Regardless of what happens on November 8, we can be certain that the post-election analysis will reproduce the stereotypes we hold. As civic educators, we can do better—by improving the accuracy with which we discuss our communities and country; the attentiveness we bring to supporting students’ understanding of our aspirations for democracy and rights; and the care with which we connect with and include off-campus partners in democratic discussion and visioning.
I’ve spent twenty years working with community organizations, college students, and faculty to advance civic and global learning. That work has clarified how the biases students bring into classrooms are frequently reproduced in educational institutions and the mainstream media. I have also seen programs that counter misunderstandings and misinformation, carefully developing students’ self, community, and broader social understanding, growing from the assets within the students we have and the communities we are.
Almost a decade ago, when I taught in the Staley School of Leadership Studies at Kansas State University, a Latinx student shared in class discussion that, coming from Seward County in Southwest Kansas, the first time she was in a majority white classroom was at K-State. This was news for many of her Kansan classmates (of many backgrounds), whose sense of place and community had yet to align with what demographers understand about the state today.
Seward County, well off the interstates and many hours from major cities, is more than 60% Hispanic. Understanding the personal identities that students held, how they were reflected in their local communities, and where that identity intersected with social movements and civic belonging fit well with the Social Change Model of Leadership the school employed. Of course, understanding our individual identities and their reflections in our communities isn’t only important in leadership development programming.
Accurately understanding who we are shifts the kinds of political conversations we can have. But who are “we”? Justice-based organizers often wish to expand the answer to that question, yet structural and more explicit violences, from exclusionary colonial roots and forward, have always constrained and periodically re-contract “our” community. Nearly a century ago, just outside Philadelphia, more than 200 members of the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross to intimidate the Italian Catholic and Black communities adjacent to the Haverford College campus where I work. A policeman responding to the incident was shot by a Klansman, becoming the first township police officer killed in the line of duty.
Today, Italian Catholic pride sometimes aligns with conservative or center-right desires such as maintaining statues of Columbus. And while that particular police department has often led on efforts to advance inclusion, the political distance measured between Blue Lives and Black Lives Matter signs is difficult to reconcile with the facts of the first slain officer here. Communities change. Communities are contested. “We” expand and contract.
There is a kind of accuracy in understanding the distribution of ethnic and racial identities we recognize today. Then there is the much more difficult civic work of understanding and co-creating the identities and communities we wish to become, together. Our political divisions are such that we have a difficult time imagining a broad, American, “We, the People.”
Our inability to see ourselves as a nation is expressed not only in our ignorance of racial and ethnic diversities and their shifts but also in our collective commitments to insist that certain regions are irrevocably “red” or “blue.” The region I’m originally from in rural Pennsylvania is about thirty miles southwest of Lancaster, PA, an area many folks know as “Amish Country.”
In national news coverage, that swath between Pennsylvania's Democrat-boosting larger cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh is repeatedly represented as a single, monolithically red space. Yet Lancaster City and County have been places of Latinx inmigration since the 1940s, with the Latinx population surpassing the Amish and Mennonite population in the early 00’s. Lancaster resettles refugees at twenty times the rate of the rest of the United States. 70 languages are spoken in the school district.
A thorough civic and global examination of Lancaster would include interrogating how the Amish, Mennonite, and Quaker ideological influences in the area intertwine with some of the strands of welcoming, inclusivity, and abolitionist work that thread through colonial history to the present. Historians and community activists are beginning this work, expanding understanding of the Christiana Resistance of 1851—a critical act of rebellion against the institution of slavery, led by a group of Free Black individuals who were part of the rural county’s population of some 3,000 Free Black persons in the mid-nineteenth century. During the rebellion, a Maryland farmer pursuing a person he had enslaved was killed. But neither the Black leadership nor their white Quaker allies were successfully prosecuted in the court proceedings that followed. Today, Lancaster County leans red, and fairly strongly. Yet it is not a monolith, and there is substantial variation when one looks around the edges.
Looking for the action at the edges was something I learned from my grad school statistics professor, who noted how data can inform us about averages and trends, but movements for social change are often outside of the normal distribution (I earned my master’s degree in political science in Lincoln, NE, a small city with one of the highest rates of refugee resettlement in the US). Central Pennsylvania leans red—as does the Midwest of the US. But these identities are nothing like fixed. A civic thinker wonders, what else is underway?
