I so love this image of one of the earliest commemorations of Memorial Day, which arose from the ashes of the Civil War. What we now call Memorial Day was first observed on May 1, 1865, in Charleston, SC, where thousands of newly freed Black people marched, prayed and laid flowers in gratitude to the Union soldiers whose sacrifice had helped liberate them from slavery. After the Confederates evacuated Charleston at the end of the war in April 1865, Black residents cleaned the site of a mass grave of 257 Union soldiers. The laborers dug out the bodies and gave the soldiers a proper burial. That May 1, nearly 10,000 people, most of them formerly enslaved African-Americans, joined by union troops and northern White missionaries, gathered to dedicate the burial ground and honor the fallen. Among the former slaves were 3,000 Black children, like those pictured here, who would become among the first African-Americans ever permitted to go to school in the South with the opening of new Freedom Schools. The people sang and laid flowers on the gravesite. The New York Tribune described it as “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.” A tragedy that so much of our country’s true history has been withheld from us — we don’t know who we are as a nation, don’t know what we’re celebrating, don’t know how we got to where we are, and thus we don’t know how to fix what ails and divides us. It’s time that we learn our history and act upon it for the salvation of our democracy. #memorialday #history #americanhistory
This is one of my most cherished photos of my father, in part, because we didn’t find this one until, tearfully, after he had passed away. He had been so modest that we didn’t know it existed. It was a gift from the universe to see an image of him from a time I could not have known. The Tuskegee Airmen only became household names in the last couple of decades, so my mother had not been especially impressed by this when she and my father were courting. She was looking for a kind, intelligent and hardworking man, preferably, in her words, tall, dark and handsome. And she found him. While Tuskegee wasn’t a source of everyday conversation, he would faithfully attend the local meetings of the Tuskegee Airmen and the Civil Air Patrol, and he kept every scrap of Tuskegee memorabilia, even a propeller from one of their training planes. He did not live to see the near universal acclaim that the very idea of the Tuskegee Airmen now evokes. But one day, in the last years of his life, as I boarded a commercial flight with my parents, we peeked into the cockpit and saw that the captain was Black, a position the airmen sadly could only have dreamt of. I whispered to the captain my father’s history. Once we reached cruising altitude, the captain made an announcement. He said that there was a Tuskegee Airman on board and that the airmen had been pioneers in aviation. The whole cabin of passengers erupted into applause, because on the plane with them was living history. My father hadn’t expected that, and he teared up, as he tended to do when he was overcome with emotion. I will miss him for as long as I live. #FathersDay #tuskegeeairmen
For the record and just to be clear, Jim Crow was an authoritarian, totalitarian regime that was so repressive that six million Black people defected to the North and West seeking political asylum to escape it, so intractable that those who stayed had to risk their lives to overturn it and so patently evil that the Nazis sent researchers to study it. This does not sound like Black-family-thriving to people who know what it was. All Americans deserve to know our country’s true and full history. #thewarmthofothersuns #castetheoriginsofourdiscontents
For the record and just to be clear, Jim Crow was an authoritarian, totalitarian regime that was so repressive that six million Black people defected to the North and West seeking political asylum to escape it, so intractable that those who stayed had to risk their lives to overturn it and so patently evil that the Nazis sent researchers to study it. This does not sound like Black-family-thriving to people who know what it was. All Americans deserve to know our country’s true and full history. #thewarmthofothersuns #castetheoriginsofourdiscontents
We need to open our eyes to the resurgence of caste all around us — the targeted attempt to block advancement when marginalized people, formally excluded for generations, seek to rise. This is a return of the centuries-old campaign to keep those assigned to the bottom of the hierarchy in their place at all costs. “It turns out that the greatest threat to a caste system is not lower-caste failure, which, in a caste system, is expected and perhaps even counted upon, but lower-caste success, which is not. “Achievement by those in the lowest caste goes against the script handed down to us all. It undermines the core assumptions upon which a caste system is constructed and to which the identities of people on all rungs of the hierarchy are linked. “Achievement by marginalized people who step outside the roles expected of them puts things out of order and triggers primeval and often violent backlash. “The scholar W.E.B. Du Bois recognized this phenomenon in his research into what happened after the end of the Civil War: ‘The masters feared their former slaves’ success,” he wrote, “far more than their anticipated failure.’ ” — Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Page 224
