Nine years ago, when I spotted blood in my ejaculate, I made an appointment to see my urologist. I quickly found myself to be the only woman in the waiting room. A handful of men surrounded me, and I could see the gears turning in their heads, wondering why a person who presented as and looked like a woman was waiting alongside them.

“Is your husband in there?” said the man two chairs to my right. As a transgender woman, passing as the gender I align with is one of the most joyous and validating feelings. For those of us who have gone through male puberty with masculinizing factors, aligning our external social presentation with our innermost core identity of gender requires both effort and luck.

If we were not in a doctor’s office, I would have remained sociable and continued the conversation. But here, I tried to avoid it, hoping to prolong the secret that the urology appointment was for me. “No,” I said with a polite smile.

The waiting room brought up all too familiar feelings: anxiety, uncertainty, and the fear of what the remaining men would say or think if I was outed. It also highlighted one of the core tensions in seeking quality health care as a trans person: We need providers to honor our gender identity beyond the simplistic frame of biology while being attentive to biological needs often linked to sex.

As I approached the front desk, a receptionist inquired if I was checking in on behalf of my husband. A second receptionist—the one I had spoken to on the phone to make the appointment—pulled the first to the side and whispered that the appointment was for me, and that I was a transgender woman.

The first receptionist stammered, apologized for the confusion, and handed me a clipboard to fill out my medical details. I sat back down, feeling incredibly self-conscious. Now the entire waiting room likely knew of my situation, that I—like all of them—had a prostate that needed to be examined.

The expectation of rejection and the cost of self-policing has profound effects on transgender lives. We are forced to live a life of vigilance, knowing our gender can shift in the eyes of the public at any moment. This is exhausting, and it can also have devastating health consequences. In a 2020 survey conducted by the Center for American Progress, 28% of transgender respondents said they had postponed or avoided necessary medical care in the past year out of fear of discrimination. Such fear inspires some trans people to cut off their history, drawing a clear line from the moment they transition and choosing to not look back on their “former” lives. But those lives also contain medical history that our bodies can’t discard.

Because of this, doctors’ visits often feel like a forced “outing,” where we have to disclose our history in order to receive an accurate diagnosis. Despite the legal and professional rules that govern medicine, medical professionals are still, in the end, human. Some are accepting and tolerant, others are indifferent and ignorant, and still others are just plain spiteful.

When I had my hip labrum cartilage repaired, I knew the bottom half of my body would be naked on the operating table, which meant my penis would be out in the open for all the doctor’s assistants to see.  The fact that I’d be under anesthesia and unconscious didn’t deter me from making an effort to boldly declare my womanhood while unclothed. I got a pedicure two days before my surgery and picked a bright fuchsia color—the same one I’ve used for over a decade—that I thought might help minimize the chances of being misgendered by the nursing staff as I waited for surgery.

But the day of the procedure, a snobbish blonde nurse looked me dead in the eye and called me “he” as she handed my medical chart over to my surgical coordinator. I made a polite attempt to correct her, but she kept referring to me as “him” and “he” to the other nurses. Finally, the surgical coordinator came to my side, rolled her eyes, and said with a nod: “I know, I know. Just ignore her. She’s just a bitch.”

Tragically, this experience is routine for trans people seeking health care. In a poll conducted by KFF and the Washington Post, 31% of trans adults reported that a health care provider had refused to acknowledge their gender identity, using instead their sex assigned at birth. Health care providers need to acknowledge our core identities even as we need to divulge our raw and tender histories. And precisely because this process can be so excruciating, it is critical for the transgender community—and the medical sectors that support us—to be consistent and precise with our language around gender, sex, and medicine. We must emphasize that being trans is about being seen for who we are as individuals rather than merely our biology, while also advocating for the quality, compassionate health care that our biology might necessitate.

Underlying all of this is the frustrating reality that doctors are fallible and sometimes misinformed, which means we must speak up for ourselves when the situation demands. Infuriatingly, the 2020 Center for American Progress survey found that one in three transgender respondents had to “teach their doctor about transgender people in order to receive appropriate care.” That was the case when I asked my general practitioner for a full panel of STD tests, only for him to ask if I had sex with men.  I was so afraid to come off as double queer—a transgender bisexual woman who had anal sex with men—that I lied and said I only dated women. “You don’t need the HIV panel if you don’t have sex with men,” he said. I was shocked at his ignorance, and to this day regret not speaking up to inform him that the spread of HIV isn’t restricted to anal male-on-male intercourse. I can’t help but wonder how many additional people he misinformed due to my reticence.

I remembered the cost of remaining silent while at a doctor’s visit last summer, when I needed an X-ray. “Are you pregnant?” the nurse asked.

“No,” I replied, “I can’t get pregnant.”

She looked at me with one raised eyebrow. “How old were you when you had your hysterectomy?”

As good as it would have felt to continue to play along as a woman who was born female and had gone through puberty as one, I instead chose discomfort. When I told her I was transgender, she nodded, thanked me for my transparency, and proceeded to strap the lead vest on my chest.  As the X-ray machine began to whirl, I smiled. It took bravery to own that moment of authenticity. But being honest with my nurse translated into better care for myself—and maybe the next patient she works with, too.

The post For Trans People, a Doctor’s Visit Can Be a Dilemma appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“What can we do in response to this meteoric rise in anti-Asian racism?” asked Chinese for Affirmative Action executive director Cynthia Choi during a wide-ranging Zócalo/Daniel K. Inouye Institute virtual event that streamed live on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, “Does a New Wave of Anti-Asian American Racism Require New Ways of Fighting Back?” Choi and her fellow panelists looked to the past and present to try to answer that very question. Traditional ways of addressing these issues do not meet the demands of the moment for the Asian American community, said Choi. “It requires our full attention.”

The discussion was dedicated to the memory of Irene Hirano Inouye, a leader in the Asian American community who was pivotal in the creation of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, and served as president and founder of the U.S.-Japan Council.

