To be a person of color in America is to always be tangled between dueling worlds. What was different in 2017, more so than any other year in recent memory, was how those polarities were laid bare for everyone else to see.

Tuesday’s special election in Alabama is monumental for the people who live in the state as well as for the rest of us across the United States. Of the two men vying to take the seat vacated by Jeff Sessions in February when he resigned to accept his new job as U.S. attorney general, one is a well-respected former…