The Times They Are a Changing
It’s the end of the school year and summer is fast approaching. there are graduations to be planned, futures prepared for and Proms to be had. There are tuxedos to be rented, dresses to be bought, limos stuffed with teens ready to engage in the end of the year tradition who’s origins are the nineteenth century Promenade Ball. But in a large part of this country that’s not the only nineteenth century tradition that Prom represents. Racial Segregation. Separate but equal Proms. And no, this isn’t 1956. In many places in the south there are two separate Proms held at the end of each year, one for the blacks and one for the whites. While its true that many of these segregated proms have been pushed to change over the last thirty years since their schools were integrated some schools such as Charleston High School, Mississippi have gone as far as to refuse an integrated prom to be paid for by Morgan Freeman, a native of the state. “You can go to school with my kids, help my son’s football team win the state championship and even win an Oscar, but don’t you go dancing with my daughter boy.” Nothing like that good old fashioned kind of racism, right?
And while the New York Times covers kids in KFC in Mississippi, the Senate’s firing up some racial accusations of their own as Sonia Sotomayor prepares for the trials of being the first ever Hispanic Supreme Court Nominee. But this time the racial charges are on the other foot. Republican Activists are getting ready to make accusations that Sotomayor is herself a racist citing a 2008 ruling in New Haven Connecticut where 20 firefighters were refused promotions due to the fact that not enough black firefighters scored highly enough to qualify. Sotomayor, as part of a three judge panel that heard the case’s appeal in 2008 sided with the city and the original decision of the lower court, denying the nineteen white firefighters and one Hispanic firefighter from New Haven their promotions. The case is scheduled before the Supreme Court later this month.
Meanwhile, in California the California Supreme Court has backed the voter approved proposition to make the marriage of a gay couple illegal. In the 2008 election, the same election where the first ever Black President was elected, California voters decided the definition of marriage to be between a man and a woman in what was known as Proposition 8. The court also decided that the 18000 some gay marriages which took place prior to the election were still valid.
And on a hill in San Francisco there’s a stolen car getting ticketed for a parking violation. And in a apartment in St. Louis a man’s getting a noise violation for beating his wife. They say that the country’s changing; that its time for change. They’ve been saying this for as long as anyone alive now can remember. I’ll tell you what I remember – a line from a Morgan Freeman movie.
“It’s just a bullshit word. So you go on and stamp your form, sonny, and stop wasting my time. Because to tell you the truth, I don’t give a shit.”