Stephanie Says

I’m delighted about today’s Supreme Court rulings on Defense Against Marriage Act and California Proposition 8 and celebrate the vindication of human rights with my friends, gay and straight.

But while we celebrate this victory, we must remember that we have much work to do to protect the rights of all people.

I urge all of my friends, including those who may not feel personally affected by yesterday’s Shelby decision, to work to ensure that the Voting Rights Act continues to protect the ballot for all Americans.

Remember – Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito needed only one more vote for today’s cases to go the other way. And without the protections afforded by the Voting Rights Act, the very people most likely to vote for legislators, governors and presidents who can stand between us and that fifth vote are in danger of being disenfanchised.

So, let’s all join together to cheer today’s decisions and then work together to restore the voting rights protections that yesterday’s decision put at risk.

Not one of the Sandy Hook teachers was a “job creator.” Probably none of the Newtown first responders measure their “success” by how much money they manage to earn, sock away and shield from taxes.  Yet it was the first responders who ran into, not away from, the gunfire that once again shattered a community, and it was teachers who stood between a madman and other people’s children.

So, when we go back to arguing about who is and isn’t contributing to society, and why and how we should invest our resources, let’s remember Victoria Sota, Dawn Hochsprung, Mary Sherlack, Lauren Rousseau, and the other teachers, police officers, firefighters, and paramedics to whom we entrust our children, our families, our communities, our safety, and our lives.

It is time for politicians to call a halt on the ugly and cynical attacks on public workers.  I don’t want to see you wringing your hands at memorial services for the Sandy Hook victims and then, the next day, hear you call their colleagues thugs and leeches.  The workers you besmirch and belittle are the same people who protect our beloved ones when we’re not with them and step into the line of fire while we’re running as far as we can in the other direction.

They aren’t job creators.  But on Friday morning, we didn’t need job creators. We needed public servants to charge into the bullets, to throw themselves on top of our babies, to keep their cool and soothe our terrified children until other public servants could ensure they were once again safe. And, thank God, they were there.

I’m not going to forget that. And I won’t let you forget that, either.

Vote suppressors, you underestimated us.

You devoted endless hours, days and weeks working to keep us from voting.  You spent millions of dollars pushing and defending voter ID laws, early voting restrictions, and registration hurdles designed to discourage us from exercising our franchise.  You spewed innumerable words trying to convince the gullible that voter suppression was really “ballot protection.”  Some of you even slipped up and admitted what everyone already knew – that you were trying to ensure President Obama’s defeat.

And while you were making all that noise, we were quietly watching and listening and preparing.

Maybe you thought we were stupid.  Maybe you thought we were weak.  Or perhaps you totally misread some of our disappointment with the slowness of the progress President Obama is making on the issues we care about and figured that to mean our support for him had ebbed.  That’s understandable – given how little you know about or care about or have tried to learn about (much less reach out to) us, why would you know any better?

It’s not surprising that you jumped to the wrong conclusions – after all, we haven’t been as loudly ebullient in our support for President Obama as we were in 2008.  But there’s a reason for that – and not the one you assumed.  As he himself has said, Barack Obama is no longer just a candidate.  He’s the President.  This was not just a campaign for us.  It was much more serious than that.  It was a mission, a cause.  We meant business.

We’ve seen what you have tried to do to this man.  We’ve seen and felt the disrespect and disdain you show him.  We’ve seen how you have endeavored to smear, demean, undermine and otherize him.  And we’ve seen how you have pulled out all of the stops to try to keep us from voting for him.

Yes, vote suppressors, you misjudged us.  You seemed to think we couldn’t see and hear you as you ham-handedly went about your nasty business, using all of the levers and mechanisms of power that voters so stupidly turned over to you in 2010 when trying to teach our President a lesson.  You didn’t seem to realize that we had gone from “Yes, we CAN!” to “Oh, no, you DIDN’T!” to “Yes, We WILL!”

But just because you don’t look at or listen to us does not mean we can’t see and hear you – and we’ve been watching and hearing and feeling everything you were saying and doing.  And while you weren’t paying attention to us, we got ready for you.

And then we lined up and stood in line – those lines that you thought would deter us but that, in reality, emboldened us.

We stood in those lines in the chill of the northern nights and in the warmth of the Florida sun.  We stood in those lines that snaked around buildings and crawled up the block.  We stood in those lines and rolled our eyes at the Tea Party activists who believed we were ignorant enough to be influenced by their glossy “Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were Republican” fliers.

We stood in these lines to show you that we will not let you snatch away our vote. We stood in these lines to show the world that we will not let you run our President out of office with your ugly lies, racist language and sophisticated, modern-day Jim Crow tactics.  We stood in these lines, calmly resolved to show him we have his back because he has ours.

Vote suppressors, you blew it.  You spent all that money, wasted all that time, and told all those lies for naught.  President Barack Obama was reelected decisively because millions of black and brown and white and yellow and red Americans stood in those lines and, with peaceful determination, let out a roar that will forever echo through history:  “Yes, we can . . . yes, we will . . . yes, we DID!”

Rest in Peace, Senator McGovern, my first political hero.

As a junior high school student, I spent hours volunteering at your campaign headquarters after school, cheered like crazy at your campaign rally, and cried inconsolably the night you lost to Richard Nixon, the first (but not the last) time that politics broke my heart.

