When the right to bear arms, especially assault rifles that are designed to kill many people at once, is more important than protecting our students, teachers, and all our citizens and visitors in America, we have to admit our country just slid off the rails. When children are wrenched from their mothers’ arms and left for weeks in cages, some of them abused, and most neglected by human touch, we have lost all decency as a country. When black Americans are constantly endangered by white people calling in false reports of feeling threatened to the police for such things as wearing socks in the pool area, our country has bought into conventions and stereotypes that justified an oppressive system of inequality and free labor better known as slavery. And when we expect children as young as one year of age to stand before court in order to be reunited with their parents, we didn’t just slide off the rails, we plunged into a morass of ignorance, hatred, xenophobia, racism, white nationalism, and depravity.
Of course, our country has been on a crash course its whole history – forcibly taking land from natives, and committing genocide; forcibly bringing Africans to America for enslavement and to make white men wealthy off their labor. We never reconciled our past transgressions against humanity. But people want to forget or deny how this country became the world power it was; I said “was” because under President Trump we have lost our status among other countries.
Maybe we can admit it became visible to us over the past ten years, ever since Barack Obama became our first president of color, and his election to the highest office in the land was interpreted by some citizens to mean that they were now irrelevant and maybe they would end up being treated as non-white and non-male persons have historically been treated in this country. An out-sized reaction to an event that simply meant equality was within reach for all Americans.
Then the Russians interfered with our 2016 election, and we find ourselves with a president who is self-serving and more concerned about his popularity among his supporters and his wealth than he is in running the country and implementing policy that will benefit the greater good instead of the 1%. He has also insulted and demeaned our allies while he praised dictators and human rights abusers.
When did it become acceptable to elect the most inexperienced person for the position of leader of the free world? How did anyone, except for the Russians and white nationalists, ever believe this was a good idea?
And why are white nationalism, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and homophobia still acceptable in this country? This kind of embracement of inequality can motivate white people to call police on black people for swimming or barbecuing or sleeping or playing or working because when black people are in public spaces some white people feel uncomfortable and like their sense of privilege is at risk of being lost—thankfully, many of these individuals were shamed across the internet after videos went viral. It can cause a Trump supporter to vandalize signs with spray paint to appear as if an extreme liberal were making death threats to the president—thankfully, he was caught on video and he turned himself in to the police. It can cause a cop to aggressively harass two black men who were walking to the park outside of Chicago with threats that he could arrest them for videotaping the scene as he pushed them and tried to send them over the edge. Thankfully, his chief saw the viral video and took action.
There is so much to do to get this train back on the track. Yes, we need to mourn the victims of our terrible laws and leaders like the representatives who are protecting the gun manufacturers that ply them with campaign donations so the manufacturers can get even wealthier than ever off the loss of life or the Trump administration officials who think it is acceptable to force a one-year-old to stand in front of a judge in order to be reunited with his mother or who think reversing Roe v. Wade is somehow pro-life. The victims are the teenagers who lost their lives because someone had a gun and the children who have lifelong trauma due to being snatched out of their parents’ arms and the women who may lose their right to control their bodies and choose their reproductive healthcare.
And we need to let special investigator Mueller finish this complex and long-reaching investigation into this administration and the other players who interfered, aided, and obstructed justice. We keep saying never again, but then it happens all over just around the corner. One more law or executive order that discriminates against certain people, one more regulation that protected life dropped in favor of making more money more quickly, one more mass shooting that feels too much like a broken record, one more day where someone black is prevented from going about his or her daily activities, one more day where a child is bereft and traumatized because her mother hoped for a better life by seeking asylum here and this country forgot its humanity. It’s overwhelming. And it makes us immune to the fact that inequality is still the law and mores of the country.
Back in 1964 when our television news hours were filled with images of black protesters being attacked by police dogs and sprayed with fire hoses, our government leaders debated passing the Civil Rights Act. Back then the Southern Democrats were almost exclusively segregationists, and they fought hard to keep Jim Crow laws that touted separate but equal status of black Americans. Although it was more like separate and unequal, separate and oppressed, separate and low wage jobs, separate and poor housing, separate and underfunded public schooling, separate and lynched. Americans could no longer deny what their eyes were seeing, and they pressed their representatives to do something about it. And they did.
In an article in Politifact it was noted the house passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 290 votes to 130 with 61% of Democrats voting for it and 80% of Republicans. The Senate then went on to pass the act with two-thirds the Democratic vote and 82% of the Republican vote. The article goes on to say this:
The primary reason that Republican support was higher than Democratic support -- even though the legislation was pushed hard by a Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson -- is that the opposition to the bill primarily came from Southern lawmakers. In the mid 1960s, the South was overwhelmingly Democratic -- a legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction, when the Republican Party was the leading force against slavery and its legacy. Because of this history, the Democratic Party in the 1960s was divided between Southern Democrats, most of whom opposed civil rights legislation, and Democrats from outside the South who more often than not supported it.
This pattern showed clearly in the House vote. Northern Democrats backed the Civil Rights Act by a margin even larger than that of Republicans -- 141 for, just four against -- while Southern Democrats were strongly opposed, by a margin of 11 yeas to 92 nays.
This pattern showed clearly in the House vote. Northern Democrats backed the Civil Rights Act by a margin even larger than that of Republicans -- 141 for, just four against -- while Southern Democrats were strongly opposed, by a margin of 11 yeas to 92 nays.
During that time our representatives, except for the segregationist diehards, worked together to find a common resolution to an immoral and deadly system of inequality. Now we can’t find that common ground and we are fighting over whether or not equality is even an American value. Big money and fundamentalists have put a wedge between us, peddling the old segregationist paradigms. They are fighting against progress but progress is good for a country. It keeps us vibrant, growing, intellectual and competitive.
