Barbara Ehrenreich: Of Race and Progress (LBJ and MLK controversy)
[Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of "Nickel and Dimed," is the winner of the 2004 Puffin/Nation Prize. 2008, The Nation.]
At first I took it as another -- yawn -- white rip-off of black culture and creativity: the Rolling Stones appropriating the Bo Diddley beat, Bo Derek sporting cornrows and now Hillary giving Lyndon Baines Johnson credit for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
If you had to give this honor to a white guy, LBJ was an odd choice, since he'd spent the 1964 Democratic convention scheming to prevent the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party from taking any Dixiecrat seats. By Clinton's standards, maybe Richard Nixon should be credited with the legalization of abortion in 1972.
But Clinton's LBJ remark reveals something more worrisome than racial tone-deafness -- a theory of social change that is as elitist as it is inaccurate. Black civil rights weren't won by suited men (or women) sitting at desks. They were won by a mass movement of millions who marched, sat in at lunch counters, endured jailings and took bullets and beatings for the right to vote and move freely about. Some were students and pastors; many were dirt-poor farmers and urban workers. No one has ever attempted to list all their names.
There's a problem, too, of course, with the conventional abbreviation of the Civil Rights Movement into two names, Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. What about Fannie Lou Hamer, who led the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's delegation to the 1964 convention?
What about Ella Baker, Fred Hampton, Stokely Carmichael and hundreds of other leaders? The Great Person theory of history may simplify textbook-writing, but it leaves us with no clue as to how change actually happens.
Women's rights, for example, weren't brokered by Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem over tea. As Steinem would be the first to acknowledge, the feminist movement of the '70s took root around kitchen tables and coffee tables, ignited by hundreds of thousands of now-anonymous women who were sick of being called "honey" at work and excluded from "men's" jobs. Media stars such as Friedan and Steinem did a brilliant job of proselytizing, but it took an army of unsung heroines to stage the protests, organize the conferences, hand out the fliers and spread the word to their neighbors and co-workers. ...
Read entire article at Oregonian
At first I took it as another -- yawn -- white rip-off of black culture and creativity: the Rolling Stones appropriating the Bo Diddley beat, Bo Derek sporting cornrows and now Hillary giving Lyndon Baines Johnson credit for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
If you had to give this honor to a white guy, LBJ was an odd choice, since he'd spent the 1964 Democratic convention scheming to prevent the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party from taking any Dixiecrat seats. By Clinton's standards, maybe Richard Nixon should be credited with the legalization of abortion in 1972.
But Clinton's LBJ remark reveals something more worrisome than racial tone-deafness -- a theory of social change that is as elitist as it is inaccurate. Black civil rights weren't won by suited men (or women) sitting at desks. They were won by a mass movement of millions who marched, sat in at lunch counters, endured jailings and took bullets and beatings for the right to vote and move freely about. Some were students and pastors; many were dirt-poor farmers and urban workers. No one has ever attempted to list all their names.
There's a problem, too, of course, with the conventional abbreviation of the Civil Rights Movement into two names, Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. What about Fannie Lou Hamer, who led the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's delegation to the 1964 convention?
What about Ella Baker, Fred Hampton, Stokely Carmichael and hundreds of other leaders? The Great Person theory of history may simplify textbook-writing, but it leaves us with no clue as to how change actually happens.
Women's rights, for example, weren't brokered by Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem over tea. As Steinem would be the first to acknowledge, the feminist movement of the '70s took root around kitchen tables and coffee tables, ignited by hundreds of thousands of now-anonymous women who were sick of being called "honey" at work and excluded from "men's" jobs. Media stars such as Friedan and Steinem did a brilliant job of proselytizing, but it took an army of unsung heroines to stage the protests, organize the conferences, hand out the fliers and spread the word to their neighbors and co-workers. ...