(Washington, DC) At a conference here today, I heard a college senior give a talk about interracial dialogs. She looked like a white woman, and in fact she is phenotypically white–descended from Europeans on both sides of her family. If you read the text of her talk, you would call it academic, formal, and professional, and you would be wrong to draw any conclusions from the transcript about her ethnic identity, which could be anything. But if you only listened to her speak, you would say she was an African American woman from a working class neighborhood of a northern city.

This wasn’t a matter of idioms or vocabulary. It was her accent, some subtle aspects of her vowels, a hint of a “k” before the “s” in “ask,” certain intonations (like a drop in pitch on the word “really”), and also hand gestures and her a way of emphasizing points with her eyes that made me think she was culturally or linguistically African American. In fact, she grew up in an African American neighborhood in Detroit and sounds like her friends and neighbors there.

If the audience had all been white people, no one would have said anything about her accent–maybe some wouldn’t even have noticed it. But the audience included five or six African American academics, several of whom wanted to talk about this young woman’s speaking patterns during the plenary discussion. In fact, one African American professor said right away, “I want to name it: you sound more Black than me.” This was a relevant comment, given the topic of the panel: interracial dialog. There was general support for the idea that the student should be able to participate in dialogs as an African American if she wanted to. After all, she had been elected president of her high school’s NAACP chapter. Her Black friends consider her Black.

Until 18 months ago, I always lived in jurisdictions where the majority of residents were African American. Although segregation has been pervasive, and I am white, I have lived long enough to have known many African Americans as well as many whites who live and work in daily contact with African Americans. I have never before met a phenotypically white person who genuinely speaks like an African American–not as an affectation, or by borrowing a few phrases, but even while she makes a highly formal and academic presentation.

This fact itself is noteworthy. There are many people of color who sound like the majority of white people in their communities (in terms of accent and intonation). But the reverse is very rare.

I would hypothesize that a phenotypically white person who always–without making a choice–sounds like an African American will face some degree of anti-Black discrimination in the United States. I think racism is strong, and accent is as much of a trigger for it as skin color.

I would never say that an African American “sounds white.” That would suggest that the default or norm, if you happen to talk like me, is to be white. White people don’t own the accent and dialect that I use. Barack Obama has exactly as much claim to it as I do, and in that sense it isn’t a “white” way of speaking. To jump to the conclusion that someone is white on the basis of a phone conversation is racist, or at least narrow-minded. Yet today’s speaker did sound Black, and I think that is mostly because crossing over as she did is so rare. It’s empirically true that her accent was “Black.”

I appreciated that African Americans in the audience considered her African American. I think one reason for my appreciation was simply that it’s appealing to see individuals included rather than excluded. There is no need for symmetry here: I wouldn’t be happy to see an African American welcomed as “white” on the basis of his or her accent. But symmetry isn’t the criterion of fairness. There are deep inequalities that sometimes require asymmetrical responses. Even if money and power were equal between Black and white Americans, there is the simple fact that the former are far out-numbered. So I’m happy to see a phenotypically White person authentically identify as, and be embraced as, African American, even though an African American who sounds like the majority of white people is still fully African American.

Finally, this case emphasizes the complexity of racial identity. As one member of the audience noted, you can be “African American” and thoroughly white if you are an Afrikaner immigrant from South Africa. You can have black skin but no roots in Africa if (for instance) you are an Aboriginal Australian. You can be African American and just arrived from Ghana, or an African American whose ancestors all lived in the American colonies before George Washington was born. You can have fifteen out of sixteen white great-great-grandparents and “count” as Black, or you can be white and never even know that some of your ancestors were Africans.

Complicating the issue doesn’t make race or racism go away, but at a minimum, it makes life more interesting.

CIRCLE is the only source for actual youth turnout estimates from yesterday’s elections. Nineteen percent of eligible under-30 voters turned out in New Jersey, 17% in Virginia, and 12% in New York City. The only previous Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections for which we have youth turnout data is 1997, and that year was better than yesterday–albeit only slightly better in Virginia. We can also follow the number of votes cast in certain college precincts in 2001, 2005, and 2009–three governor’s races in a row–and that shows substantial decline this year.

As I wrote on Monday, it is a statistical error to generalize from a small number of cases. But we do know from much other research that young people turn out when campaigned to. As far as I can tell, there was more youth outreach in Virginia and New Jersey in 2005 than there was this year, including party operations and nonpartisan work. Under those circumstances, the low turnout seems fairly predictable. It is nevertheless a problem that less than one in five eligible young people should participate in this election–and just over one in ten in New York.

(In Washington, DC for a Kettering Foundation board meeting): We have a partnership with the Chautauqua Learn and Serve Charter School in Panama City, Florida. This is a school that enrolls disabled children and adults and involves them in service and advocacy as part of their education. For example, the students have lobbied effectively for public transportation in their city. They visited me last week at Tufts, on their way to Iceland to see the self-sustaining village of Solihemar, which is a collaboration between disabled and non-disabled citizens. I have been following the students’ travels on their blog (and recalling my own family visit to Iceland of several years ago).

It will be tempting to make predictions based on the elections that occur this week: the gubernatorial campaigns in New Jersey and Virginia, the gay marriage referendum in Maine, and the mayoral elections in New York, Pittsburgh, Boston, and elsewhere. People will try to generalize about whether liberals or conservatives have national momentum. They will also want to know whether particular demographic groups are energized or not. For instance, David Kocieniewski writes in the New York Times: “The outcome could also help answer a question nagging at Democrats nationally: Can they keep engaging those drawn to the polls by Mr. Obama’s charisma and historic campaign, or will last year prove a one-time surge for the party?” Even more forcefully, the Times’ Adam Nagourney writes, “it seems difficult to argue that there are no lessons to be drawn from what happens Tuesday.”

Well, here goes. It is a basic mistake of statistics, a fallacy, to use a few elections to make any generalizations or predictions at all. Each campaign is idiosyncratic; the candidates, strategies, local demographics, local issues, etc. all vary. In even-numbered years, 435 House races occur simultaneously, and the Law of Large Numbers means that the idiosyncrasies should average out and you can say something about the election as a whole. For instance, youth turnout may either rise or fall; the country may move rightward or leftward. But with two gubernatorial elections, there can be no meaningful pattern. To detect a pattern from two cases is to commit the fallacy sometimes called (tongue in cheek) “the Law of Small Numbers,” a.k.a., the “fallacy of hasty generalization.”

To make matters worse, the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections were not randomly selected. And, as governor’s races, they make especially poor predictors of House campaigns.

Does this mean that you can’t learn anything from case studies? On the contrary, they can be rich sources of information. But you can’t learn from the simple outcome, such as the number of votes cast. You have to look at the details in context and develop insights into what they mean. For instance, Craig Berger criticizes the Corzine campaign for taking youth for granted and expects low youth turnout as a result. His criticism sounds plausible to me and would suggest a general lesson: don’t ignore youth issues. That would be right even if Corzine happens to eke out a victory with youth support.

CIRCLE will release youth turnout numbers the day after the election; here is our press advisory. I think analyzing the turnout is the right thing for us to do, because it keeps young voters in the news and allows people to work with data rather than mere impressions. But I will be trying to argue against generalizing from the two data points we provide.