My town has received a lot of national news coverage this week because of our historically strange ways of going about things. It's really about the balance of power, who has it, how they use it, and the process of successful change. If the family is God's laboratory for learning how to love people, Alabama is the nation's laboratory for studying class, racism, and voter fraud. It's a place where tradition has allowed it to remain easy to categorize all types of people while the outside world is ever changing. Holding on to something familiar during shifting sands can be a comfort to humans, even when they know its wrong deep down. We may not necessarily be better or worse people than the rest of the country but we are definitely less subtle (The 50th Anniversary of the 16th Street Church Bombing will remind you of that) (As will the details of picking of candidates for Governor). It's a population Diffusion of Innovations study waiting to happen.
All of this talk about who is accepted and who isn't had me thinking about my own college experience, which was vastly different from the students I teach. It's all a matter of perspective and what you value. In this town, if I told you I roomed with two different Homecoming Queens (one of which was Panhellenic President or something) and was elected SGA Secretary you'd probably think I owned at least three pairs of Tory Burch flats and had my pick of open doors in life. In reality, we thought it was absolutely hilarious that we had a Homecoming Queen and we considered it a bit of a funny adventure. As in, they let us run a muck on the soccer field and put a crown on my roomie's head and hoop and holler and eat free pizza. Here, the Homecoming Queen is escorted by the Governor and was the focus of an HBO documentary. In reality, my roomate leading Panhellenic meant that we had some underclassmen girls over to the Honors House for spaghetti. Here, it would mean determining the life path for thousands of young women. In reality, I was SGA Secretary because nobody cared to run and I needed more scholarship money so the Dean of Student Affairs thought it was a nice way to help me out and get the position filled at the same time. It was an uncontested race that involved zero threat or intimidation to other candidates that might be different from me. Here, it would be a different story and involve putting my name on lots of Range Rovers with white shoe polish. The thing that actually made me kinda popular at my undergraduate university was the fact my three best friends were cast members in the annual Fall Follies production and the guy that sat by me in class led the night's house band. Have I mentioned it was quite a different world?
For all that goes on behind closed doors in this town, I will say that it is good that students care. They care to be a part of leadership, they care to vote, and the students speaking out care to make things better. My undergraduate experience was much better suited to me, but it wasn't perfect. I remember when one of our international students wrote a letter to the school paper on how appalled he was by our apathy regarding student leadership. He was one of the older students that would stand on the walkway above the student center and smoke cigarettes (how scandalous!). He was from a nation with a dictator and wrote that students in his country were killed for trying to have a voice and we didn't care about student government enough to vote (which was ridiculously easy to do while waiting in line for the cafeteria) and we should all be ashamed of ourselves.
I don't know if he made any of us actually care about the SGA, but his letter all those years ago regularly makes me think of democracy, freedom, and privilege. Much like the words that have stuck with me from one of my fellow graduate students when I was the lone white girl in the department. I admit I naively acted like I had shared life experience more often than I should yet my fellow women were so kind in their correction of me. One told me to never forget I was priveleged and to always use my influence for those that would not be granted the same opportunities. I hope I've done my best on all accounts.
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