Stars Fell on Alabama (yes of course I wanted to call this "Sweet Home Alabama" but do you know what they say about Governor Wallace in that song?)

Good morning-- it's December 13 and people with anti-racist, feminist, left-leaning sensibilities are feeling pretty thrilled with Alabama (a sentence that's probably never been uttered before). The "news" on my social media (which for me means facebook) is pretty evenly divided between people feeling thrilled and hopeful and people cautioning "us" that "we" didn't do this-- Black men and women did this (yes, this is presuming that the people speaking to each other on my facebook wall are white left-leaning men and women. That's fairly true.) I think it's useful and extremely, extremely important to keep this in mind: white people did not elect Doug Jones. Black people elected Doug Jones. Here's the breakdown everyone is looking at. Notice that Black people are outnumbered by white people in Alabama 2 to 1. 

But there's another statistic from the exit polls that feels very important to me this morning. Here it is:

What this graph says to me is not the super depressing thing that everyone is gleaning from the one above it, but something much more empowering: EDUCATION MATTERS. College education clearly didn't magically turn the white people of Alabama into the kind of Americans I think we should be, but that has got to be evidence of one of the biggest possible political changes you could make in a person. I recognize that there are many other factors at play in the blanket designation "college graduate" (like CLASS and AGE probably), but still. In a political landscape where people are winning or losing by a few hundred votes, we see a 21% difference in white women's political choices. 17% in men's. Those are not enough to swing either of those demographics overall, but they are more than enough to swing an election. Those margins represent thousands of people. 

Those margins are where I am trying to make a difference, and a night like last night in Alabama--where my white maternal grandmother grew up before putting herself through college in Tennessee where she married a Chinese man in 1950 against plenty of familial disapproval and pressure--a night like last night is evidence I am using to feel encouraged in what I do, much more often than not in the face of great stress, and disillusionment, and exhaustion. 

I think that graph alone is proof of exactly why the Republican congress is targeting universities and students in their current tax plan. Education works for individuals and I think it works for the greater whole as well, whatever kind of ragged, flawed, dirty whole that we are fighting to become or remain.




PS: A bonus graph that i find super interesting:

Check out how Moore gained a few votes from non-white college graduates! It seems like some kind of privilege bell curve. Or a weird spot where culture mixing could lead to a little Stockholm Syndrome with white supremacy? Still, not nearly as significant as the changes in white voters on the basis of education.