This Just In – Another Black History Month is in the books, despite the wishes of the current president.
During this month of February, there have been protests, speeches and reminders that we are in a civil rights movement right now. Jane Fonda received a lifetime achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild and urged her audience to “be brave.” She talked about being proud of her union (SAG) and that with unions, workers have power.
In the civil rights movement, we talk about community and common ground. It’s about our humanity. The more we can demand that our representatives hold true to that, the more difficult we can make it for Vladimir Putin to destroy our republic from within by way of his “useful idiot” – the 47th President of the United States. That is precisely what’s going on here and we must be brave enough to say so. Resisting what is happening in the Trump administration is resisting Russian intrusion into our sovereignty.
NC Senator Thom Tillis, a most unlikely target of praise from yours truly, agrees with me on this. He took to the floor of the Senate with displays of disturbing pictures from Ukraine and called Putin the aggressor and a dictator and a murderous thug.
“As we mark the third anniversary of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, it is critical that we maintain our support for the Ukrainian people and hold Putin accountable as the United States seeks to secure a lasting peace,” said Tillis. The problem is … the United States is not doing that.
This occurred during the same week that the United States of America voted against a UN resolution condemning Russian aggression.
Resistance, constant and clear-eyed, is what’s needed at every level of society to make it impossible for this autocratic white supremacist nonsense to succeed. The ability to control any and every level of communication and organization has been the key to these tyrannical impulses seeing success in the past, but even so, the traction that they accomplished was short term.
There’s plenty of living memory of McCarthyism and Hitler’s Germany to demonstrate this, but remember, too what our beloved founding fathers did to suppress American slaves: they deprived them of their most basic humanity.
Look at the census documents going back as far as they go, and you’ll see that before emancipation, slaves were listed as a number only. For Congressional apportionment, they counted as 3/5 of a person, and that was strictly for southerners to try to preserve political power.
They were deprived of family names and the continuity it provides. They were not permitted to marry, giving legitimacy to their familial relationships. American slaves used their own ceremonies to replace a recognized wedding ritual (West Africa’s “jumping the broom”) and they sang and celebrated these unions, often secretively. They kept faith in an impossible situation because doing so allowed them to survive – to endure.
The inequities experienced between Americans of varying shades obviously persists today. The current administration’s insistence that removal of programs to expand diversity, ensure equity and inclusion are proof positive of where the problem lies. Most of us are quite happy to run things based on merit. Doing so would have kept several top military leaders in their non-partisan jobs.
In this administration, however, the presence of brown skin or ovaries is too scary in a command position. That’s right – it scares them, so this government moves further and further from its people, whether they realize it or not.
We do what we must do to defend our republic. We move on and we march. We demonstrate the power of our community and shared humanity. Just as the last week featured ridiculous examples of outrageous hubris (respond to this email or you’re fired), we also saw old-school protests all over the country and some surprising backlash to Musk’s cuckoo email demand … like cabinet secretaries telling their departments not to respond.
Regardless of the administration’s not issuing a boilerplate resolution for the nation’s leading liar to scribble his compensating signature on, March is Women’s History Month. Believe me when I tell you that these guys would rather that we not have the right to vote, along with bodily autonomy and financial equality. Watch Jane Fonda’s speech. She’s 87 years old. Be brave. Stay together. Hold hands. We’ll make it if we do that.
(featured image: AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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