We need to open our eyes to the resurgence of caste all around us — the targeted attempt to block advancement when marginalized people, formally excluded for generations, seek to rise. This is a return of the centuries-old campaign to keep those assigned to the bottom of the hierarchy in their place at all costs. “It turns out that the greatest threat to a caste system is not lower-caste failure, which, in a caste system, is expected and perhaps even counted upon, but lower-caste success, which is not. “Achievement by those in the lowest caste goes against the script handed down to us all. It undermines the core assumptions upon which a caste system is constructed and to which the identities of people on all rungs of the hierarchy are linked. “Achievement by marginalized people who step outside the roles expected of them puts things out of order and triggers primeval and often violent backlash. “The scholar W.E.B. Du Bois recognized this phenomenon in his research into what happened after the end of the Civil War: ‘The masters feared their former slaves’ success,” he wrote, “far more than their anticipated failure.’ ” — Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Page 224
We need to open our eyes to the resurgence of caste all around us — the targeted attempt to block advancement when marginalized people, formally excluded for generations, seek to rise. This is a return of the centuries-old campaign to keep those assigned to the bottom of the hierarchy in their place at all costs. “It turns out that the greatest threat to a caste system is not lower-caste failure, which, in a caste system, is expected and perhaps even counted upon, but lower-caste success, which is not. “Achievement by those in the lowest caste goes against the script handed down to us all. It undermines the core assumptions upon which a caste system is constructed and to which the identities of people on all rungs of the hierarchy are linked. “Achievement by marginalized people who step outside the roles expected of them puts things out of order and triggers primeval and often violent backlash. “The scholar W.E.B. Du Bois recognized this phenomenon in his research into what happened after the end of the Civil War: ‘The masters feared their former slaves’ success,” he wrote, “far more than their anticipated failure.’ ” — Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Page 224
We need to open our eyes to the resurgence of caste all around us — the targeted attempt to block advancement when marginalized people, formally excluded for generations, seek to rise. This is a return of the centuries-old campaign to keep those assigned to the bottom of the hierarchy in their place at all costs. “It turns out that the greatest threat to a caste system is not lower-caste failure, which, in a caste system, is expected and perhaps even counted upon, but lower-caste success, which is not. “Achievement by those in the lowest caste goes against the script handed down to us all. It undermines the core assumptions upon which a caste system is constructed and to which the identities of people on all rungs of the hierarchy are linked. “Achievement by marginalized people who step outside the roles expected of them puts things out of order and triggers primeval and often violent backlash. “The scholar W.E.B. Du Bois recognized this phenomenon in his research into what happened after the end of the Civil War: ‘The masters feared their former slaves’ success,” he wrote, “far more than their anticipated failure.’ ” — Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Page 224
We need to open our eyes to the resurgence of caste all around us — the targeted attempt to block advancement when marginalized people, formally excluded for generations, seek to rise. This is a return of the centuries-old campaign to keep those assigned to the bottom of the hierarchy in their place at all costs. “It turns out that the greatest threat to a caste system is not lower-caste failure, which, in a caste system, is expected and perhaps even counted upon, but lower-caste success, which is not. “Achievement by those in the lowest caste goes against the script handed down to us all. It undermines the core assumptions upon which a caste system is constructed and to which the identities of people on all rungs of the hierarchy are linked. “Achievement by marginalized people who step outside the roles expected of them puts things out of order and triggers primeval and often violent backlash. “The scholar W.E.B. Du Bois recognized this phenomenon in his research into what happened after the end of the Civil War: ‘The masters feared their former slaves’ success,” he wrote, “far more than their anticipated failure.’ ” — Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Page 224