“[Hirano’s] tireless work in this space has resulted in great strides for Asian Americans,” said Daniel K. Inouye Institute director Jennifer Sabas in her opening remarks. “She would have been 72 this month. We lost her way too early.”

Sabas then turned the discussion over to the event moderator, Sewell Chan, editor of the editorial pages for the Los Angeles Times, who opened by asking the panelists to “lay out the framework of what’s going on right now with anti-Asian violence.”

Political scientist and founding director of the UC Riverside Center for Social Innovation Karthick Ramakrishnan said that one has to consider this moment from a post-9/11 context. “What we saw after 9/11 was the normalization of not just nativism, but some of the most virulent aspects of white supremacy that it became mainstream,” he said. “We’re still feeling the strong effect of that.”

How can we build better systems to combat nativism and white supremacy? Embracing the “politics of solidarity,” said Ramakrishnan, is one way. “We don’t want to get into what some people call ‘oppression Olympics,’” he said—comparing what’s happened to one group to another—but instead to figure out, “How can we all work together to make sure that we overthrow these systems of exclusion?”

For instance, he said, he’s been inspired by the work of Black-led organizations in the Inland Empire, where he lives. “I know that by supporting them and their work dismantling racism it’s going to benefit so many other communities, including Asian American communities.”

Turning to another panelist, United States Senator Mazie Hirono, Chan asked if her constituents in Hawai’i—the state he called “best known for pluralism”—have given her templates or patterns for the rest of the country to learn from.

“A large percentage of the people of Hawai’i identify themselves as multi-racial,” said Hirono. “That is a huge factor in our celebration of diversity.”

Hirono is also looking to the nation’s past for inspiration in combating contemporary anti-Asian American racism. This week, she introduced the Neighbors Not Enemies Act, which would repeal the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, an act referred to by President Trump in his Muslim Ban and by President Roosevelt in Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal and incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

In May, Hirono also joined senators Kamala Harris and Tammy Duckworth in introducing a resolution to condemn racist acts, rhetoric, and speech against Asian Americans caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. While the House version of that bill recently passed, Hirono pointed out that almost 200 Republican members did not vote for the bipartisan resolution.

“It’s just amazing this is where we are,” said Hirono, “and that’s why our work is cut out for us, and why elections matter.”

USC historian and Two Faces of Exclusion: The Untold History of Anti-Asian Racism author Lon Kurashige, another panelist, added additional historical perspective to the discussion. “When the internment happened, there were no supporters; there were no allies,” he said. “It was a very different time.” But during the civil rights movement, he pointed out, Japanese Americans, led by the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), were very active in marching and protest, and in pushing legislation in Congress.

“This is the work we have been building,” Choi added, pointing out that her 50-year-old organization was inspired by the Black civil rights movement. “Our founders borrowed many of the tactics, in terms of protest and advocacy work, and so that’s the work that we have built upon, and we’ve always done our work in coalition, including around education,” she said. Citing Lau v. Nichols, the landmark 1974 Supreme Court case ensuring English-language learners would have quality education—a case brought on behalf of Chinese students in San Francisco that ultimately affected many different non-English-speaking young people—she added that much of the work Chinese for Affirmative Action does “benefits our multi-racial democracy.”

Both Chan and the audience question-and-answer session closed the discussion by bringing up the event looming on everyone’s minds: the upcoming presidential election. How, an audience member asked via YouTube chat, should we deal with racist rhetoric coming directly from the highest office? “Words matter,” said Choi. “It makes me feel outrage that the president of the United States is essentially giving license to people to attack Asians.”

Hirono turned her gaze past 2020.

“There’s so much work to be done after this administration,” said Hirono. “So much rebuilding. So much recognition of what we need to do to bring our country together in this most divisive period. There’s work for all of us.”

The post A New Wave of Anti-Asian Violence Demands New Answers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Mentally, I’d roll my eyes. If someone asked me, my answers would be monosyllabic. Food wasn’t something I liked to talk about, and the everydayness of the question diminished it in my view. That is, until last week. I get it now. The superficial—What are you eating? Is that all?—masks the essential (I’m thinking of you). If friends ask me now, I answer in all earnest: Khichdi. Bread. Potatoes, yes, again.

My timeline is now full of photos of self-prepared meals and recipes. I read them, uselessly. Most ingredients are missing from our kitchen. We’ve never stocked much. There’s a grocery store right outside, a dairy across the road, and a bakery every few yards. But the lockdown was only announced at 8 p.m., when it was scheduled to start at midnight. We’d been self-isolating for a week already, and supplies were so low that, along with the rest of the city, I panicked.

My mother tried to dissuade me, but I went out anyway, promising to keep my distance. It was a mistake. I had to choose between keeping a safe distance, and getting hold of any food. A few mini-packs of soy milk, for which there are few takers in India, and some buns were my only prize, the latter thanks to a baker who recognized me. He’d pulled the grille-gate shut and turned off the lights to dissuade crowds, but when he heard my voice through the cotton mask, he gave me something.

There were funny moments too. At one shop, I asked for bleach and experienced a surge of relief when the vendor said yes, he had some. A pause, and then he said: Face bleach, yes?

