I recently met a girl from Minnesota. She described her home as a quaint town of just more than 50,000 people where the average home costs half a million dollars. My new friend said there was one black family and a bi-racial family in her neighborhood. A few students of color attended her high school. Most of the black kids that went there came from the surrounding areas — they didn’t live in the actual city. “You have to be very lucky to live there,” she said.

This town sounds like the perfect place to learn a lot about inner-city black culture. It doesn’t sound like the demoralizing place where police pull you over for having the wrong shade of skin. Or a place running short on role models because all the good jobs moved to the suburbs and took the lawyers, doctors and firefighters with them.

This town isn’t the neighborhood where political parties systematically distribute flyers, telling people “not to forget to vote on Wednesday.” (By the way, the presidential election will always be on a Tuesday.)

Although it may be reasonably argued that these people need to take responsibility for knowing when Election Day is or choosing where they live, generalizing about the extent to which they listen to rap music or ruin the entire black culture doesn’t move them any closer to getting out of the ghetto. But it does move us further from the truth.

The reality is that most Americans get their information about cultures they have never experienced from a media-condensed version of knowledge to accommodate the pea-sized attention span of the average American.

It’s the fallacy of the dominant culture: the tendency to look down upon those who are not a part of the dominant culture.

Do we not remember that men once believed (sadly, some still do) that women were incapable of leadership or responsible voting? When a group of women gets together, men become “the stupid half” of humanity.

Can we not see that while we gawk at religious veils, people in the Middle East believe the United States is the most immoral society ever to exist?

When you have a large group of people who glorify Tim McGraw or Green Day, they may tend to demonize other artists such as Nelly or Tupac.

The reality is that if we can argue that inner-city black culture is dominated by “bling-bling,” perhaps we should argue that the American culture is dominated by the same. It seems American aspirations are fulfilled on car lots and in magazines, and everything sells better with a half-naked woman standing close by.

American heroes are celebrities, and we track their dating and mating patterns as if they were our own neglected families. Apparently their break-up-and-find-another philosophy sets a great example: More than 50 percent of marriages in our country end in divorce. Accordingly, I’d argue that America stands as the world standard for “bling-bling.”

Yet, a report of “American culture morphed by vulgarity” would not be very popular in this country. Headline: “Once pioneering modern democracy, nation deliberately disenfranchises citizens.” Why not? Because in the United States, “Americans” dominate the culture. Not black Americans. Or women or Latinos or the elderly. It shouldn’t be surprising when the dominant culture demonizes what it considers to be a minority. But we can call it what it is: shortsighted ignorance.

My new friend said her town is “about as diverse as Ames,” recalling how she and her mother exchanged puzzled expressions and laughed as they were told how “diverse” Iowa State is during freshmen orientation. The evidence? The speaker proudly boasted that “over 600 of our students are African American.”

Out of more than 26,000 students. I suppose the dominant culture has the right to set the standards for what we consider “diverse.” I just hope we don’t use members of our “diverse” Ames population to generalize about cultures and communities across the nation and the world.

We’ve seen the dire consequences of generalization all too many times.