We need to open our eyes to the resurgence of caste all around us — the targeted attempt to block advancement when marginalized people, formally excluded for generations, seek to rise. This is a return of the centuries-old campaign to keep those assigned to the bottom of the hierarchy in their place at all costs. “It turns out that the greatest threat to a caste system is not lower-caste failure, which, in a caste system, is expected and perhaps even counted upon, but lower-caste success, which is not. “Achievement by those in the lowest caste goes against the script handed down to us all. It undermines the core assumptions upon which a caste system is constructed and to which the identities of people on all rungs of the hierarchy are linked. “Achievement by marginalized people who step outside the roles expected of them puts things out of order and triggers primeval and often violent backlash. “The scholar W.E.B. Du Bois recognized this phenomenon in his research into what happened after the end of the Civil War: ‘The masters feared their former slaves’ success,” he wrote, “far more than their anticipated failure.’ ” — Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Page 224
We need to open our eyes to the resurgence of caste all around us — the targeted attempt to block advancement when marginalized people, formally excluded for generations, seek to rise. This is a return of the centuries-old campaign to keep those assigned to the bottom of the hierarchy in their place at all costs. “It turns out that the greatest threat to a caste system is not lower-caste failure, which, in a caste system, is expected and perhaps even counted upon, but lower-caste success, which is not. “Achievement by those in the lowest caste goes against the script handed down to us all. It undermines the core assumptions upon which a caste system is constructed and to which the identities of people on all rungs of the hierarchy are linked. “Achievement by marginalized people who step outside the roles expected of them puts things out of order and triggers primeval and often violent backlash. “The scholar W.E.B. Du Bois recognized this phenomenon in his research into what happened after the end of the Civil War: ‘The masters feared their former slaves’ success,” he wrote, “far more than their anticipated failure.’ ” — Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Page 224
We need to open our eyes to the resurgence of caste all around us — the targeted attempt to block advancement when marginalized people, formally excluded for generations, seek to rise. This is a return of the centuries-old campaign to keep those assigned to the bottom of the hierarchy in their place at all costs. “It turns out that the greatest threat to a caste system is not lower-caste failure, which, in a caste system, is expected and perhaps even counted upon, but lower-caste success, which is not. “Achievement by those in the lowest caste goes against the script handed down to us all. It undermines the core assumptions upon which a caste system is constructed and to which the identities of people on all rungs of the hierarchy are linked. “Achievement by marginalized people who step outside the roles expected of them puts things out of order and triggers primeval and often violent backlash. “The scholar W.E.B. Du Bois recognized this phenomenon in his research into what happened after the end of the Civil War: ‘The masters feared their former slaves’ success,” he wrote, “far more than their anticipated failure.’ ” — Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Page 224
We need to open our eyes to the resurgence of caste all around us — the targeted attempt to block advancement when marginalized people, formally excluded for generations, seek to rise. This is a return of the centuries-old campaign to keep those assigned to the bottom of the hierarchy in their place at all costs. “It turns out that the greatest threat to a caste system is not lower-caste failure, which, in a caste system, is expected and perhaps even counted upon, but lower-caste success, which is not. “Achievement by those in the lowest caste goes against the script handed down to us all. It undermines the core assumptions upon which a caste system is constructed and to which the identities of people on all rungs of the hierarchy are linked. “Achievement by marginalized people who step outside the roles expected of them puts things out of order and triggers primeval and often violent backlash. “The scholar W.E.B. Du Bois recognized this phenomenon in his research into what happened after the end of the Civil War: ‘The masters feared their former slaves’ success,” he wrote, “far more than their anticipated failure.’ ” — Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Page 224
