Landau Calrissian

As someone born and raised in Alabama, I’m so tired of people taking every awful political development here as an opportunity to call everyone who lives here stupid or inbred. More than a quarter of Alabama’s population is Black. The majority of Black Americans live in the South. These are communities that have spent generations fighting the systems people are now using as an excuse to mock them. There are teachers trying their hardest for their students, organizers fighting for voting rights, queer people fighting for their safety, and working families who can’t just pack up and leave. They live with the consequences of these politics every day, then get told by people outside the South that they deserve it. And if your concern is education, mocking people for being failed by their schools does absolutely nothing to help them or the teachers trying to change that. Be angry at the politicians. Hold the people supporting these policies accountable. But calling an entire state stupid lumps the people fighting back in with the people making their lives hell. Being outnumbered doesn’t mean people aren’t fighting. They deserve your support even when they lose.