Rural electoral precincts in Orange County only a few miles away from town showed Trump margins well over 60%, and in bordering counties (like Alamance, to the West), Trump margins exceeded 80% in some areas. However, Orange County is one of the borders between ‘Red-State’ and ‘Blue State’ North Carolina, and Hillsborough, in particular, is at the interface between the growing metropolitan area and the rural and semi-rural patchwork that characterizes much of North Carolina and the South. Neighboring Chapel Hill, home of the University of North Carolina, and Durham, home of Duke University, are overwhelmingly Democrat: Biden led in many precincts by over 90%. In the Town of Hillsborough’s limits, at a more granular level, the margin was as high as 86% for Biden, and no precinct was lower than 66% ( NY Times Analysis, 2021). Some numbers from the 2020 presidential election: In Orange County, where Hillsborough is the county seat, the margin for President Joe Biden was 74% to Trump’s 23% ( NC State Board of Elections). Pride flags are commonplace in local establishments, even found on the walls of a local hardcore gym, alongside the ‘Thin Blue’ and ‘Red Line’ Flags and the “Gadsden” (“Don’t Tread on Me”) Flag, common mainstream symbolic indications of radical-right ideology. In 2021, Hillsborough passed a sweeping set of LGBTQ protections. Carrboro, a town near Hillsborough, elected the first openly-gay mayor in North Carolina’s history, in 1995. The region has also been an enclave of LGBTQ-justice. Known for its pre-Revolutionary-War homes, some which date to the 1750s, and its local community of writers, Hillsborough has long been a popular bedroom community in the fast-growing, highly-educated, Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill metropolitan area – a bastion of progressive politics in a relatively-conservative Southern state. It is a quiet, leafy town, about 10 miles from the cities of Durham and Chapel Hill. Hillsborough, North Carolina, is not an obvious home for radical-right activity.
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The Coming-Together of ‘Red State’ and ‘Blue State’ Pride flags or Proud boys? You can’t have it both ways and expect downtown, or the local economy, to flourish.
#Charlottesville gay pride flags full#
The Hot Tin Roof encourages Proud Boys, in full dress, to patronize their business and rub elbows with its largely young, diverse, gender-fluid, queer, and progressively open-minded clientele. Here’s an excerpt from a letter written by a patron at the Hot Tin Roof bar in Hillsborough: However, suburbs like Hillsborough, NC are tense borderlands, where territory, ideology, and space are contested, and Proud Boys drink in bars draped with (LGBTQ) Pride Flags, threatening community cohesion and rupturing social fabric.
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The widening political, cultural, and economic gap between urban and rural America has resulted in two distinct worlds that rarely come into physical contact with each other: a radical-right worldview centered on nationalism, hyper-patriotism, and rejection of social justice narratives, and a more progressive worldview oriented toward inclusion and equity. The American suburbs, where rural touches urban, are awkward meeting places of the radical-right and progressive communities.