The joy of a lifetime to share the stage with the “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” the retired Texas schoolteacher and survivor of Jim Crow, Mrs. Opal Lee, who led the movement to make Juneteenth a national holiday, who finally got her wish in 2021 and was awarded the Medal of Freedom at the White House for making it happen. Juneteenth was seared into her memory in childhood. She was 12 years old when a white mob stormed and burned down her family’s home right after they moved into an all-white neighborhood in Ft. Worth, TX. They managed to escaped with their lives. It was June 19, 1939. She has dedicated her life to memorializing the day that the last enslaved African-Americans were finally liberated — two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation and months after the end of the Civil War. She made a historic walk from Ft. Worth to Washington in 2016, at the age of 89, to dramatize its significance. Now, at 97, she has set her sights on a museum dedicated to this history. It was my honor to deliver an address in Ft. Worth in support of the Juneteenth Museum, which is still in the planning stages, and to trade insights with the woman behind the Federal holiday and, one day soon, a place to honor and learn more about it. But the trauma of the razing of her family home has never left her. She looked into what happened to the land her family once owned at 940 East Annie Street in Ft. Worth and discovered that it was in the hands of Habitat for Humanity. She went to them to buy the land back for her family. Habitat for Humanity would not sell it to her. “They gave it to me,” Mrs. Lee said. “God is so good.” Now she has just completed building her new house on the land that her family was forced to flee back on this historic day, 85 years ago, fulfilling her parents’ dream. #juneteenth
The joy of a lifetime to share the stage with the “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” the retired Texas schoolteacher and survivor of Jim Crow, Mrs. Opal Lee, who led the movement to make Juneteenth a national holiday, who finally got her wish in 2021 and was awarded the Medal of Freedom at the White House for making it happen. Juneteenth was seared into her memory in childhood. She was 12 years old when a white mob stormed and burned down her family’s home right after they moved into an all-white neighborhood in Ft. Worth, TX. They managed to escaped with their lives. It was June 19, 1939. She has dedicated her life to memorializing the day that the last enslaved African-Americans were finally liberated — two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation and months after the end of the Civil War. She made a historic walk from Ft. Worth to Washington in 2016, at the age of 89, to dramatize its significance. Now, at 97, she has set her sights on a museum dedicated to this history. It was my honor to deliver an address in Ft. Worth in support of the Juneteenth Museum, which is still in the planning stages, and to trade insights with the woman behind the Federal holiday and, one day soon, a place to honor and learn more about it. But the trauma of the razing of her family home has never left her. She looked into what happened to the land her family once owned at 940 East Annie Street in Ft. Worth and discovered that it was in the hands of Habitat for Humanity. She went to them to buy the land back for her family. Habitat for Humanity would not sell it to her. “They gave it to me,” Mrs. Lee said. “God is so good.” Now she has just completed building her new house on the land that her family was forced to flee back on this historic day, 85 years ago, fulfilling her parents’ dream. #juneteenth
The joy of a lifetime to share the stage with the “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” the retired Texas schoolteacher and survivor of Jim Crow, Mrs. Opal Lee, who led the movement to make Juneteenth a national holiday, who finally got her wish in 2021 and was awarded the Medal of Freedom at the White House for making it happen. Juneteenth was seared into her memory in childhood. She was 12 years old when a white mob stormed and burned down her family’s home right after they moved into an all-white neighborhood in Ft. Worth, TX. They managed to escaped with their lives. It was June 19, 1939. She has dedicated her life to memorializing the day that the last enslaved African-Americans were finally liberated — two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation and months after the end of the Civil War. She made a historic walk from Ft. Worth to Washington in 2016, at the age of 89, to dramatize its significance. Now, at 97, she has set her sights on a museum dedicated to this history. It was my honor to deliver an address in Ft. Worth in support of the Juneteenth Museum, which is still in the planning stages, and to trade insights with the woman behind the Federal holiday and, one day soon, a place to honor and learn more about it. But the trauma of the razing of her family home has never left her. She looked into what happened to the land her family once owned at 940 East Annie Street in Ft. Worth and discovered that it was in the hands of Habitat for Humanity. She went to them to buy the land back for her family. Habitat for Humanity would not sell it to her. “They gave it to me,” Mrs. Lee said. “God is so good.” Now she has just completed building her new house on the land that her family was forced to flee back on this historic day, 85 years ago, fulfilling her parents’ dream. #juneteenth
