NYT on Cajuns

I can’t decide whether to be pleased or irritated when the Great Grey Lady reports on Cajun culture. This article (“Born on the Bayou With Little Urge to Roam”) is a great example. On the pleasing side, it paints a picture of a warm, self-sufficient, happy group of people with strong family bonds and an aversion to much of the cultural bad stuff in modern America.
On the irritating side, it perpetuates the stereotype of Cajuns as poorly educated (“Higher education, in fact, is threatening the stay-at-home stability of the entire state.”), insular (“Vacherie is a stupendously static exception to the American rule of wander. With an almost total absence of population mobility…”), and racist (“Blacks and whites agree that race relations in Vacherie are stuck in a kind of 1940’s time warp, with little overt racial animosity and little racial mixing.”)
Me, I think I’ll take the good stuff and leave the bad.