Early this past August, Kansas surprised the country with a resounding rejection of an amendment intended to restrict access to abortion. In the analysis that followed, NPR Political Correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben said, “To be clear, Kansas isn't now a blue or purple state.” This news might come as a surprise to the 42% of Kansans who voted for President Biden, to the Democratic Governor Laura Kelly, or to Sharice Davids (D-KS), one of the first indigenous women elected to Congress and the first openly LGBTQ+ member from that state.
The point here isn’t so much the precise political color of Kansas. It’s that people have always moved and places have always changed. To think civically requires robust understanding of history and social institutions—not merely horseracing among this election cycle’s candidates. K-State’s home in the small city of Manhattan, Kansas was, in the mid-1800s, settled by ardent abolitionists; by the turn of the 20th Century, a small town in the Southeast corner of the state produced the leading socialist newspaper in the US. Red Kansas indeed.
Purple Pennsylvania is also more complex than pundits allow. A Philadelphia Inquirer analysis notes, “The state’s division is clear in the 2018 U.S. Senate race results, with blue in cities and suburbs and red in rural areas.” That’s true—except where it’s not. In the 2018 Governor’s Race, ten counties that border neither Philadelphia nor Pittsburgh went blue. Yes, they frequently contain small cities—but so does much of the Commonwealth. Even in very rural counties with less than 20,000 total voters, typically something on the order of a third of votes are splitting for the Dems. In Philadelphia, more than 130,000 votes were cast for Trump in the last Presidential election. As with the Kansas example above, there are truths in the headlines, and essential details that are lost too.
Whether in a 2019 review of voter registration data or 2020 election results, the state—like the country—witnesses accelerating geographical separation along party identities. Yet there are many thousands of people registered with each party in every county. And the occasional very rural county—like Elk and Lawrence—have virtually even rates of Democratic and Republican registrants. Hence the very tight race: Can PA Democratic Senate Candidate John Fetterman deliver with his rural strategy?
Poll watchers will know soon, but more important is the reality that geography is not destiny. Renegotiation is always underway, everywhere. Maria Hinojosa’s Latino USA podcast recently profiled North Dakota, the state with the greatest rate of Latino population growth in the entire country. One of the individuals she spoke with, Yolanda Rojas, was homemaking and community-building in Watford City, reflecting, “Here I discovered a beauty. It’s a peaceful place. It’s very safe. It’s a great environment to raise a family.”
Ms. Rosas' reflections reminded me of people holding Latinx backgrounds who I’ve spoken with in Pennsylvania, who say they move here not only for work but also for more affordable living, and for the more tranquil country life. Lancaster is emblematic of broader trends stretching through the Poconos and to New York. Two-thirds of Pennsylvania’s population growth between 1970 and 2010 was due to people holding Latinx identities. From Mexico, Peru, the Caribbean, and especially from among Puerto Rican communities in New York City, Latinx folks moved into and around Allentown, Bethlehem, Lebanon, and Reading.
People who travel internationally know there are great diversities in rural and urban spaces everywhere, but somehow—oddly—“rural” in the United State has become a codeword for “white,” while “urban” is expected to translate as “diverse,” which is itself another inaccurate codeword for “nonwhite.” This imagination is simply wrong. Not only in the states I’ve enumerated, but also through Chinese presence in rural Oregon, Native American communities in South Dakota, and the preponderance of Black folks in the cosmopolitan crossroads that is the Mississippi Delta Region. Those examples speak to long-term presence, while ESRI’s 2020 diversity index shows diversity increases at higher rates in rural and micropolitan areas than in metropolitan zones nationwide.