Every visit to the wash basin is ironic. Soap-free cleanser. Soap-free shampoo. What use now? I had a bar of real soap tucked away, thankfully. I’d bought some off a woman I know online as the Alt Prime Minister. There was a fun campaign going at the time: An Alt Sarkaar (shadow government) was formed on Twitter, with a cabinet and ministers who would announce measures to which the actual government ought to have paid attention. Vidyut was elected Alt Prime Minister via an online poll. Aside from digital activism, she also makes soap, giving each bar an interesting name. What I have now is “Black Day,” a bar of black soap she made on December 11, 2019, the day the government passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

The amendment offers citizenship to illegal immigrants as long as they’re Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis, Jains, or Buddhists who declare that they fled persecution in three neighboring Muslim-majority nations: Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan. Only Muslims from those countries are excluded from citizenship citing persecution. The amended law doesn’t take into account that Myanmar and China are in the neighborhood too, and Muslims have been brutally persecuted there. Or that minority sects like Ahmadis or Shia are also vulnerable even within Muslim-majority nations. It also ignores Tamils, whether Hindu or Muslim, who might face persecution in Sri Lanka. It is as if the persecution and suffering of Muslims in South Asia were irrelevant, something that can be shrugged off by India. It is also the first time that India, founded on the principles of secular democracy, has singled out Muslims for isolation by way of policy.

The act heightened fears around the “National Registry of Citizens,” a registry that had already been initiated in one state, Assam, where the government had confined thousands to detention centers for being unable to prove that their forefathers lived at a particular address and were therefore not illegal immigrants. In January and February, tens of thousands of Indians took to the streets. There were multiple sit-ins in cities across India, many led by Muslim women. For a few weeks, art bloomed. Libraries popped up.

As COVID-19 began sweeping across the world, moving from China to Europe, state elections were held in Delhi. The party that is currently in power nationally lost. Suddenly, violence was reported on the fringes of India’s capital city. Murders, mobs, arson. It was said that the violence was a backlash against the sit-ins and protests against the CAA/NRC. Police arrested a Muslim leader and social media accounts suggested that Muslims were responsible for the violence, although it was Muslims who died in larger numbers, and the majority of the businesses and homes burnt down belonged to Muslims. Muslim peace activists were arrested and their families say they’ve been tortured in custody.

A certain miasma already hung in the air. Long before the coronavirus hit, many of us were practicing social distancing of another kind. I was already staying home a lot. I was afraid of talking to many former colleagues or schoolmates. It was impossible to accept their affection for me while witnessing their hatred of Muslims; it was no longer possible to be me without also being “Muslim.” Like-minded friends were distraught. Some threw themselves into relief work. Others admitted to being depressed. We didn’t need to meet each other to know. We read the news. We saw each other’s social media posts. We slept poorly. We had nightmares.

When news of coronavirus cases in India started to come in, I wasn’t worrying about rice, noodles or sanitizer. Instead, I sent messages to people who were attending sit-ins, pleading with them to quit. Others, who understand how dangerous narratives are spun, also urged them to quit. Movements are hard to build up, though, and there was no official lockdown. Parliament, politics, pilgrimages—nothing had been halted. The protestors felt they could continue to sit-in with masks. I had to admit, it wasn’t only their health I worried about, but that they’d get painted over as obstinate and irrational. Irrational Muslims.

The protests wound up after the Prime Minister announced a “janta curfew”—a people’s curfew, a single 14-hour period of isolation—and also asked the public to clap and bang on pots and pans to show appreciation for doctors. They did so enthusiastically.

Immediately after the curfew ended, people poured out of their homes to celebrate. A nationwide lockdown was announced only two days later, on March 24.

After the initial panic, I was calm. True, we were low on groceries. True, there was no immediate clarity on how one could go out to shop for basics. There were memes: Someone on social media shared an image of a heavily padded rubber bodysuit, to wear when you go out for groceries. It suggested protection from batons aimed at your backside and thighs. One politician had reportedly asked cops to break people’s legs, or just shoot them if they violated the lockdown order.

Still, I felt calm. The lockdown felt like a physical enactment of my inner world—a sense of siege, of caution and confusion. I had the relief of a dozen unread books, waiting. Besides, it was getting warmer. It is already close to 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the evenings here. The pandemic won’t hit India as hard, I thought.

Then came the awful visuals: thousands of migrant workers trapped in cities who had been abruptly thrown out of work, and were now hungry and desperate to go home. Train and bus services had already been suspended. They would have to walk hundreds of kilometers to get home. Outraged at the treatment of the workers, some citizens began to donate rations and funds. And masks.

My eyes barely left my phone screen. It was like being in a tunnel where the roof has fallen in, our collective hands bloodied from trying to dig out despite a lack of tools. All tunnels have ends, of course. Perhaps it will be three months, not three weeks. Or three years. Everyone says to brace yourself. On the other end of the tunnel could be a mess of an economy and millions of starving people with low immunity. And who knows what the spring harvest was like? How much were farmers able to store? Was the government able to procure enough grain?

It became impossible to read or write about anything outside of this. My mind turned circles around words like decency. Dignity. Equality. It returned to warm spots of memory—places blue and burnt sienna, sprawling libraries. It also sprang towards terrifying stories of famine from the last century.

For some reason, I also kept returning to the image of a maze: the Bhoolbhulaiya in Lucknow’s Bada Imambara. It is full of sunlight glancing off honey-tinted stone walls. People must have had a taste for perplexity back in the day. Perplexity can be charming, unlike the grim certitudes of a tunnel. Not everyone makes it out though. I caught myself thinking of a chakravyuh—a military formation whereby you are encircled and trapped. With surveillance and restricted mobility becoming acceptable in the name of public health, was this the beginning of something more dangerous, more discriminatory than a virus?

Some of India’s COVID-19 deaths were traced to a large gathering of Muslim preachers, the Tableeghi Jamaat, in Delhi. That religious congregations are associated with risk of infection is not news, and the Jamaat had already congregated before the lockdown was announced. The instructions were to stay put where people were and not to travel. So, many of them stayed put. Large numbers of Hindu pilgrims had also traveled to temples like Vaishno Devi and Tirupati around the same time and had also sheltered in place. However, a bunch of television news anchors began to focus mainly on the Tableeghi gathering, accusing them of hiding or holing up, instead of simply saying that they were stranded as pilgrims of other faiths were. The phrase “Corona Jihad” was used.

When I first took a bath with my bar of black soap purchased from Vidyut’s online store, I started crying. This black, black day. These days that never stop dawning black.

