With the MAGA faction still in control of the GOP, I keep feeling that it is deja vu all over again. It appears to me that their goal is to roll back America to 1956, the year I graduated from my segregated White high school. So now I see the MAGA movement regressing to the 1950s, from attitudes about race and women to repressing civil rights to controlling and destroying the reproductive choice of women to be able to plan their lives and to pursue dreams.
The Supreme Court decision handed down a decision on 6/29/23, reversing years of affirmative action in admissions to higher education, is an example of a step back from enormous progress in desegregation. I remember well when this happened in 1950. It is an example of how extreme racism of the 1950's kept minorities from access to education. While the court decision on June 29 does not return us to this extreme, of course, it assumes there is no langer anti-black racism that needs special consideration for racial minorities to get a level playing field. Supreme Court Decision Ending Affirmative Action - Bing News We are not living in a color blind society and we are fooling ourselves if we think that. In fact, racist sentiments have become more accepted and frequent in the public discourse. We are in the midst of a resurgence of a backlash to progress in racial equlity as evidence in the tolerance and acceptance in elements of the GOP of white nationalism and voter suppression meansures. Quotas have long been banned, but the minute racial affirmative action was eliminated in university adminssions in Michigan and California, the numbers of minaority students dropped dramatically.As Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action, colleges see few other ways to diversity goals | AP News
So what affirmative action will be put on the chopping block by this regressive Court? Women's rights? Already chopped by ending Roe v Wade, but what about college admissions or job hiring and advancement in the private sector? What about a future of the country's diversity? This only enhances white privilege as the country's populace becomes more diverse due to demographic growth. Will those who govern a more diverse country be those who are less educated because they were not given the same opportunities? Or will conflicts arise as white privileged rule over those who resent being discriminated against or the haves vs the have-nots? That does not portend either a competent or peaceful society.
The next day the Court continued its trek back to 1950. With the MAGA faction still in control of the GOP, I keep feeling that it is deja vu all over again. It appears to me that their goal is to roll back America to 1956, the year I graduated from my segregated White high school. So now I see the MAGA movement regressing to the 1950s, from attitudes about race and women to repressing civil rights to controlling and destroying the reproductive choice of women to be able to plan their lives and to pursue dreams.
The Supreme Court decision handed down a decision on 6/29/23, reversing years of affirmative action in admissions to higher education, is an example of a step back from enormous progress in desegregation. I remember well when this happened in 1950. It is an example of how extreme racism of the 1950's kept minorities from access to education. While the court decision on June 29 does not return us to this extreme, of course, it assumes there is no langer anti-black racism that needs special consideration for racial minorities to get a level playing field. Supreme Court Decision Ending Affirmative Action - Bing News We are not living in a color blind society and we are fooling ourselves if we think that. In fact, racist sentiments have become more accepted and frequent in the public discourse. We are in the midst of a resurgence of a backlash to progress in racial equlity as evidence in the tolerance and acceptance in elements of the GOP of white nationalism and voter suppression meansures. Quotas have long been banned, but the minute racial affirmative action was eliminated in university adminssions in Michigan and California, the numbers of minaority students dropped dramatically.As Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action, colleges see few other ways to diversity goals | AP News
So what affirmative action will be put on the chopping block by this regressive Court? Women's rights? Already chopped by ending Roe v Wade, but what about college admissions or job hiring and advancement in the private sector? What about the future of the country's diverse population? This only enhances white privilege as the country's populace becomes more diverse due to demographic growth. Will those who govern a more diverse country be those who are less educated because they were not given the same opportunities? Or will conflicts arise as white privileged rule over those who resent being discriminated against or the haves vs the have-nots? That does not portend either a competent or peaceful society.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/supreme-court-rules-for-web-designer-who-refused-to-work-on-same-sex-weddings/ar-.The whole concept of civil rights and the civil rights movement beginning in the 1960s is in jeopardy. While the Courts earlier had made it difficult for bigots to use religious beliefs as a basis to act on their bigotry, their decision in the Colorado web designer case said it would be OK to act on bigotry for a private business to refuse service to certain classes of people, in this case, gays, on the basis of "free speech". So where does this go? will it be possible for a restaurant to list in their menu that they refuse to serve blacks, gays, and Muslim-covered women and if challenged, claim the restaurant owners, too, were just exercising their free speech.
