wasn't even the fraternity that dresses in confederate uniforms every year). Given the stereotypes many outsiders have about Kentucky, I can't say I was that surprised thatsomeone from Kentucky used the "N" word. What did surprise me, though, was how many of the people I heard using the "N" word in casual conversation were from Louisville. (Define irony: racist rich white kids from the suburbs smoking Black & Milds, listening to hip-hop, while wearing gold chains and G-Unit attire.) Let's not even mention the anti-Latino sentiment (most try not to). Even the way most people in Lexington say "those MEXicans" is offensive.

...So what's my point? I don't really have one, other than pointing out the fact that our city has a long way to go. The outdated, ignorant attitudes of a few (although unfortunately more than a few in reality), more than anything,continue to hold this city back and reinforce outsider's stereotypes that we're just a bunk of backwards drunkard redneckians . Maybe if we want to undo the stereotypes the rest of the country has about Kentucky, we should start by undoing the outdated and often racist stereotypes many Kentuckians hold towards people they perceive as different.