The same evening, I caught sight of a new trending hashtag: #मुस्लिम_मतलब_आतंकवादी. Muslim Means Terrorist. The television focus on the Muslim preachers had already borne fruit online.

I was first alerted to the “terrorist” hashtag by a stranger, who’d apologized to me and a few other Muslims on Twitter, saying he felt ashamed by it. I felt compelled to go check it out, although friends had advised against it: Why do this to yourself? But I feel the need to bear witness. This sort of hate campaign has been mounted much before the pandemic. An earlier hashtag called for the economic boycott of Muslims in India. Again, I made myself look.

I took screenshots, reported a couple of tweets, but there were too many. For an hour, I kept scrolling. Down, down. The tears came, but I couldn’t put the phone away. That evening, I wept until my head started to hurt. I was careful to be silent though, and to wash my face well before I faced my mother. Then I made myself a cup of tea and picked up my phone again. The essential question was waiting: Have you had your tea?

The post A Letter From Mumbai, Where Everyday Questions Carry New Weight appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The residence hall in the United States has come to mark the threshold between childhood and adulthood, housing young people during a transformational time in their lives. When parents drop their kids off at college, do they pose in front of a classroom building or the library? Maybe. But it’s the unloading of clothes, computers, and comforters at the dorms that defines the break between childhood and adulthood.

This rite of passage is taken much more seriously by Americans than by people in other countries. In the United States, largely because of Americans’ romantic attitude toward the universities of Oxford and Cambridge—where young men once lived and studied together and forged lasting identities based on shared housing—students living together in one building has come to be seen as an essential part of the college experience. Students spend just 12 or 15 hours per week in class, plus a few hours of study; the rest of the time they are socializing, working out, gaming, managing clubs, politicking, making music, and relaxing with friends. In short, they are forging connections that will last a lifetime and establishing a network that will benefit their careers.

But living on campus—and the social benefit Americans place on it today—was never inevitable. American universities haven’t always intended for dorms to bring people together; campus housing was also organized, for many years, to keep groups of students apart. In fact, the very first purpose-built residence for college students in America was the Indian College at Harvard University, constructed by a British religious society in the mid-17th century to house Native American students and keep them separate from white boys.

And while today’s residence life experts tout diversity as the key reason for residing with fellow students, from the 17th century to the early 20th century, anti-diversity was the norm. Dormitories introduced young men to other men like themselves, and anchored young women in the domestic sphere they were expected to inhabit later on—and architects and university leaders came up with physical designs that furthered these social goals.

Over the decades, universities designed dorms to promote desired social norms, and in the postwar period, high-rises became popular. Here, two boys stand on a dorm balcony at Rutgers University on move-in day, 1955. Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

In the colonial period, college buildings were often single, multipurpose structures that housed all the functions of a school, including the president’s home, faculty apartments, student bedrooms, chapel, library, dining hall, and classrooms. Harvard’s first governing board reported in 1671, “It is well known … what advantage to Learning accrues by the multitude of persons cohabiting for scholasticall communion, whereby to acuate the minds of one another, and other waies to promote the ends of a Colledge-Society.” Since the actual curriculum was limited, Christian morality was a large part of what boys absorbed at the colonial college. This character formation was gained by observing role models; professors and students sharing living space was good for moral development. This attitude was an essential intellectual and emotional precondition for the American dormitory.

A uniquely American sense of religious identity provided the ongoing impetus for sorting students into dorm-style housing during the 18th and 19th centuries. Great Britain had one official state religion, Anglicanism, which dominated life at both Oxford and Cambridge. But in the United States, religious freedom expressed itself in dozens of sects—each of which wanted its own college, with its own moral imprint on its members. Religious leaders often founded small schools in rural districts, away from the crime and vice of the city; assigning students to live together in a dormitory allowed young boys to bond with each other and their tutors, reinforcing their social connections. Ideally, a young man’s roommate had a marriageable younger sister, tightening the bond once more.

Although dorms were exclusionary, on balance, university-sponsored housing was still more democratic than the houses built by the private fraternities for white men in the late 19th century. As fraternities surged in popularity, they erected houses for dwelling, partying, and secret rites on many American campuses. They soon began to dominate college social life, and by the 1870s a non-Greek student (also called an “independent”) had little chance of becoming student body president or first trombone in the marching band. As historian Nicholas Syrett has explained, “Like any society that includes some people and excludes others, fraternities gain prestige precisely through that exclusion.”

In the service of solidifying their status, fraternity men also pushed the boundaries of acceptable student behavior. At Cornell University, the University of Michigan, and other colleges, fraternity brothers made it known that so-called coeds (female college students) were not allowed at their parties, and that local women were the preferred guests. The brothers saw lower-class women as sexually available and “ostracized those female classmates who threatened their hegemony on campus,” Syrett writes.

College deans maintained that the gulf separating fraternity men from other men on campus could be blamed on housing. In 1930, S. L. Rollins, a dean of men at Northwestern University, spoke plaintively, “[It is an] undesirable result when the fraternity men are well housed while the independents are not. This inequality in housing is the predominant cause for the feeling of inferiority [among non-Greeks] and for their animosity toward the fraternity men.” Today it might seem laughably naïve that anyone thought animosity arose from poor housing, rather than racial and religious discrimination, but Rollins and other administrators felt that the construction of good dormitories was a positive intervention that would smooth the torn fabric of college life. So, in the early decades of the 20th century, many university leaders lobbied strenuously for a new sort of residence hall to serve as a democratic alternative to the elitist fraternity.

Many of these pre-World War II dorms were arranged around a quadrangle, much like Cambridge and Oxford, to shut out the bustling city, create a private outdoor space, and hark back to vaunted English forebears. The University of Wisconsin’s Adams and Tripp Halls, built in 1924-26, are typical. They face away from Lake Mendota, making them cozy and self-contained, and they are laid out in the shape of a square donut, with four sides built to the same height and a central courtyard inaccessible to anyone other than a resident.

