Change

In 2008, millions of us were thrilled to elect Barack Obama, who had campaigned for president on the theme of “change.” As we approach the midterm elections on November 2, two years into his presidency, complete with Democratic “control” of both houses of Congress, many of us are deeply disappointed by the slow rate of change that has actually been achieved. The media (and not just Fox “News”) constantly talk about the ascendancy of the Tea Party nutjobs. The Republican minority in the Senate have successfully blocked and watered down every attempt at progressive legislation. President Obama has backtracked on gay rights, continuing to support homophobic policies even when the courts strike them down. The Guántanamo Bay torture facility remains open. And the list goes on. It feels as if in the ongoing “battle” for the soul of the United States of America, we who believe in equality and justice are losing. Where is all this change we were promised?

So this seems like a good time for a little reflection on political and social change, taking the arbitrary period of my life as a convenient unit of measurement.

I was born in 1969, a couple of months before a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar on Christopher Street in New York, set off riots led by angry transgender people and launched the modern American gay rights movement. About a week ago, a gay man was again attacked at the Stonewall, part of what feels like an epidemic of homophobia spreading around the country this month. But this time, the bashers were arrested, not the gays. Carl Paladino, candidate for governor of New York and his right-wing rabbi friend, to name just a couple, continue to spew homophobic venom, but they have truly become the fringe, not the mainstream. I advertise my affiliations with gay organizations on my resume, and walk around New York wearing my Gay Games t-shirts.

Don’t get me wrong. I want the right to get married, and the right to join the military, and generally to be treated as a full citizen. I don’t wear those t-shirts in the Bronx. And I am deeply disappointed and angry with the Democratic Party in general and with President Obama in particular for their continued homophobia. But there is no denying that we have made huge strides—in the right direction!—in a relatively short time.

In 1969, my parents were one year out of college. They met at a perfectly good state school. At that time, if my mother had wanted to attend Brown University, where I enrolled 17 years later, she would have been politely directed to its “sister” school, Pembroke College. A woman’s place (at least a white middle-class woman’s place) was still in the home, not in the Ivy League. Professional women in offices were still a rarity. Abortion was illegal in most states.

Brown now has an African-American woman president. We almost elected a woman as president of the United States in 2008. There are more women than men in colleges and universities across the country. This is not to say that everything is rosy. There is still a glass ceiling in business, though a little higher than it used to be, and mainstream American culture remains disturbingly sexist. But again, the debate has shifted tremendously in four decades, such that the kind of overt sexism that so many people love to watch on Mad Men is no longer publicly espoused in most places. Even the word “feminist” after suffering from serious backlash since the 1980s, seems to be making a comeback as right-wing women try to claim it as their own.

In 1969, legal racial segregation had been abolished, but de facto segregation and discrimination was still the status quo. Cities fought over court-ordered busing to desegregate schools. One Black family moving into a neighborhood would destroy housing values, and white flight to the suburbs was in full force. Remember the Jeffersons? The whole idea of a Black family living in a Park Avenue apartment was so weird that it was the premise of a sitcom.

OK, I live on the Upper East Side, and the black and brown faces on Park Avenue still mostly work there, they don’t live there. And cities across the country remain amazingly segregated. But overt racism is no longer acceptable in polite company, and certainly is not acceptable in politics. This is a profound cultural shift. And of course, there’s that president we’re so disappointed in. The election of an African-American president is obviously not proof of the end of racism, but it is HUGE nonetheless.

So what’s my point? We have achieved so much, everything is so much better than it used to be, so we should stop complaining? Absolutely not! The world—and this country in particular—continues to be a profoundly unjust place. Immigrants and Muslims (code for Arabs) currently play the role previously occupied by African Americans, Jews, Irish… name your minority, depending on the time and place you choose. Vilification of the Other continues to be a favored way to play on people’s fear in order to gain political power. And I will save my rant about economic justice for another post.

But we need to recognize and celebrate how far we have come. We should learn from our parents and grandparents who made the change happen. And we should draw strength from the successes of the recent past to keep working toward making the world a place we want to live in.