And you helped me learn my first and, perhaps, most important political lesson.  The morning after the election, bleary- and swollen-eyed, demoralized and frustrated, I refused to go to school because I knew the kids would taunt me over the loss.  My father, the Good Judge, told me, “So WHAT if they laugh?  If they laugh, they’ll only show how ignorant they are.  You have nothing to be ashamed of.  You studied the issues, made up your mind and then fought for something you believed in.  Just because you lost doesn’t mean you were wrong.  Now, you put on your McGovern scarf, go to school and hold your head up high.   And start thinking about how you can make a difference in the next election.”

That McGovern scarf is long gone, but I’m still holding my head up high because you believed in us and I’ve never stopped thinking about how I can make a difference.

You made a difference to me, Senator.  Thank you.

“I say it with a sad sense of disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary!…This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.” Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852

“I, too, sing America.” Langston Hughes

If a politician died and no white people wept, would he be painted an American hero?

If he drew throngs of mourners made up almost exclusively of minorities, would the mainstream news media insist that he was universally loved by all Americans?

Would the networks subject their viewers to the 24/7 non-stop hero worship being accorded Ronald Reagan, if all but a tiny handful of the thousands and thousands of Americans paying tribute were brown instead of white?

I think not.

In its eagerness to characterize Ronald Reagan as an American icon based upon the “outpouring” of grief at his passing, the media are ignoring an important yet unavoidable fact: there are hardly any people of color singing Reagan’s praises. For days, we’ve watched eager commentators tell us ad nauseam that the mourners waiting to view Reagan’s casket represent a “cross-section of America.” But if they just turned around, they’d see what we see – a virtually all white tableau snaking behind them. This backdrop sure doesn’t look like the America I know.

How hard is it to notice that, in a city that’s more than 60% black, so few people of color have bothered to wander over to the Capitol to bid farewell to President Reagan? Yes, a few were spotted here and there and, of course, dark faces abounded among the military personnel participating in the solemnities (thanks to our integrated armed forces, there was more color in the Color Guard than in the crowd). Otherwise, it seemed that most of the handful of black folk not decked out in full ceremonial dress were there not to see Reagan but to sell water, snacks and souvenirs to the white folks who were there to see Reagan.

If they bothered to leave their cozy perches on the Capitol lawn and venture a few blocks in any direction, the network reporters might actually pick up a different perspective, a perspective they aren’t getting from the self-selected masses gathered to honor the former president.

To many of us, Ronald Reagan was not a great man. He was not a hero. In fact, many of us have nothing but painful memories of his presidency and what he stood for.

This pain was first inflicted like a punch in the stomach back in 1980 when Ronald Reagan journeyed to Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the murder of three civil rights workers 16 years before, to kick off his general election campaign with a speech endorsing states’ rights.

“I believe in states’ rights,” he said on that August day. “I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment.” He went on to promise to “restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them.”

Black Americans – and those hostile to our interests – knew exactly what he meant. “States’ rights” has long been a code word for segregation, discrimination and massive resistance to the federal government’s efforts to stop southern states from oppressing blacks. States’ rights was the excuse given for denying blacks the right to vote, access to public accommodations, equal protection of the laws. It was such a deeply held principle among some Southerners that they even lynched folks who interfered with it.

And Ronald Reagan turned up in the place where James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered for registering black voters, to affirm his commitment to the principle that led to that and countless other terrorist acts and to promise that he would fight to turn back the clock to the days when local governments had the power to treat minorities any way they damned well pleased. And the 30,000 white folks who crammed the Neshoba County Fairgrounds that day cheered him wildly and then helped send him straight to the White House.

Once there, Ronald Reagan proceeded to do exactly what he had promised, spending the next eight years diligently rolling back important civil rights gains (with the help of Attorney General Ed Meese, an eerie precursor to John Ashcroft). During his tenure, Reagan transformed the War on Poverty into a war on the poor. He divided and agitated Americans by injecting racist stereotypes (remember “welfare queens?”) into the public discourse. He worked to dismantle affirmative action and thwart reasonable civil rights remedies, coddled and abetted South Africa‘s apartheid regime, and appointed federal judges who believe that civil rights laws are valid only when used to protect white men from “reverse discrimination.”

Ronald Reagan was not a hero to minorities, to women, to the poor or to anyone who cares about civil rights and equal opportunity. To us, his administration represented little more than callousness and retrenchment. And now that he’s gone, his partisans, with the enthusiastic assistance of an uncritical media, are orchestrating the transfiguration of this flawed man into an affable, larger-than-life myth. But those of us who bore the brunt of this president’s policies and philosophy and are still trying to clean up his messes know the truth behind the grin. And it still hurts.

So, it’s perfectly understandable that minorities are not falling all over themselves to pay tribute to this man who did so much harm. Nevertheless, the press has virtually ignored the glaring absence of color in the Reagan love-fest. Instead, they are feeding us a bizarre illogical syllogism – because Reagan is loved by all Americans who love him, Reagan is loved by all Americans.

The over-the-top, adoring and revisionist coverage of Ronald Reagan not only brings back the pain he caused so many of us, but is also a jarring reminder of an ugly assumption that underlies it all: white Americans are the “real” Americans while the rest of us still just aren’t heard and still just don’t count. We should either get with the program or get out of the way as “America bids farewell” to its hero, with or without us.

But if the media stop their heavy breathing for a spell, they could hear our silence. If they take a closer look at those standing in line to lionize Ronald Reagan, they’d see us, the darker brothers and sisters who are not there.

And if they ask why, they’ll catch echoes of Frederick Douglass and Langston Hughes in our answer: “This president is your hero, not ours. And we, too, are Americans.”