The University of Wisconsin’s Adams and Tripp Halls, pictured here on a 1926 postcard, were designed to level class distinctions. Courtesy of Carli Yanni.

College deans wanted to establish the same esprit-de-corps within houses as could be found in an exclusive fraternity, but that required engineering. Each man had a single bedroom, so to create community out of these single rooms, students were organized into houses, formed vertically off of a staircase in a porous arrangement sometimes called the staircase or entryway plan. A brochure directed at incoming Wisconsin students emphasized the possibility that dorm life in places like Adams or Tripp Halls could level class distinctions, noting that the son of a banker and a farmer’s boy could converse and relax in front of the crackling logs of the fireplace.

Unfortunately, for all these widespread claims of egalitarianism, the dormitory still perpetuated barriers. Black students, for instance, weren’t permitted to live in white dorms—at Wisconsin or nearly anywhere else in the U.S. When the enormously popular University of Wisconsin chef Carson Gulley, who was African-American, couldn’t find housing in Madison in pre-civil rights America (before the mid-1960s), university leaders assigned him an apartment in Adams Hall—but it was in the basement, and Gulley’s family had to enter through a separate entrance that was reminiscent of a servants’ door.

Chef Gulley’s apartment was shoehorned into an existing dormitory; in contrast, nearly every space at Howard University in Washington, D.C., was built by black architects for black students. At historically black colleges and universities like Howard, the social value placed on the dormitory was high. Black colleges represented in physical form the acquisition of land, the aspirations for education, and successful uplift of African-Americans—and a certain style of dorm life became part of the program. But that came with a private cost: The handbook for Howard students said, “Always remember that a Howard student is a marked student. Each represents more than himself or herself, because the University entrusts its honor and reputation to each student.”

In particular, the construction of Howard’s Women’s Dormitory (known today as Harriet Tubman Quadrangle), demonstrates how these spaces were expected to protect and prepare their residents. The building was overseen by Lucy Diggs Slowe—a nationally respected educator, tennis champion, writer, and founder of the first African-American sorority (Alpha Kappa Alpha) who was dean of women at Howard for 15 years. Built under her close direction in the 1930s, the Women’s Dormitory resembled Adams and Tripp Halls at Wisconsin in that it was a completely enclosed. Its courtyard was larger, however, and there were fewer points of entry to the inside of the dorm—it was closed off from the city for the protection of the young women. Howard’s administration assumed that female students needed greater protection and surveillance, so the dorm’s architect, Alfred Cassell, organized room entrances around long corridors instead of the entryway plan.

Lucy Diggs Slowe stands in front of the newly completed women’s dormitory (front row, fourth from the left) with members of the National Association of Deans of Women in 1932. Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

On the first floor of one side of the quadrangle, Cassell, at Slowe’s behest, supplied a panoply of social spaces, including parlors, a music room, and a social hall that could be used for special parties or for everyday dining. “A dormitory should be as much like a well-ordered home,” Slowe wrote, “as it is possible to make it”—in other words, a ladies’ dormitory was where the refinements of a carefully managed home would develop. Students entertained guests in order to learn to be good hostesses, and (later) good wives and mothers. The female students needed the extra living space, in part because they were not to go inside men’s dormitories; if a woman was meeting a date (chaperoned of course), he had to come to her dormitory. The female students at Howard were being trained in “thoughtfulness, courtesy, and hospitality,” Slowe said. Socializing was a goal of living in the dorm; the residence hall set a high standard for social behavior. The beautifully appointed parlors and music rooms were a stage set for enhancing students’ moral development.

Over the decades, American educators have cherished the residence hall as a transformational space in which adolescents turned into adult, morally conscious citizens. Of course, this may seem strange today, when living in a residence hall might just as well lead to a decline in moral character.

Either way, in the weeks around the start of the fall semester, students should stop and think more deeply about the physical space of their residence hall. What possibilities does it offer? Does it reinforce class and race divisions, or does it breakdown social expectations? Corridors make keeping tabs on students easy, but echo with noise; staircase plans prevent roughhousing but offer no communal space; lavish lounges in women’s halls were once intended to civilize male visitors, as were specially designed benches for courting couples. In spite of the fact that college housing policies often allowed for discrimination according to class, race, and gender, deans persisted in their vision of residence hall as a democratic alternative to the elitist fraternity. Against the backdrop of sweeping societal changes, communal living endured because it bolstered networking, if not studying. It’s no wonder families still pose next to the freshly made bunk bed.

The post Why Living in College Dorms Is an American Rite of Passage appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How can Californians rise from horrific local circumstances to national influence?

Two recent books offer one answer: It may help to have grown up amid the racism and institutional failures of Los Angeles in the 1990s.

The two books are both popular and compelling memoirs from African-American women and Southern Californians now in their 30s. But the authors are very different people. One is the Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a deeply serious activist whose memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist, quotes Nelson Mandela and Emma Goldman. The other is the TV and movie star Tiffany Haddish, a profane comedian whose memoir, The Last Black Unicorn, offers an excruciating exegesis of discovering a sex tape of her boyfriend and his mistress—and that the video time stamp is her birthday.

But, in distinct ways, the women show how to turn the pain of Los Angeles into national power. In their telling, the worst of L.A.—its discrimination, neglect, and public agencies so awful that they were taken over by other governments—helped forge strong identities. And the best of L.A.—its diversity—taught them how to speak to the broadest audiences.

Both women learned bitter and useful lessons in the San Fernando Valley. Khan-Cullors recalls growing up in a Section 8 apartment in a poor, mostly Mexican-American corridor of Van Nuys, where takeout restaurants pass for community anchors. “Ours is a neighborhood designed to be transient,” she writes. Haddish was a South L.A. kid, but she rose daily at 5 a.m. to ride a school bus to Woodland Hills.