The joy of a lifetime to share the stage with the “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” the retired Texas schoolteacher and survivor of Jim Crow, Mrs. Opal Lee, who led the movement to make Juneteenth a national holiday, who finally got her wish in 2021 and was awarded the Medal of Freedom at the White House for making it happen. Juneteenth was seared into her memory in childhood. She was 12 years old when a white mob stormed and burned down her family’s home right after they moved into an all-white neighborhood in Ft. Worth, TX. They managed to escaped with their lives. It was June 19, 1939. She has dedicated her life to memorializing the day that the last enslaved African-Americans were finally liberated — two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation and months after the end of the Civil War. She made a historic walk from Ft. Worth to Washington in 2016, at the age of 89, to dramatize its significance. Now, at 97, she has set her sights on a museum dedicated to this history. It was my honor to deliver an address in Ft. Worth in support of the Juneteenth Museum, which is still in the planning stages, and to trade insights with the woman behind the Federal holiday and, one day soon, a place to honor and learn more about it. But the trauma of the razing of her family home has never left her. She looked into what happened to the land her family once owned at 940 East Annie Street in Ft. Worth and discovered that it was in the hands of Habitat for Humanity. She went to them to buy the land back for her family. Habitat for Humanity would not sell it to her. “They gave it to me,” Mrs. Lee said. “God is so good.” Now she has just completed building her new house on the land that her family was forced to flee back on this historic day, 85 years ago, fulfilling her parents’ dream. #juneteenth
In honor of my beloved and unshakeable mother, who inspired The Warmth of Other Suns. I found this photo as a young girl and was captivated from the moment I laid eyes on it, beguiled by who she was before she had me and how and why she had made it out of small-town Georgia to Washington, DC. There she is on the left, with a grade school friend from back home who would settle in Baltimore. It planted a seed of wonderment that would abide within me and emerge decades later in my devotion to understanding the Great Migration. Warmth is an ode to her and to the six million souls who journeyed out of the Jim Crow South. The idea started, unbeknownst to me in the moment, with this: “The picture is sepia, 2 by 3 inches, from the forties. Two young women sit on the front steps of a rowhouse on R Street, looking very Bette Davis. Stacked heels and padded shoulders, wool coats brushing their knees. They are new in town. Childhood friends from Georgia meeting up now in the big city. Their faces give no hint of whatever indignities the South had visited upon them. That was over now. Their faces are all smiles and optimism. The one in the pearls would become a teacher and, years later, my mother…. “As a girl, I found the picture in a drawer in the living room, where many of those artifacts of migration likely ended up. I stared into the faces, searched the light in their eyes, the width of their smiles for clues as to how they got there. “Why did they go? What were they looking for? How did they gather the courage to leave all they ever knew for a place they had never seen, the will be more than the South said they had a right to be? What would have happened had all those people raised under Jim Crow not spilled out of the South looking for something better?….” — From The Warmth of Other Suns #thewarmthofothersuns #thegreatmigration
In honor of my beloved and unshakeable mother, who inspired The Warmth of Other Suns. I found this photo as a young girl and was captivated from the moment I laid eyes on it, beguiled by who she was before she had me and how and why she had made it out of small-town Georgia to Washington, DC. There she is on the left, with a grade school friend from back home who would settle in Baltimore. It planted a seed of wonderment that would abide within me and emerge decades later in my devotion to understanding the Great Migration. Warmth is an ode to her and to the six million souls who journeyed out of the Jim Crow South. The idea started, unbeknownst to me in the moment, with this: “The picture is sepia, 2 by 3 inches, from the forties. Two young women sit on the front steps of a rowhouse on R Street, looking very Bette Davis. Stacked heels and padded shoulders, wool coats brushing their knees. They are new in town. Childhood friends from Georgia meeting up now in the big city. Their faces give no hint of whatever indignities the South had visited upon them. That was over now. Their faces are all smiles and optimism. The one in the pearls would become a teacher and, years later, my mother…. “As a girl, I found the picture in a drawer in the living room, where many of those artifacts of migration likely ended up. I stared into the faces, searched the light in their eyes, the width of their smiles for clues as to how they got there. “Why did they go? What were they looking for? How did they gather the courage to leave all they ever knew for a place they had never seen, the will be more than the South said they had a right to be? What would have happened had all those people raised under Jim Crow not spilled out of the South looking for something better?….” — From The Warmth of Other Suns #thewarmthofothersuns #thegreatmigration