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Footnotes: paernonal remembrances of life in the 19550's.
In the seggregated state of my youth, one black man was admitted to Oklahoma University after a lower court lawsuit permitted him to attend so long as he did not use the university facilities. He was forced to sit in a hallway. https://face2faceafrica.com/article/the-story-of-george-mclaurin-who-excelled-as-university-of-oklahomas-first-black-student I remember how appalled my classmates were that even they would have to sit next to a black person if they went to OU. Among my clasmates's discussion is maybe a Negro could attend OU if he was kept in a glassed off area, as if his blackness would have been an infectious disease.
.I am dismayed that there are so many men and women breast-beating with hyper-masculinity in their cult-like adoration of a "strong man" who sees women as sex symbols or useful help-mates. I hear that side of the debate and its "cultural wars", but I cannot and will not advocate for it. Been there, done that. In fact, I have spent a lifetime revolting against it. How is it that I have been there, done that? Excuse the self-indulgent musings of an 85-year-old reflecting on how I got where I am today. Here it is.
My claim to high school fame was my success in my extracurricular activity: debate and extemporaneous public speaking. I came away with three things that shaped my thoughts throughout my life: 1) girls could beat boys at both academics and intellectual combat; 2) I had to be on top of current events and able to produce a speech on any topic in 15 minutes and deliver it without notes (perfect training for aTV journalist before TV); 3) I had to be able to be as effective arguing against a premise and making a case for it in order to win a debate tournament, anticipating and strategizing rebuttals.(Perfect training for an opinion writer) It was my ticket to scholarships that landed me at Northwestern, where I confirmed the lessons I had learned in high school. Yes, I spent two years as one of the first women radio talk show hosts, fifteen years in local government, and in between in public relations. I even got a crack at opinion journalism in my latter years.
However, real life in 1956-1960 was a different world. "Girls" were expected to get married and stay that way, have kids, serve their husbands who brought home the bacon, and only be able to work at a career (teaching, secretarial) if they somehow missed the family marriage boat. We were expected to be seen but not heard. We were expected to produce offspring or die doing it. Birth control, or the lack of it, kept women in their place, physically making any sort of deviation from accepted societal expectations and any political activities a difficult proposition. In New York media right out of college, where I wrote sitcom storylines, I was told serious women talking about serious topics like world affairs and politics would have no credibility, so I stuck to the PR department in both media and Wall Street and put my skills to work there.
I was born of parents from the North transplanted to a "to kill a mockingbird" kind of Eastern Oklahoma town that held on to Jim Crow racial attitudes. In my teenage years, I witnessed firsthand the impact of Brown v Board of Education and the beginning of the civil rights movement that unrolled its attack on white supremacy and segregation. This cultural disconnect with the Southern mentality led me to spend the rest of my life elsewhere.
Fortunately for me, I married a lifelong partner who supported both my living up to the traditional role of women, who permitted yet enabled me to dip my toe into politics and whose views of racial conflict were not moored in America's slave-holding past. He also respected strong women he knew who fought side by side with men as partisans in World War II Europe and saw them as equals.
I am grateful to the feminist movement and its determined, gutsy leaders. It was a compromise of a lifetime of choices that left me with both moments of satisfaction and frustration, feeling that on either front, fulfilling the traditional women's role and using the talents I had developed, I had never met my full potential as successfully as I would have liked. In spite of this, I raised three wonderful children who were self-motivated, successful achievers, and I became known as the first woman to run for office and taken seriously in my efforts as the views toward women in political life changed.
I owe my frustrations to some personal shortcomings, an introvert with an extrovert ambition, a desire to play it safe instead of taking risks, and choosing to make a conscious compromise that kept me from going all out in one direction or another. I was not willing to give up completely one lifestyle to pursue another. I also have had a nagging feeling that I had been born ten years too soon. I was far more attuned to the generation following mine that had broken away from the 1956 silent ones to which I had been born.
So you have it. Been there; done that.