Both are from families that fell out of the middle class during the deindustrialization and recession of the 1980s and ’90s. Khan-Cullors’s mother is abandoned by her parents when she becomes pregnant as a teenager, and one of Khan-Cullors’s fathers loses his job at the Van Nuys GM plant and never quite rebounds. Haddish’s mother is a postal service manager and property owner who is never the same after suffering major injuries in a freeway accident.

In the Valley, both must reckon with wealthy white people who are unaware of their privilege. Khan-Cullors goes to a Sherman Oaks school, where she makes a friend whose father turns out to be the slumlord who won’t repair her family’s apartment. She is arrested inside her classroom at age 12 (while the school’s white teenage drug dealer goes free). “That was the year I learned that being Black and poor defined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready,” she writes.

Haddish, also attending schools with wealthy whites, decides not to be ignored or insulted, but to emphasize, even with clothing (“poor as f—k chic”) how she’s different. This makes her popular. She also seizes the opportunity, developing a steady business providing dancing and entertainment at bar mitzvahs.

Both women give credit to their Los Angeles Unified public schools. Khan-Cullors recalls how teachers and classmates at Cleveland High introduced her to concepts of social justice. Haddish enjoys the social life at El Camino Real High (she serves as El Conquistador, the school mascot), and a teacher there helps jump-start her academically—to the point that New York University offers her admission (though not enough money for her to attend).

But outside of school, both learn the lesson that L.A. doesn’t really care much about the lives of its kids—especially black, poor ones.

Khan-Cullors watches her friends get harassed and arrested for nothing more than minor acts—tagging, underage drinking, cutting class, talking back, and, in one case, wearing the same T-shirts. She sees how the drug war, the “three strikes” law, and Prop 187 injure friends and acquaintances. And she is particularly angry at how gang injunctions are used to label kids even when they have nothing to do with gangs. “Kids were being sent away simply for being alive in a place where war had been declared against us,” she writes.

The book is particularly powerful—and infuriating—in recounting how Khan-Cullors’s brother, Monte, a schizophrenic, is charged with progressively more serious crimes (“I spent my childhood watching my brother get arrested”), even though he doesn’t physically harm anybody. Monte is beaten, tortured, and drugged in the L.A. County Jail during a time when, subsequent investigations showed, such abuse was a regular practice of the county sheriffs.

Khan-Cullors fights to protect her brother from institutions that treat him as disposable. The line to her eventual activism is clear: Wouldn’t Monte have received the care he needed, rather than abuse and incarceration, if all black lives really mattered?

In Haddish’s memoir, it is the author herself who suffers the abuse. This fact—and Haddish’s comedic instinct to make herself, not others, the butt of jokes—gives her funny book unexpected pathos. She is beaten by her mother, as well as in the foster care system, in which she spends her teens. She describes the indignity of having to beg a judge—since she had no official parent and was a ward of the state—to seize an early opportunity to appear on television.

“It didn’t feel like anybody gave two f^*ks about me, unless it was benefiting them. Unless they was getting paid,” she says, recalling that her grandmother insisted on being compensated for a stint as her foster mother. “Me just being myself was never good enough for anyone to love me.” She falls into difficult relationships with men—some of them cops to whom she is drawn because of the illusion that they provide safety. “I end up picking jealous and possessive guys, because in some sick, twisted way, I think that means they care,” she writes.

In the face of awful realities, both women conclude they have little choice but to assert themselves. Khan-Cullors builds a commune of activists and artists, defying police raids. She helps organize the first Black Lives Matter march, strategically held in Beverly Hills, to gain broad notice. She finds that having had to navigate the many different peoples of L.A. allows her to build diverse alliances—and to make Black Lives Matter a truly democratic organization. Perhaps it’s easier to be intersectional if you’re from a city with so many intersections.

“We have built a decentralized movement that encourages and supports local leaders to name and claim the work that is needed in order to make their communities more just,” she writes, noting that her own name remains little-known. “This is monumentally difficult in a world that has made even activism a celebrity pursuit.”

Haddish has to fight racism and sexism as she breaks into comedy, with only a day job at an LAX ticket counter for support at first. She is cheated and propositioned by producers. But she is lucky in that her unlucky childhood has made her fierce and uncompromising. In 2017, she breaks out in the film Girls Trip, and by this spring, she was a presenter at the Oscars. Toward the end, Jada Pinkett Smith, alongside her husband Will Smith, hilariously enters the narrative playing Henry Higgins to Haddish’s Eliza Doolittle, who needs to be cleaned up so she isn’t “too street” for stardom.

Ultimately, both books make the same timely point: You can’t negotiate or compromise with people or places that discriminate against you. The best you can do is confront that discrimination—and use that experience to build your voice.

As it happens, that is also a strong point in the USC sociologist Manuel Pastor’s new State of Resistance, the best book so far about California in the age of Trump. Pastor argues that the story of California of the past 20 years is how younger Californians, many of them immigrants and minorities, got tired of being victimized. After realizing that complaining doesn’t work, they built institutions and alliances (Black Lives Matter among them) that have protected immigrants and other at-risk people—and took over state politics in the process.

Black Lives Matter and its allies are often criticized as advancing “identity politics.” That’s backward. Khan-Cullors and Haddish each show how forging a strong identity—even through suffering—can allow you to advocate for universal values. The power is in the pain.

“That’s why my comedy so often comes from pain,” Haddish writes. “In my life, and I hope in yours, I want us to grow roses out of the poop.”

The post The Pain of Surviving the San Fernando Valley Can Make You Powerful appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Ever since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, it’s been fashionable to deplore (with full-on How dare they? indignation) the power of big business in our political process. But judging from recent events, I’m more inclined to regret that corporations don’t have a greater say in our civic life.