In honor of my beloved and unshakeable mother, who inspired The Warmth of Other Suns. I found this photo as a young girl and was captivated from the moment I laid eyes on it, beguiled by who she was before she had me and how and why she had made it out of small-town Georgia to Washington, DC. There she is on the left, with a grade school friend from back home who would settle in Baltimore. It planted a seed of wonderment that would abide within me and emerge decades later in my devotion to understanding the Great Migration. Warmth is an ode to her and to the six million souls who journeyed out of the Jim Crow South. The idea started, unbeknownst to me in the moment, with this: “The picture is sepia, 2 by 3 inches, from the forties. Two young women sit on the front steps of a rowhouse on R Street, looking very Bette Davis. Stacked heels and padded shoulders, wool coats brushing their knees. They are new in town. Childhood friends from Georgia meeting up now in the big city. Their faces give no hint of whatever indignities the South had visited upon them. That was over now. Their faces are all smiles and optimism. The one in the pearls would become a teacher and, years later, my mother…. “As a girl, I found the picture in a drawer in the living room, where many of those artifacts of migration likely ended up. I stared into the faces, searched the light in their eyes, the width of their smiles for clues as to how they got there. “Why did they go? What were they looking for? How did they gather the courage to leave all they ever knew for a place they had never seen, the will be more than the South said they had a right to be? What would have happened had all those people raised under Jim Crow not spilled out of the South looking for something better?….” — From The Warmth of Other Suns #thewarmthofothersuns #thegreatmigration
In honor of my beloved and unshakeable mother, who inspired The Warmth of Other Suns. I found this photo as a young girl and was captivated from the moment I laid eyes on it, beguiled by who she was before she had me and how and why she had made it out of small-town Georgia to Washington, DC. There she is on the left, with a grade school friend from back home who would settle in Baltimore. It planted a seed of wonderment that would abide within me and emerge decades later in my devotion to understanding the Great Migration. Warmth is an ode to her and to the six million souls who journeyed out of the Jim Crow South. The idea started, unbeknownst to me in the moment, with this: “The picture is sepia, 2 by 3 inches, from the forties. Two young women sit on the front steps of a rowhouse on R Street, looking very Bette Davis. Stacked heels and padded shoulders, wool coats brushing their knees. They are new in town. Childhood friends from Georgia meeting up now in the big city. Their faces give no hint of whatever indignities the South had visited upon them. That was over now. Their faces are all smiles and optimism. The one in the pearls would become a teacher and, years later, my mother…. “As a girl, I found the picture in a drawer in the living room, where many of those artifacts of migration likely ended up. I stared into the faces, searched the light in their eyes, the width of their smiles for clues as to how they got there. “Why did they go? What were they looking for? How did they gather the courage to leave all they ever knew for a place they had never seen, the will be more than the South said they had a right to be? What would have happened had all those people raised under Jim Crow not spilled out of the South looking for something better?….” — From The Warmth of Other Suns #thewarmthofothersuns #thegreatmigration
In honor of my beloved and unshakeable mother, who inspired The Warmth of Other Suns. I found this photo as a young girl and was captivated from the moment I laid eyes on it, beguiled by who she was before she had me and how and why she had made it out of small-town Georgia to Washington, DC. There she is on the left, with a grade school friend from back home who would settle in Baltimore. It planted a seed of wonderment that would abide within me and emerge decades later in my devotion to understanding the Great Migration. Warmth is an ode to her and to the six million souls who journeyed out of the Jim Crow South. The idea started, unbeknownst to me in the moment, with this: “The picture is sepia, 2 by 3 inches, from the forties. Two young women sit on the front steps of a rowhouse on R Street, looking very Bette