By Jack Bernard, contributing columnist
PEACHTREE CITY, Ga. | The United States must make greater strides towards diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). However, we must realize that America has made tremendous progress along these lines since the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement began.
Many of this columns’ readers were not alive when Martin Luther King, Jr. was the Civil Rights’ movement leader. As a teenager and young adult in the 60s, I lived on Long Island, N.Y., plus later in Bartow, Clarke and Fulton counties. These places were alike in one way. Many white people shared a general dislike of the civil rights movement and MLK, Jr. in particular.
Some people think that New York has always been progressive. However, it was segregated when I grew up there, and with racial strife. But it was not only race that caused conflict.
My mother’s Italian family was religious. My grandmother’s bedroom looked like a Catholic church with paintings and statues of the Virgin Mary and Jesus everywhere. Her father died and she had to drop out of school to support her mother, who spoke no English.
Working in a factory, she met my father, a French undocumented immigrant. They got engaged. But he was deported, eventually returning to marry her. It was not a typical, big Italian wedding.
My mother grew up with a dozen siblings. All nine of my mother’s older siblings married Italian Catholics. My mother had the audacity to want to marry a French Jew. Boy, did that raise eyebrows! So, she and my father were married at City Hall.
My father was charismatic and a good provider, so her family eventually accepted him. Still, my mother was told it might be advisable not to go to my grandmother’s house for Christmas because an uncle might make a crack about Jews killing Christ.
I lived in an Irish and Italian blue-collar neighborhood. For public school, we were bused into another town, an upper-middle class Jewish area. There were cliques. Jews looked down on Irish and Italian kids. And the Italians and Irish frequently cursed the Jews. Since then, you can see why I say that our nation has become a less tribal, more diverse society.
Fifty years ago, Christians were 87 percent of U.S. adults, 6 percent were another religion, and 5 per cent “did not have a religious preference” Now, only 68 percent call themselves Christian while seven per cent are other religions; the rest are not religious.
According to the census, back in 1960, 88.6 percent of Americans were white, 10.5 percent black, and less than one percent other. Now, only three-fourths of U.S. citizens are white, 14 percent are black and three percent Asian. The other eight percent are a mixture of racial identities.
So America has become more diverse. And civil rights laws, many passed in the 60’s, have promoted integration of our society. But there is a right-wing push to do away with these laws starting with the Roberts’s Court’s infamous 5-4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, gutting the Voting Rights Act… which had been overwhelmingly re-authorized by both houses of Congress.
Doing away with civil rights laws by Congress or the Supreme Court will simply promote tribalism. As MLK Jr. once said, “It may be true that morality cannot be legislated- but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless.” He was 100 percent correct.
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