Seriously. Think about the recent rash of exhilarating triumphs for once-marginalized minorities: the U.S. Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage across the land; South Carolina hastening to lower the Confederate flag of sedition and racism; a Republican presidential candidate being ostracized for bashing Latino immigrants. One of the threads connecting each of these stories is the presence of corporate America flexing its muscles, taking a stand against the bullying and discrimination of minorities.

In the landmark marriage case, a Who’s Who list of blue-chip companies from Procter & Gamble to Goldman Sachs signed onto legal briefs urging the justices to strike down all bans on gay marriage. They argued that such bans conflict with their own anti-discrimination and diversity policies, and that you can’t have a country (and cohesive marketplace) where fundamental rights—like the right to marry—vary from state to state.

Even more impressively, big business mobilized in a number of states over the past two years to defeat or roll back proposed “religious freedom” laws seen as disingenuous efforts to legitimize the discrimination of gays. No single company has been more identified with the effort to stand up to such laws than Walmart, which was credited with singlehandedly defeating a proposed measure in its home state of Arkansas. The retailer also joined other prominent businesses in attacking another such law passed in Indiana, which was subsequently altered.

Business interests were also instrumental in turning the tide against the Confederacy. The New York Times story on South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s decision to call for the removal of the Confederate flag from the State Capitol grounds in the aftermath of the racially-motivated massacre at the Emanuel Church credited “intensifying pressure from South Carolina business leaders to remove a controversial vestige of the state’s past” as one factor leading to the governor’s reversal of her previous position.

Arizona is another state where businesses leaders fought against, and defeated, a religious freedom law that would have otherwise prevailed. In addition, establishment Republicans and corporate leaders in the Grand Canyon State have been in full damage-control mode since the state legislature passed SB 1070, a controversial anti-immigration measure which proved disastrous to the state’s brand as a tourism and investment destination. Subsequently, the business community mobilized to defeat a number of other, ever more radical, anti-immigrant proposed laws in the state, and to take on the Tea Party Republicans responsible for them.

At the national level, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups have led the charge for sensible immigration reform—though this effort can’t yet be checked off as a victory. If only the business lobby had as much power as we often assume it does! In the meantime, it was gratifying for Latino activists aligned with business on immigration to watch Donald Trump be fired by corporate partners like Macy’s, Comcast, Univision, and Disney over his hateful comments about Mexicans. Turns out, vicious speech denigrating immigrants may be acceptable speech in certain political circles, but not in the corporate realm.

Some politicians eager to cater to local prejudices, and capitalize on them, are clearly chafing at the activism of corporations on behalf of a healthier business climate. This spring, while pushing for his own religious freedom law, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal practically whined in a New York Times op-ed: “As the fight for religious liberty moves to Louisiana, I have a clear message for any corporation that contemplates bullying our state: Save your breath.”

It’s an interesting line, not only because he ascribed “breath” to companies, doubling down on the much-mocked pronouncement of then-candidate Mitt Romney that companies are essentially people, too. Jindal’s choice of the verb “bullying” is deliciously hypocritical, because in this case (as in the others described above), it was business rising up to oppose the bullying of people by small-minded politicians.

And this is the key issue on which I differ from many of my friends and colleagues in journalism and academia who hold to a reflexively anti-corporate worldview. They see large, distant corporations as the source of much bullying. I tend to see the worst forms of bullying arising closer to home: at the hands of local or state governments, or dominant business interests rooted in one place.

No, there isn’t anything inherently virtuous about business leaders. As cynics are quick to note, the political fights I’ve described here are all about business wanting what’s best for business. Companies need to avoid offending existing or potential customers and they need to be seen as being inclusive and diverse employers to the best and brightest potential hires out there. I’ll still take those selfish impulses: If only more governments were similarly motivated, instead of being willing to marginalize minorities.

Most business lobbying is admittedly not focused on civic or “business climate” issues like the ones I am raising, but rather on narrower, self-interested agendas of particular companies or industries—say, to influence the drafting or application of regulations, or tax laws. Critics resent the billions spent by corporations and their trade associations in trying to influence the political process, especially since the amounts they spend dwarf the lobbying expenditures of everyone else. But lost in the depiction of a monolithic corporate America pitted against the rest of us, getting its way behind closed doors, is the fact that a significant portion of those business lobbying efforts and dollars are essentially engaged in an intramural corporate contest. It’s about one industry or company seeking to gain advantage (or a level playing field, they might say) against a competitor. Those dollars often cancel each other out. But when the business community does come together to speak with one voice, on broader issues affecting us all, it tends to play a powerful and positive role.

Big business tends to be more enlightened than smaller business interests rooted in only one place, because the broader your perspective, the bigger your market, the less tolerant you can afford to be of idiosyncratic regional prejudices. A company with customers and employees across the country or around the world won’t be comfortable choosing as its home a state that embraces symbols associated with the cause of slavery, or one that passes laws that treat gay couples as second-class citizens or one perceived to be harassing foreigners. It’s no accident that commerce across state lines has always been one of the great motors of progress in this country, and not just economic progress.

That is also why trade agreements that seek to harmonize norms across borders are as beneficial to individuals as they are to big multinationals. The prospect of joining the European Union (and attracting investment by large foreign companies) forced governments across Eastern Europe to protect the rights of long-oppressed minorities. As much as Elizabeth Warren and her protectionist allies have attacked President Obama’s proposed trade deal with Asia as a sop to big business, the agreement will help strengthen civil society and individual rights in these countries for precisely the reasons these critics attack it—by standardizing norms of behavior across jurisdictions.

Bigotry, and the disregard of people’s rights and dignity that comes with it, don’t travel well. And they’re bad for business.

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Racial segregation on trains or in bus stations is unthinkable today. But I remember the days when it was the law or custom in many places, especially in the South. I was raised in New Orleans, and learned early from family what segregated life was like as a Negro and would probably be like for the rest of my life. I also remember the Freedom Rides. In August 1961, I was one of a group of 11 men and women who boarded a train from Los Angeles to Mississippi.

