American Exceptionalism Excludes Women

our democracy, our exceptionalism. The data don't bear us out.

Our United States of America loves to brag about our advancements. We are the biggest, the best, the most progressive and the most democratic. We believe that people, no matter who they are, deserve a voice. We have invaded other people's countries to make that point. We beat ourselves against our chests to talk about

The World Economic Forum says it will take 131 years. Internationally, to close the gender gap with economics, politics, STEM engagement and more. It ranks the so-called exceptional United States as 46th in gender parity, behind Norway and Iceland (1 and 2), the United Kingdom (15), France, Columbia, Switzerland, the Philippines and South Africa. These countries do better than ours because they have poli-

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cies that support families, instead of penalizing them for simply existing. Our country took a step in the right direction after COVID when we chose to provide unemployment benefits, child services, and more for challenged families. Now, we have leaders who would punish those who want to uphold families.

The gender pay gap bleeds over to the life gap. Women who don't earn earn enough can't contribute enough to the candidates of their choice. No matter what they think

Ben Jealous

A Deep-South Governor's Race to Watch

A year in which there are only three races for governor's seats, all in the Deep South, wouldn't normally create a lot of political speculation. Kentucky's popular Democratic incumbent may have a tough race, and chalking up Louisiana and its neighbor to the east to a Republican would be typical conventional wisdom.

But "Mississippi Miracle" may well become the catchphrase of this election season. Brandon Presley is making a strong bid to become the first Democratic elected governor in the Magnolia State this century.

Presley (yes, Elvis from Tupelo is a cousin) has won a seat on the state's Public Service Commission four times, where he's opposed a huge coal-fired power plant and a proposal to dump nuclear waste in Mississippi and fought to expand internet access in rural areas.

He's hard to pin as a typical Democrat. He lowered taxes and

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balanced budgets as a mayor, endorsed George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election and describes himself as a pro-life Christian (which he is quick to note demands supporting health care, education, and seniors as well).

Presley has a powerful personal story that reaches well beyond his kinship with the King of Rock and Roll. He was raised by a single mom who worked in a garment factory after his father was murdered. He's told poor and working-class voters that they should see their own

David W. Marshall

or feel, they can't support at the level of the predatory capitalist men who have attempted to craft a world that allows them to rule. At the root of the gender pay gap, there is an oppression that sidelines women's voices. And some of the strange fruit of the root is the way many women buy into our own oppression.

As long as the American economy is introducing great results, the inequity in these results is hidden. GDP growth is robust, unemployment rates are low, at the macro level all is good. Down here on the ground, not so much. Down here on the ground, too many are wondering what will happen next. Down here on the ground, low unemployment rates, coupled with low wages, mean that a robust labor market is not a robust paycheck.

Thus, the myth of American exceptionalism is a story of illusion and delusion. Where is the exceptionalism for women, when a

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Nettleton, the town of about 2,000 people in the northeastern Mississippi that Presley hails from and he first became mayor at age 23, is split about 60% White and 40% Black like the state as a whole but has a median income $10,000 below the median in one of the poorest states in the country.

It's no surprise that Presley is campaigning on issues that matter most to those voters. He responded to Gov. Tate Reeves' state of the

Thomas Jefferson and Clarence Thomas, a Paradox of Liberty

two critical elements in American history. The first is the paradox of the American Revolution — the fight for liberty in an era of pervasive slavery.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture opened its permanent home in 2016 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Among the museum's many exhibitions is one that explored slavery and enslaved people in America through the lens of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello plantation. The exhibit, "Paradox of Liberty," highlights

The second element is the self-contradiction of the man who was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. When we look at national unity from patriotic and moral lenses, it can best be described by the paradox of five powerful words authored by Thomas Jefferson: "All men are created equal." And yet Jefferson was an owner of slaves.

Jefferson was a complex man, an oppressor (slave owner) who at the same time was oppressed by the British. He was a man who achieved a degree of freedom when the American colonies gained their independence from Great Britain. However, he chose not to extend independence and liberty to all his slaves when he denied their freedom after his death. There were over 600 enslaved men, women and children during Jefferson's lifetime on his Virginia plantation. Jefferson would set only two of them free.

As the facts of Jefferson, the op- pressor, are disheartening, he wrote those five powerful words from the perspective of being an oppressed citizen at the hands of King George III of England. As our nation celebrates Independence Day, we should remember that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence to inform a "candid world" about the "long train of abuses" the American colonies were subject to the rule of King George III. It listed and explained, in point-bypoint detail, the "patient sufferance of the colonies," which justified their reasons for public protest. With an state address outside a shuttered rural hospital to highlight his $1 billion Medicaid expansion plan, which he says will improve health care to low-income residents and save nearly 40 Mississippi hospitals at risk of closing.

Reeves is unpopular even among his party's voters. Six in 10 voters in a recent poll, including a third of Republicans and two thirds of independents, said they want "someone else" to be governor. While unsuspecting world being part of his written audience, Jefferson exposed the truth about the oppressor and the truth concerning the oppressed. The anger, humiliation and pain oppressed people must endure (then and now) were evident in his words. He understood the divine rights of kings is the belief that the right to rule comes directly from God and is not derived from the people. It is believed that kings are not answerable for their actions to the people whom they are

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Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

usually unpleasant. When they surrender their right to vote, the consequences can be disastrous. Failing to vote when one can is the ultimate surrender!

