Constantino Diaz-Duran is a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University. He is chronicling his walk from New York to Los Angeles to celebrate his eligibility for American citizenship. Follow Constantino’s progress.

I was introduced this week to the concept of “summer teeth”: sum’er here, sum’er there; sum’er this way, sum’er that way. You’ll find several examples of summer teeth in this clip from HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.

I first watched that video when I was in Alabama. Now I’m in Mississippi, where the footage was filmed. Maher claims that the filmmaker “cut out 20 people who also did not have teeth.” He says they had to edit the footage so that it didn’t look like everyone was missing teeth. That’s probably the case-I’m sure a lot of the people they talked to had suffered from a severe case of summertime in the mouth. But I don’t buy the claim that they didn’t seek these folks out.

You find what you look for, and the Real Time team was looking for rednecks who vote Republican and hate Obama. It’s TV, it’s entertainment, and it’s a misrepresentation of what people here actually look like. In five months in the Deep South, I have definitely seen people with crooked teeth, but they have been few and far between. The vast majority of southerners-yes, even Republican, anti-Obama southerners-have good teeth.

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Now I should probably admit that I have approached my journey with optimism, seeking the good in people and in this country. So maybe that is why I’ve found what I’ve found. But I have no use for rose-colored glasses, and I’m still very much an outsider here. I’ve met people who look askance at me because of my accent, and people who do it because I come from New York. I’m not blind, and I don’t shy away from pointing out problems when I see them. Summer teeth, I assure you, are not a widespread problem.

One of the biggest lessons I’m learning is that, as diverse as our country is, this diversity is fairly homogeneous. What I mean by that is that every region of this country is diverse in similar ways. That diversity includes uneducated “rednecks,” and let’s be honest-they, too, are everywhere.

A trip I took to Long Island a couple of years ago comes to mind. I was flying to Wisconsin to visit my sister, and I got a cheap flight out of the Islip airport. I took the Long Island Railroad from Penn Station to Ronkonkoma, and then I had to take a cab from the train to the airport. And let me tell you, my cabbie’s teeth that day were as summery as summer gets.

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*Photo by Constantino Diaz-Duran.