Davis. Stacked heels and padded shoulders, wool coats brushing their knees. They are new in town. Childhood friends from Georgia meeting up now in the big city. Their faces give no hint of whatever indignities the South had visited upon them. That was over now. Their faces are all smiles and optimism. The one in the pearls would become a teacher and, years later, my mother…. “As a girl, I found the picture in a drawer in the living room, where many of those artifacts of migration likely ended up. I stared into the faces, searched the light in their eyes, the width of their smiles for clues as to how they got there. “Why did they go? What were they looking for? How did they gather the courage to leave all they ever knew for a place they had never seen, the will be more than the South said they had a right to be? What would have happened had all those people raised under Jim Crow not spilled out of the South looking for something better?….” — From The Warmth of Other Suns #thewarmthofothersuns #thegreatmigration
There is no need nor do we have the luxury of continuing to be surprised at what we are seeing unfold around us. I wrote this back in the summer of 2022 for the new Afterword of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. I wrote this before many dared to think that even the consideration of this level of intrusion into people’s private affairs could ever be possible, that a basic part of everyday life would ever be up for debate: “A revealing example of the extremes to which the most ardent have been willing to go to assure numerical caste dominance is the proposal to deny access to birth control itself. Combined with bans on abortion, these proposed restrictions would effectively block most every avenue for protecting bodily integrity and determining one’s own destiny, or, in the words of then Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., in 1972, ‘the decision whether to bear or beget a child.’ “It was the longest-serving current member of the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, who wrote the concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson, which overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. In doing so, he singled out three landmark cases that he argued the court should take up next: Lawrence v. Texas, which protects the right to same-sex intimacy; Obergefell v. Hodges, which established the right to same-sex marriage; and the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut, which grants the right of married couples to use birth control. Justice Thomas described these three bedrock rulings as ‘demonstrably erroneous decisions,’ and wrote: ‘We have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents.’” Understanding our country’s 400-year-old caste system explains so much of what we are witnessing. I urge all of us to learn our history and to recognize the patterns as a roadmap for what could come — if we truly want to work toward a more humane and egalitarian future. #castetheoriginsofourdiscontents #dobbsvjackson #griswoldvconnecticut
There is no need nor do we have the luxury of continuing to be surprised at what we are seeing unfold around us. I wrote this back in the summer of 2022 for the new Afterword of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. I wrote this before many dared to think that even the consideration of this level of intrusion into people’s private affairs could ever be possible, that a basic part of everyday life would ever be up for debate: “A revealing example of the extremes to which the most ardent have been willing to go to assure numerical caste dominance is the proposal to deny access to birth control itself. Combined with bans on abortion, these proposed restrictions would effectively block most every avenue for protecting bodily integrity and determining one’s own destiny, or, in the words of then Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., in 1972, ‘the decision whether to bear or beget a child.’ “It was the longest-serving current member of the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, who wrote the concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson, which overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. In doing so, he singled out three landmark cases that he argued the court should take up next: Lawrence v. Texas, which protects the right to same-sex intimacy; Obergefell v. Hodges, which established the right to same-sex marriage; and the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut, which grants the right of married couples to use birth control. Justice Thomas described these three bedrock rulings as ‘demonstrably erroneous decisions,’ and wrote: ‘We have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents.’” Understanding our country’s 400-year-old caste system explains so much of what we are witnessing. I urge all of us to learn our history and to recognize the patterns as a roadmap for what could come — if we truly want to work toward a more humane and egalitarian future. #castetheoriginsofourdiscontents #dobbsvjackson #griswoldvconnecticut