E. Faye Williams

Elections always have consequences and this week we experienced Part Two of the pro-Republican/pro-conservative Supreme Court. When we connect the dots, we realize the connection between Trump and three of the six justices who voted to terminate Roe AND eliminate affirmative action in college admissions. When folks surrender, the consequences are

I join the legion of those who will analyze and critique this latest act of social violence by the Supreme Court. Much of what I write will echo what you have already seen on television or read online or in a publication. For that I apologize, but the truth of this matter is voluminous and must be told and listened to.

Using the language of the 14th

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Amendment which was written to remedy the injuries of enslavement and bring a full measure of citizenship to formerly enslaved persons, the majority dismissed the history and continuing injury of systemic racism. In their dissent against this travesty, Justices Brown Jackson and Sotomayor gave the nation a complete and concise primer on the beneficial impact of affirmative action and the shortsightedness demonstrated by orchestrating its demise.

Sonia Sotomayor, one of the three liberal justices on the Su-

Marc H. Morial

preme Court, said in her dissenting opinion, "Today, this court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress," she added that this decision "subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society."

Sotomayor argued that the race neutrality envisioned by the majority "will entrench racial segregation in higher education because racial inequality will persist so long as

it is ignored."

In a blistering rebuke of her colleagues in the majority, Brown Jackson stated that "six unelected members of today's majority upend the status quo based on their policy preferences about what race in America should be like, but is not, and their preferences for a veneer of colorblindness in a society where race has always mattered and continues to matter in fact and in law."

Brown Jackson added, "Our

Celebrating 20 Years of Upholding a Tradition as 'The Voice Of Black America'

sponsibilities of leadership of the National Urban League — one of which is the honor to author this very column, "To Be Equal," established by the esteemed Whitney M. Young Jr.

Whitney M. Young Jr.

"Show me a person who is full of prejudice, and I will show you a sick, unhappy, fearful individual who is not going anywhere and who is not growing. People don't shut other people out; they fence themselves in." —

It was 20 years ago this week that I humbly assumed the re-

The column shares its name and takes its inspiration from Young's first full-length book, published on New Year's Day, 1964, in the wake of what Young called "the year of the Negro Revolution," a year that saw thousands of children, marching through Birmingham, Alabama, attacked by police

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dogs and blasted with firehoses; the Woolworth's lunch counter sit-in in Jackson, Mississippi; Gov. George W. Wallace's Stand in the Schoolhouse Door at the University of Alabama, the assassination of Medgar Evers, the March on Washington for Jobs and Justice, and the deadly bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church.

The first "To Be Equal" column to be published in New York's Amsterdam News was headlined, "How Much Are Negroes Worth?" Young recounted his conversation with "a middle-aged white housewife" who declared she harbored no prejudice against Black Americans but could not comprehend the push to desegregate schools. "Her arguments against school integration, it turned out, were directed against sending her children to slum schools," Young wrote. "But supposedly there is nothing wrong with sending Negro children to slum schools."

The last "To Be Equal" column published under Young's byline ran three weeks after his tragic

March 11, 1971, drowning in Nigeria and consisted of excerpts of his various speeches. The last column he authored, also published after his death and headlined "Old Story, New Beginning," concerned his efforts as part of a special commission tasked with updating the recommendations of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission.

"The Kerner report's sound

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Freedom and Equal Justice Under the Law Requires Constant Struggle

On Juneteenth 2023, the nation enjoyed the new national holiday celebrating the freedom of the slaves at the end of the Civil War. This week marks the 10-year anniversary of Shelby v. Holder and the impending decision of the Supreme Court on affirmative action in college admissions. The juxtaposition is a stark reminder that the struggle for equal justice for all is ongoing. Each step forward is met with furious reaction; each reconstruction with concerted efforts to roll back the progress. And today, we are once more in the midst of that reaction.

June 19, 1865, was the day that U.S. Major General Gordon Granger declared that the Emancipation Proclamation, that went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, had freed all the slaves in Texas — an estimated 250,000. The proclamation, a wartime measure, was lim- ited: it applied only to those states still in rebellion. Lincoln always gave precedence to the survival of the union over the question of slavery. With the proclamation, slaves in states that were not in rebellion — like Delaware and Kentucky — remained in bondage. And the news was slow to travel to distant slave states like Texas, even after the surrender of the Confederate armies under Gen. Robert E. Lee. The proclamation took hold only as U.S. troops extended their victory. It took the passage of the

13th Amendment to end slavery throughout the United States.

Needless to say, that profound reform was met with furious reaction. The plantation class in the southern states began a campaign of systematic violence to squelch Black freedom. The Ku Klux Klan, among others, spread the terror of lynching across the South. In the end, the federal government gave in. A political deal removed federal troops from the defeated Confederate states. A reactionary Supreme Court ratified "separate but equal" as constitutional. Segregation — legal apartheid — settled in across the South. Juneteenth marks not the triumph of equal justice, but a large step forward and the beginning of a new era of struggle.

One hundred years later, the civil rights movement rose up to demand equal justice. Blacks demanded the right to vote, and equal access to public accommodations. Finally, a Supreme Court ruled that segregation was a vio-

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