You see, something happened after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed. Truly, white people started worrying that black people really would become equal. In other words, they theoretically agreed with equality but emotionally weren’t ready for it because when they heard the term equal, they thought it meant better and maybe more powerful, not equal at all. They feared their status would be reversed. They couldn’t imagine what a country of equal citizens would look like. The systemic racism was so strongly imbedded in our history and our social structure and economy, that they could not imagine a different, more progressive, system.
The backlash to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act began with the election of Nixon and got much worse when Reagan came into power. Nixon implemented the Southern Strategy, which brought the Southern segregationist Democrats into the GOP, and he started the school to prison pipeline for young black men to keep them out of white society. During the Reagan years, Reagan created the Welfare Queen in order to make the face of welfare a conniving black woman who bilked the system on the backs of the good, law-abiding white taxpayers. President Clinton, often jokingly called the first black president because he seemed to understand the plight of black Americans, enacted, at the behest of the GOP, the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that furthered the trend of mass incarceration of black men. Then came the Bush era economic policies that hurt everyone who wasn’t wealthy and increased poverty by 26% according to April Ryan in an article from 2015.
Soon after President Obama was elected, the Tea Party rose to power with their mantra to “take back America.” It left me wondering whom they believed took it from them in the first place, but I knew. It was ethnic minorities seeking social and economic equality along with the old progressives from the 1960s who supported and voted for the Civil Rights Act.
You know the rest of the story. The fractured GOP and Russian election interference caused the rise and election of Trump with his call to “make America great again.” The message was clear. A great America has no room for people of color, nor non-white immigrants, nor women, nor non-Christians, nor LGBTQ individuals, nor individuals with disabilities. They are all to be relegated to second-class citizenship as they were in the past.
Here’s the thing. I am upset with our representatives, conservative and liberal alike, because they have to work together and they’ve proven they can’t. They’ve even turned on one another as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi did after President Trump attacked Maxine Waters when he said, “She is a low IQ individual, Maxine Waters. I said it the other day. High — I mean, honestly, she’s somewhere in the mid-60s, I believe that.” Then he called her the “face of the Democratic Party” and told her to be careful. This was a racist dog-whistle for his supporters and a direct threat to her. Maxine Waters called for civil disobedience in the form of confronting Trump administration officials through the power of protest, but Schumer and Pelosi did not support her. Instead, Pelosi called her responses unacceptable while Schumer said Waters’ call for “harassment of political opponents” was “not American.” They sided with whiteness and failed to take seriously the threat issued by the president and the death threats she received from ardent Trump supporters. In my eyes, they have fallen from iconic to mediocre.
Black female leaders and allies of Waters, nearly 200 in all, wrote their own letter of protest to Schumer and Pelosi stating: “We write to share our profound indignation and deep disappointment over your recent failure to protect Congresswoman Waters from unwarranted attacks from the Trump Administration and others in the GOP. That failure was further compounded by your decision to unfairly deride her as being ‘uncivil’ and ‘un-American.’”
Even white leaders who philosophically agree that equality is our mandate sometimes fail to see their own buy-in to systemic racism and misogyny.
How do we get our representatives back to working with one another like they did in 1964 and 1965? How do we remember that we theoretically want the best for all our citizens and not just the few? How do we shape what that looks like and abate fears that equality means giving something away? How do we prevent special interests from co-opting our government? How do we get people to understand that our freedoms are for every American? How do we speak to one another without all the vitriol? And how do we visualize what equality looks like and how it is implemented?
First, we have to demand that our representatives represent all their constituents, and we need to get rid of gerrymandering and make sure that every vote counts. Then we need to vote! We need to vote in every single election, even when we feel our votes may not count. They do!
Next, we have to understand that we really need differing perspectives in order to best serve the citizens of this nation. We need conservatives, liberals, independents, centrists, libertarians, democratic socialists, fundamentalists, and whatever else politicians bill themselves as, to work together as a team to make the best decisions for the greater good, not just the few, based on the best information available. Representation of Americans should not all be one extreme or the other. We need politicians who are as diverse as our population. That means more women and minorities serving in elected positions and more varied perspectives being brought to the podium for discussion. We can and should be able to work together but, first, we need to agree that equality and progress are the mandates. We need to disavow false narratives that hurt and marginalize individuals.
Then we need to hold our politicians accountable. Don’t let the NRA or the Koch brothers or another country’s dictator buy our politicians. They serve us! They also need to stop using fear and hatred to garner votes. They need to disavow both those things along with calls for inequality. That’s where our votes matter yet again.
Another thing we need to be strong on is support of the free press. We rely on them to find the truth. It is imperative that they can operate freely to do that. Otherwise we are destined to become a country run by despotism.
And after a recent conversation with a relative about how shallow and unrewarding social media can be, I have come to the conclusion that we need to put down our computers and open our doors to have some real conversations with real people. We’ve forgotten that there are people behind the avatars representing them on social media. When one is responding to a picture or a quote, it is easy to drop all semblance of fair and equitable dialog.
Stop buying into fear and hatred. Realize equality means we all have a right to be in public places, and to act to keep our children safe, and to make choices about our bodies, and to worship or not as we see fit, and to make a living wage and have a decent place to live and good schools for our children. Be kind to one another, please, but don’t be silent when fear and hatred raise their banners.
Let’s do one little thing that might help us start to get the big things done. Join the conversation about race in America. Please, start by reading my book, To the Mothers of the Movement, With Love, to follow my decades-long journey of learning about race and racism in America. It isn’t always an easy conversation, but it is a necessary one, if we are ever to reach our ideal of an equal and progressive America.
