I was asked about the thing where cottagecore aesthetics are used to encourage white people to ârevitalizeâ small towns, buy up land and hopefully become a new generation of farmer/rancher, as well as crowd out Black and Indigenous people and this is the jist of it:
they donât outright say itâs to push out Black farmowners but what Iâm talking about is a web of rural development policies which do a few things including:
give incentives to new farmers (the incentives grants are given freely to white farmers and routinely deny Black farmers)
advertise rural life/farming but in a way that targets white people in particular (small town chambers of commerce were all over Instagram with white women/babies/families/etc. in wheat fields since it started)
continue the displacement of Black farmers, particularly landowning Black farmers these together form a system that entices and privileges white people to âwork the land.â
it also goes without saying that these rural cities, often sundown towns, really really do not want Black and Indigenous people, or any people of color, Jews, LGBTQ people, etc., to move to their towns so they set up these systems with the coordination of the federal government.
So while Iâm not saying reblogging a picture of a stream is actually just a colonialist plot (unless????? you make it one???????? donât do that.), the aesthetic has baggage and many of these cottagecore blogs (or the blogs they source their materials from) absolutely are trying to sell you something and that something is colonialism.
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