As I always imagined it, the ascension of the first black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court would signal an era of progress, a time of triumph for those Americans who believe in the beloved community of which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke. I was well off the mark. This is no era of…
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Now what? Conservatives seem on the verge of achieving their hard-fought goal of reversing Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that gave women control over their bodies. A leaked draft ruling previews a frightening commitment to return to the 1950s. Affluent and well-educated women, though, will not bear the brunt of this decision. In…
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In 1851, Sojourner Truth, who had been born into slavery, gave a remarkable speech at a convention organized by suffragists. She brilliantly noted perceptions of her womanhood as contrasted to the womanhood of her white sisters. “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to…
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Recently, the governor of Mississippi reaffirmed his campaign against the teaching of history with a blizzard of falsehoods and flagrant nonsense recited on camera. It’s too bad there was no one as courageous as Russian TV editor Marina Ovsyannikova to sneak up behind him holding a sign with the words, “No lies. Don’t believe the…
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Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the U.S. Congress was expected to pass bills and make laws that served the citizens by, for example, improving health care, cleaning rivers and streams or bolstering the national defense. If Republicans and Democrats disagreed on the means or methods to accomplish those things, they hammered…
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Having grown up in the Deep South under the cruel lash of Jim Crow, I was jolted back to my childhood by the images of dark-skinned Haitians driven back by mounted Border Patrol agents — terrified black people helpless before light-skinned men on horseback. I remember the television footage of Selma’s Bloody Sunday, when white…
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You may have been taught in middle school that a fundamental tenet of democracy is that every citizen has the right to vote. That right is the foundation of every Westernized democratic state. You may have learned that the Founding Fathers didn’t believe in universal suffrage but that the United States has slowly expanded its…
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