In my social media "folly" I've (the Married White Progressive of the post title) been attempting to reconnect to my roots in small town Connecticut in part as a way of having conversations with people who have totally different political views from my own.  This experiment has blown up in my face over the past week.

I'll admit that I may have been overzealous in my attempts to engage on political posts from my "friends" but I did always try to be polite when pressing for clarity on some stances that appeared innately inconsistent.

This anthropologist learned that a large number of people who post political content don't actually want to talk about it (I guess it's more emblematic to them than interesting) and aren't interested in adding to or adjusting their views beyond what they already think they know about the world.  I find this troubling because it doesn't bode well for democratic process (whether the people are progressive or conservative).  The people I've been speaking with seem to base their conservative politics largely on the "character" of people they feel haven't earned help because they are lazy or undereducated.

Here is where the bear trap snapped on my foot... I'm a social scientist.  We are a misunderstood lot of rag-tag academics.  We aren't scientists, per se. Social Scientists have done a poor job of convincing the public that you can actually study human behavior, culture, and society and come up with "facts". Additionally, since everyone makes observations about people in their day to day lives, people assume their experiences are as representative as the research of Social Scientists.  They're not.

This is where I began to feel like an a-hole. People I was engaging with I don't think understand that college professors are also researchers, not just "teachers". As I said to a friend in a heated and unsuccessful moment of weakness, "It's like me telling you that I know as much about nursing as you do because my mother has a long-term illness". Anthropologists are trained to think about their social position in relation to others they are interacting with.  I am way over-educated in relation to the folks I was engaging with.  When I spoke of the "facts" I have studied, they took it as me thinking I was telling them they were stupid or uneducated.  We were in the gray zone where social science analysis of patterns of poverty and poor communities was being looked at as my opinion as a progressive, just like their idea that poor people are poor because they are lazy was their opinion.  Frustration set in for me. There are things that are provable if you look closely at them.  My assertion of proof was taken as an attack on intelligence.  I had been called out with comments like, "you paid too much for your education" from folks who had joined the military and never completed college. I couldn't respond in kind because I think it would be wrong to tell this person that our public school had failed him and he never learned to make an argument where evidence built upon itself to a conclusion.  He was all over the place when we talked politics.  I always liked him as a person when we were in school together.  He was kind in a school full of pretty mean people. But it turned into a trap.  This social scientist's disciplinary insecurity (but these are FACTS!!! Why won't anybody LISTEN TO ME?!?!) turned into what I wanted to avoid (Anne has become an over educated, Brooklyn elitist who thinks she knows more than anybody else). I will say that through it all I never resorted to the name calling that was hurled at me, but in all this has been a failed experiment. If anyone knows an "over-educated" conservative who actually likes to talk about politics, send them my way.