I am a 57 year old white woman who benefited from the Civil Rights Movement [View All]

[karynnj]

Written with respect in response to http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x5289500, which has generated at least one other thread. The original post is part of the dialog needed on issues of gender and race.

If you had daughters or granddaughters they very likely did too.

There was no way that the feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s would have had the success that they did without piggybacking on the hard won achievements of the civil rights movement. It was the affirmative action legislation written because of the civil rights movement that was expanded to require large companies doing business - in any way - with the government to hire women in positions that they were never given before.

In my case the timing was perfect. In high school, a teacher leading a class on future careers, told me I couldn't take the folder on mathematician, but if I really liked math, I should take the "secondary education folder" because that was a job girls could get. I also refused to take typing (something I do regret) because the guidance counselor recommended it for the girls, but not the boys, on the college prep tract - saying that we would need to start as secretaries. I couldn't accept that boys that I routinely outperformed would start out ahead of me. Five years later, when I graduated college, there were great opportunities for women with degrees in Math, science, engineering, and economics. I got a job that my teacher would have called a "boy" job.

The other thing I have from my life experiences is knowing how irritating it was on one assignment to interact with people who thought and said that I got that assignment because I was a woman. Both HRC and Obama are far more that the "black" or the "woman". It demeans either to see them as generic representations of the demographic group they are in. If HRC was a black male with all of HRC's other characteristics (personality, history and positions) and Obama was a white woman with Obama's characteristics - I would still be for Obama. In fact, I have often identified Kerry as the politician I most admire and would have supported had he run. I do not think he is perfect, but if you use him as the template for what I think is good - Obama, with his emphasis on bringing people together, diplomacy, honesty, and his activist roots is a closer match than HRC. I am positive there are others choosing HRC for reasons consistent with their own preferences - that may have nothing to with race or gender.

Everyone is needed to move to a fairer society. As can be seen from the 1960s and 1970s, movement in one area causes movement in the others. Voting for LBJ, rather than Goldwater, was good - but it was the vibrant, powerful civil rights movement and the ground work done by people like Roger Wilkins within the JFK administration that made it possible for LBJ to push the Civil Rights Bill.

It sounds as though you feel that you are being blamed for the inequities of the past. Of course you shouldn't be. In fact, you likely took bigger risks in speaking out, than I a generation later ever did because your generation were the "adults" when much of this happened. You are my mom's age and I remember her anger and words when a neighbor came to our house with a petition against a black couple (both doctors) to persuade them against moving into our lower middle class town. She was so angry that she did not correct my about 8 year old sister who responded to the woman's argument that when they had kids, the kids would lower the level of their classes by saying that the woman's son in her class currently did that and no one was asking him to leave. (We were brought up to be much politer than that.) That was the early 1960s Northwestern Indiana.

One of the worst things of this primary is that people who have been supportive of both minorities and women are being accused of being either anti-woman and sexist on one side or racist on the other. In fact they are simply for one of them more than the other or at worst dislike one of the candidates for who she or he is - just as if the choice were Kerry, Dean or Edwards etc in 2004.)