As a young voter in North Carolina, I have felt like a political anomaly. My state is labeled as a swing state, purple, some say, but growing up in northeastern NC, it rarely felt that way. I spent most of my life surrounded by conservative voices. My family, my extended family, my family’s friends and so-on. In my small, deeply red hometown, political conversations rarely happened beyond “Thanks Obama” jokes at the lunch table. The only openly progressive person I knew was my childhood best friend. I remember thinking how brave she was for ironing a rainbow flag patch onto her vintage Levi’s jacket next to Grateful Dead bears and wearing it into school. That simple act of ally-ship in such a conservative space left an impression on me that I have never shaken.
Until I left for college, she was the only person I ever felt completely safe discussing my political and moral beliefs with…beliefs that seemed like social outliers given where I grew up. If others felt the same as I did, they stayed silent, maybe afraid, like me, of disrupting the peace or status-quo. In my early teen years, I learned that showing kindness and empathy to minorities and people different from me was something I was expected to keep quiet about if it didn’t align with the prevailing politics of my high school and broader community.
When I started at East Carolina University, that silence began to break. In my first year, I wrote a piece for the student newspaper about Harper v. Hall, a NC Supreme Court case challenging the state’s heavily gerrymandered political maps. I had heard about gerrymandering before, but reporting on the case helped me see just how deeply it distorts our democracy, especially here.
That experience was a point of realization. I realized my state wasn’t as red as I had assumed for so many years of my upbringing. It was more indigo than I thought, but twisted by years of partisan map-drawing that reduced the power of so many Black and brown votes. This discovery gave me a strange sense of comfort, not the fact that my state’s leaders were purposefully diluting votes, but because it was the first time I realized fully that I wasn’t just a blue dot in a red ocean. I was a part of a network of voices scattered across the whole state and not just the little blue triangle in the middle of NC.
Now with a degree in Political Science and a heart filled with a passion for ally-ship and equality for all, I look back thankful for my good, brave friend. Her quiet courage planted the seeds of my own political consciousness. She showed me that empathy doesn’t need to be loud to be powerful.
I have a sense of outspokenness now and have no need to shrink from my moral compass of loving and helping others. My love goes out to the young people discovering their voices, peeling back myths that they had known as fact for far too long. I hope they know they aren’t alone.
We may still be blue dots in some places, but together, we’re forming a mosaic that can’t be ignored for much longer.