Regardless of this election cycle’s results, in institutions of higher education, we have opportunities and obligations to enhance student understanding of the places where we are situated, and the global, historical, and cultural processes that have formed those places. In the center I direct, we draw on open access tools we helped co-create, in the Global Solidarity, Local Actions Toolkit, to provide students with conceptual resources, such as considering their roles in social change, along with some specific, place-based preparation about (in our case) Philadelphia—before they begin summer internships all across the region. We supplement that online, flipped-classroom resource with POP - the Philadelphia Orientation Program—a five-day, intensive, experiential introduction to social change agents, organizations, and communities all across the Philadelphia region. Data and text support our students’ understanding of the communities where we work and call home—but it is the experiential learning through internships that frequently root students in more profound understanding and relationships.
Through internships, Haverford College students have developed online digital literacy resources with the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, supported youth programming in the region through the African Family Health organization, and worked with the PA Humanities Council on their We are Here podcast. Through these individual internships with specific organizations, students not only learn more about the incredible diversities that surround us while developing professional skills; they also collaborate with and support the organizations and initiatives that are ensuring we see, respect, and support one another. It is neither experience nor careful attention to data, demographics, and history alone, but the combination, brought into continuous and challenging thoughtful conversation. This kind of programming is expanding on many campuses.
Colleagues at Cornell, Dickinson College, East Carolina University and several other institutions use the toolkit as well, supplementing introductions to key concepts such as sustainable development goals and structural violence with their own place-based examples and preparatory programs. One of our core assumptions is that most people have the greatest opportunity for positive contribution and leadership on challenging global issues in their home communities. But many of us have work to do to better understand our home communities, too.
In a dark way, I am somewhat hopeful. I’ve been reflecting on the old adage, “the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.” Look around: democracy has been disappearing in the US. Those of us who believe in the radical, unfolding, fundamentally unachieved experiment in creating a diverse, multiracial, inclusive democracy have been put on notice. It is long past time to double down for democracy.
Homegrown fascism and terrorism have reawakened us to the reality that democracy will not come to pass without thoroughgoing commitments to the human dignity of every single person in our communities. Across media platforms, backgrounds, and positionalities, people like Valerie Kaur, Alicia Garza, Baratunde Thurston, and Eric Liu have been calling us into the Public Love and commitment required of any community that wishes to achieve flourishing together.
This pushes us beyond the distanced theoretical inquiry (that I have been guilty of) pointing out the impossibility of democracy without shared commitments to common human dignity and basic rights. It asks us to connect, to community-build, to deep canvas—to build a better party for democracy. And here I mean the party with drinks and neighbors, connecting and camaraderie. Those parties, where we accept one another, talk, and consider our shared visions together, are building blocks of democracy.
As Anand Giridharadas argues in his new book, The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy, we who believe in the hope that is democracy must continuously call our neighbors in to the fun, exciting, beautiful world that is the peaceful and inclusive community we will co-create.
This can be hard from within higher education. Too often, our institutions prioritize neutrality over democracy, and manage to find it difficult to embrace the rights-oriented public statements implied by our public-serving missions. And even more challenging: the greatest and growing rift in the US Public is between people who have graduated from college and people who have not done so. Democratic dialogues on campus without off-campus partnerships are necessarily and structurally limited.
On campuses, just as with internship work, we must partner with off-campus organizations to connect more broadly across communities in respectful and democratic dialogue. Organizations like The Bridge Alliance, The Interactivity Foundation, and the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation are working on this—and often with dynamic local manifestations of community-building, inviting neighbors together for coffee, cookies, drinks, dinner—and democratic discussion. None of this is easy, but the spaces must be open to everyone (people who threaten violence excepted).
In closing, I note that these three things: advancing accuracy of understanding our actual complexity, developing appreciation for the aspirational and ever-opening quality of American Democracy (making it something we choose and re-choose), and inviting off-campus partnerships, repeatedly and systematically—are well within the general capacities and purposes of American Higher Education writ large. Other vital democratic projects, such as improving the extent to which our institutions adhere to the principle of One Person, One Vote, may require some time with policy analysts and political scientists. But across the board - we need everyone.
Democracy-building is a multi-generational project. With intentionality and attentiveness to strategies for accuracy, aspirations, and off-campus engagement—including working directly and carefully with K12 partners—we just may contribute to increasingly accurate understandings of who we are, watering the seeds of the more just, inclusive, sustainable communities we must become.
Eric Hartman is Executive Director of the Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship and a Co-director of the Community-based Global Learning Collaborative.