by Marybeth O’Mara
03/26/2025
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As of this issue of the newsletter, you can comment and share your ideas about the Council of Crones, the events you are participating in, and the news we are all processing.
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What are you up to in this crazy time? What is helping you cope? What action are you taking?
Undoing Civil Rights
These past few months, I have struggled with the undoing of much of the progress of my lifetime that I have taken for granted even as I celebrated it. I am now facing the new reality that my lifetime, which started just a few years after the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v Board of Education (in which the nine justices UNANIMOUSLY held that applying the doctrine of “separate but equal” racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional), has been the pinnacle of social justice and inclusion in the US, and that I will not live to see the day that the freedoms and progress that are currently being stripped away by the Trump administration will be restored.
While I learned about the Brown case early on in my education, I did not learn about the organized pushback and delayed compliance with desegregation until many many years later.
This organized “massive resistance” to desegregating led to counties in Virginia closing public schools entirely for up to 5 years, leaving a “lost generation” of black students formally uneducated until districts were forced to comply and reopen; it led to a surge of private “segregation academies” for white students being opened throughout the South, stripping population and funding from the public school systems, and it cost a (different) “lost generation” of Black educators their seniority and, often, their jobs because administrators did not want to put Black teachers in charge of white students or other teachers. And yet, Brown led, over more than a dozen years, to more Supreme Court decisions striking the “separate but equal” doctrine to transportation, employment, and public accommodations, and to the enactment of the Federal Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960’s. By the time I was old enough to be aware of these changes, society as I knew it had been reshaped and racial progress seemed inevitable, and those strategies and outcomes began to be extended to women, indigenous Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ folks, and people with disabilities. Yay!
Sure, I knew about the Jim Crow era, the impacts of urban renewal and federal housing policy on Black neighborhoods in Chicago and other cities, the health and wealth gaps between Black and white Americans, and the widespread suspicion that accomplished Black professionals received some “special” consideration to advance in their careers. But, still, I noticed the historical trajectory that resulted in more diversity in the places I lived and the friendships my children cultivated and the headlines I read and the families represented in advertising.
In 2008, I celebrated the election of our 1st Black president, and in 2016, I cheered on our first female major party candidate for president. Until…..
The day after Trump’s first inauguration in 2019, I read an op-ed in the New York Times by Ibram X. Kendi, which was the first time I became aware of him. It was before he wrote his influential book, “How To Be an Antiracist,” which we used in our professional development at school after it was published. In this op-ed, “Racial Progress is Real. But So Is Racist Progress”, Kendi proposed that unlike MLK’s observation that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” (echoed by Barack Obama), there was a parallel arc toward increasing racism, at least among a good chunk of the American population.
This perspective was new to me but really grabbed my attention, and I have come back to it time and time again in the years since. These past 10 weeks have been shocking in the speed and targeting of not only DEI initiatives but of all references to and reporting of any accomplishments of women, people of color, or persons with any characteristics that challenge the administration’s assumptions that only (or at least predominantly) white men are the ones whose efforts and achievements matter. I now believe that it not only the reporting of history that is being targeted, but that the administration is actually trying to undo the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, all the way back to Brown! Beyond that, they seem to be trying to roll the clock back to before the New Deal, when, under FDR, government was reshaped to improve the lives of Americans and the institutions that support us.
Trump’s executive orders tying continued federal funding to eliminating any (and I mean ANY) DEI initiatives. Today, I learned that my daughter’s alma mater has shut down its Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. These are just 2 of so many colleges that cannot seem to hold firm or stand together in the face of this unprecedented assault on their previously alleged values.
The institutions won’t save us.