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LA, Long Beach, New York and Pittsburgh come to mind.
From what I've seen of one year in the midwest, people are kind of in a lock step around here. Conform or leave!
Welcome to the rust belt. Things here are done in a very straight and narrow form. Not much room for stepping outside of those lines and if you wanna be creative please leave these areas, or you could get persecuted, or worse yet burned at the stake for having "evil" ideas. ...Counting down the days for total liberation!
There are some elements of "conforming to society" that are necessary to avoid prison or an insane asylum. Some obvious examples being you don't have sex on a public sidewalk, you don't lick the faces of strangers, and if you see a dead bird on the street you don't try to eat it. Many other mammals do these things, but other mammals don't have to conform to society. For that matter some things children do, like bite someone for stealing their favorite toy or steal lunch money, are probably not going to be acceptable in most places.
My first reaction is of course, most places have their eccentrics, but they are tolerated/embraced some places better than others.
But somehow I get the impression the OP is concerned about racial stereotypes. Is that correct? In that case it might be a good idea to move somewhere that there aren't too many folks of your race/subgroup, that way the locals are less likely to have developed stereotypes.
Sorry, but from what I've seen of midwestern cities, its pretty-much golly-gee-whiz-its-vanilla bland around here.
Of course we are talking about cities. Their are plenty of rural areas in the entire country where the locals just have their own way of doing things. But then you are still conforming to that local mind set.
You could always live like the unabomber, without the anger and paranoia.
Rereading it the stereotyping issue does seem to be the idea.
However it's not necessarily true that a place with few of a certain subgroup are less likely to have stereotypes. There was no black people in my entire school K-12, but there were certainly people with stereotypes of blacks. From the 13th-15th centuries England maintained several Anti-Semitic stereotypes even though there were no, or no openly, Jewish people in the entire country. (King Richard had exiled them during the Crusades and refugees from the Inquisition had not yet arrived)
I think this "few=no stereotypes" only works if it's a socially liberal area or if you're of a minority group that is comparatively obscure. If you're Walloon or of the Baha'i faith you might not be treated at all in a stereotyped manner in a place where there is few like you. However if you're Black or Mexican people are going to have heard negative stereotypes in most any part of the nation and in some cases they'll believe them. The two little towns I've lived in were both over 95% white and there are a fair number of racists or racial stereotyping in both of them.
I have observed that people who live in the urban core - like in a dense city residential environment - are those who are more likely not to "conform to society". This seems to hold true even in small cities.
But this also is influenced by my perception of what it means to "conform to society." What this means to you, seems to have something to do with race, which I do not have to worry about.
Are there any cities in the US that have people who don't conform to society?
Um...all of them?
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