If I could pinpoint one driving force behind my liberal progressive beliefs that make me hyper-aware of social ills, it’s this: I went to and graduated from college.
A college education surrounded me with other liberal people, who naturally became some of my best friends. Being a conservative would have made me an outcast in a lot of circles. I hate to say it but it’s the truth, and I would have had to work a lot harder to gain the trust of people who surrounded me. I was certainly liberal before, but my experience in college drove me further left than I ever thought possible.
As an example, I had no position on whether graduate students should be unionized or not because I was completely unaware the issue existed, and I didn’t know any graduate students. But once I got to college and understood what graduate students go through with inadequate stipends and unrealistic work expectations, I came around. But if I didn’t go to college and get to know grad students, I wouldn’t have cared at all about the topic.
Of course, I’m not sure how much you can truly attribute to college or rather the politics of the time. Two old white men named Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders also came around when I was in college, which partially also describes some of the radicalizations of myself and my peers.
But my personal experience has a grounding in an education gap in American politics, a divide that often goes understated: Democrats are growing more college-educated, while Republicans are increasingly representing the part of the uneducated. For the left, this is not a good realignment.
According to political strategist David Shor, the educational polarization in America has led to huge swaths of non-college-educated Hispanic voters swinging to the right. As did non-college-educated Black, Asian, and other non-white voters. Working-class voters of all colors saw an increase in support towards the GOP. The only group that swung left was college-educated white people, who swung left in drastic proportions.
Even my friends in college who started out conservative became liberals, who adopt the progressive positions on social and economic issues. I saw an Evangelical Christian conservative turn into a diehard Black Lives Matter protester and agnostic.
Does being uneducated make you more likely to hold ignorant, and even hateful positions? A lot of people would say so, but we have to be very, very careful of believing in a meritocratic society where we can brandish our education over those who were not so fortunate.
Even left-leaning people of color who haven’t gone to college, who I’ve interacted with, hold more old-fashioned views on social issues like transgender bathrooms and LGBTQ+ rights. My best friend is Mexican-American, and he’s the first person in his family to go to college. We share similar liberal, progressive views.
His brother, who hasn’t gone to college, is all in on Fox News and Donald Trump, which is in line with Donald Trump winning a greater share of Latino voters without a college degree. People in my family who didn’t attend college are likely to support liberal policies on economic issues, but much less likely to lean left like transgender bathrooms. This may be a generational gap as much as it is educational, but the association remains.
I want every person to be able to have a higher education, or at least have access to one, Trump supporter or not. We need a more educated population. I’m not saying everyone should become more woke, and I’m sure a lot of conservatives would call your average university an indoctrination factory.
The simple fact is going to college and being privy to the theories and ideas you learn in college, no matter how righteous we feel they are, is elitist. We brandish our cultural and social capital over those that don’t have them so we can look down on them for being ignorant. As an example, I can brandish terms like intersectionality and problematic at will, but are those terms familiar to your average person without a college degree?
But it’s a terrible reflection on ourselves to think we’re better than the uneducated.
What should we do about woke privilege? Just like male privilege or white privilege, most people cannot just stop being male or stop being white. But there’s always a call to action to check your privilege if you’re a man or white. And after you check your privilege, there’s responsibility: responsibility to make sure other people have the same access to your privilege.
It’s controversial to say this, but we in the mainstream woke left should also check our privilege, and realize what advantages we are afforded if we’re college-educated liberals.
I have had a significant conflict with my father lately, but he has certain rules about politics as a Chinese immigrant: don’t talk politics in China. Do not go to protests. In China, keep your head down and your mouth shut, and watch who you’re open to about your beliefs.
This is survival 101 of living in a repressive society that we don’t experience in much of the West. But my father, for all his flaws, lived in Beijing and close to Tiananmen Square during the 1989 massacre. He grew up in a world where what you say and what you stand for can get you killed. Right before the 2020 Presidential Election, my father called me and made me promise not to go to any protests — he grew up in a world where going to protests can and will get you killed.
I will acknowledge that not every Trump supporter is uneducated. Not every blue-hearted, Defund the Police liberal is college-educated. The college-educated are not a monolith. Neither are the non-college educated.
But I have learned simply being able to have these conversations and not feeling like the government is going to kill you for expressing your views is a privilege in itself. A lot of people on the right and the left feel like there’s significant censorship of speech with cancel culture and our current climate around the political discourse.
But that is peer judgment more than it is statewide oppression of speech. In America, you won’t get killed for something you post on social media. I’m not saying you can’t get killed for going to a protest in America either because it has happened before, but we don’t have the same state-sponsored oppression.
D. Watkins, an editor at Salon, who grew up in an impoverished East Baltimore neighborhood and is currently a law professor, critiques woke culture for its affluence and out of touchness. Watkins says “woke people…normally have at least one bachelor’s degree” and keep a copy of James Baldwin. But protests from the woke crowd didn’t resonate with him because the protests didn’t listen. He cited one activist in a DC community who said the following:
“Y’all Black Lives Matter people not gonna be coming to my neighborhood and telling me how to run it!”
The educational elitism of being woke is something to be addressed. It becomes more pronounced the more educated — a 2016 Pew Research Center study found only 24% of PhDs held conservative values.
What should we do without educational privilege in left-wing circles? It’s enough to point out the problems, but what about the solutions?
Well, Watkins advocates listening more than talking and preaching. It means especially listening more to voices of the economically disadvantaged, especially Black and brown disadvantaged voices. It means pushing back against the commentary of intellectuals and allowing those voices to speak for themselves instead of allowing ourselves to speak for them.
Again, with privilege comes responsibility. Not every woke person is college-educated, for sure, but if we are woke and college-educated, then we should probably take stock of how we were afforded privileges a lot of other Americans were not. With more education comes the tendency to feel like we know everything, which makes us less likely to listen. The positions we take being woke are more likely to give people voices they didn’t have before, but ultimately it is each individual’s right to make the choice of what they believe.
Listening is painful, especially to those who we feel have disdainful beliefs. But it is necessary with our privilege. We should at the very least advocate for everyone to have the means and right to go to college. And it will make us less out of touch with those we purport to serve.
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This post was previously published on aninjusticemag.com.
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