We Freedom Riders—some 400 or so people across the U.S.—bore witness to our conviction that segregation was illegal. We were a disciplined, organized, and racially mixed group. We rode trains, buses, and planes; we sought service at dining facilities, restrooms, and waiting rooms. And more often than not, we were arrested and jailed for violation of local laws. We expected to be incarcerated and were aware that there could be violence directed against us. But we were committed.

Fifty-four years have passed since that summer—but just last weekend, I joined Ellen Broms from the L.A. Freedom Rider group in Sacramento. We traveled together to memorial services for poet and fellow Freedom Rider Steve Sanfield. We joined Steve’s family, friends, and admirers at the North Columbia Schoolhouse Cultural Center in Nevada City, California, site of the Sierra Storytelling Festival that Steve founded 30 years ago.

When I met him, Steve was working at the historic Larry Edmunds Bookshop in Hollywood. He was a recent graduate of Amherst College in Massachusetts. He was gentle, an articulate man of conscience.

I had recently graduated from UCLA, where I was active in the L.A. chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). As a student, I served as a CORE liaison with student activists in the South. We spoke often by phone about what was going on there and how we could support their causes from Los Angeles. After graduation, I continued this work with CORE—talking and collaborating with like-minded people like Steve and Ellen who sought an end to segregation and racial injustice in Los Angeles and across the nation.

We closely followed the Freedom Rides after they started in May. Riders were beaten and jailed, and a bus was firebombed outside of Anniston, Alabama. Students from Tennessee vowed that this violence would not stop the rides, and the movement picked up steam over the summer as activists joined them from across the U.S. in Jackson, Mississippi.

By August, the Freedom Rides were slowing down as focus shifted to action in the courts. Steve, Ellen, and I—and other CORE activists and students in L.A.—were eager to participate in what turned out to be one of the last organized Freedom Rides. In preparation for our journey, we went through an orientation and training in CORE’s non-violent philosophy and tactics. No matter what happened—if someone spit on you, called you names, knocked you down—you pledged not to fight back.

We knew we were putting ourselves at great risk. But we were not deterred. Riders who were under 21 had to get permission from their parents. And all of us wrote our last wills and testaments.

We left L.A.’s Union Station on August 9, 1961. When our train arrived in Houston, the 11 of us from L.A. joined seven members of the Progressive Youth Association, mostly students from Texas Southern University. Our plan was to desegregate the coffee shop at Houston’s Union Station and then continue on to Mississippi.

Our task as Freedom Riders was to sit down in places like that coffee shop—and then go to jail. The idea was to generate publicity to put pressure on lawmakers to make change. Segregationists called us “outside agitators,” which is exactly right. We did what local activists couldn’t have done without great personal risk to themselves and their families. Young people from other parts of the country (like Steve, Ellen, and me) didn’t need to worry about getting jobs—we weren’t planning to stick around. The only way to get to us was to take us into temporary custody.

It only took 45 minutes before we were arrested at the Union Station coffee shop. Local law enforcement knew a Freedom Ride was coming through and were waiting for us when we entered. Their vehicles were parked at the nearby curb. We took seats at the whites-only counter and requested service. We were refused. A police commander asked us to leave the premises. Not a single one of us moved, and he announced that we were all under arrest. We were ordered into the nearby vehicles and taken to jail. The process was smooth and efficient, much like going through an airline security check these days.

We were booked into the Harris County Jail, where we were segregated by gender and race in the jail’s general population. We black males were welcomed as heroes by the men in our tank once they found out that we were Freedom Riders. Of everyone—black and white, male and female—the white men received the worst treatment. Steve Sanfield, along with Steve McNichols and Robert Kaufman (all of whom are deceased now), and Joe Stevenson were beaten bloody by other prisoners, and carried physical and mental scars for the rest of their lives. Like many Freedom Riders, they paid a personal price to secure the right for all of us to travel without racial restrictions.

Steve Sanfield at a 2011 exhibition at the California Museum.

We spent a few weeks in jail. As soon as our lawyers visited and saw how the white riders were being abused, we were bailed out. We had our days in court and were found guilty of misdemeanor “unlawful assembly” charges. These charges were later overturned on appeal. Upon our release, I returned to Los Angeles with my fellow CORE members.

The rest is history. The violence against Freedom Riders and their incarceration got a huge amount of publicity across the U.S. and abroad. That attention, and the demands of the public, prodded President John F. Kennedy into action. In November 1961, his administration pressured the Interstate Commerce Commission to act.

And change came. The “whites only” and “colored” signs were removed from train station coffee shops and bus station restrooms. The Freedom Riders had secured an end to racial discrimination in interstate travel facilities, and freedom of movement for everyone. It was a crack in the massive scheme of segregation. I am proud to have been a part of it.

We L.A. Freedom Riders moved on with our lives. For me, that meant entering the new world of civic and electoral politics of Los Angeles, motivated by my experiences in the civil rights movement and my desire to help meet the need for a more representative government. For Ellen, it meant finishing her education and gaining employment as a social worker in California state government. For Steve, it was back to literature and a creative life as a storyteller, poet, author of children’s books, and builder of a cultural institution.

I recalled those days of August 1961 when I attended Steve Sanfield’s memorial last weekend. I thought of his courage—and the courage of every Freedom Rider—when I traveled by Greyhound, and walked through bus terminals free of the racial animus that we helped to eradicate.

The post From the Freedom Rides to the L.A. City Council appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The prevalence of this kind of hiring—particularly in California, America’s most populous and most diverse state—suggests that the Civil Rights Act needs to be updated. California in 2014 certainly looks nothing like Alabama and Mississippi of 1964, which were Congress’ focus when it passed that year’s Civil Rights Act. The main question then was how to provide equal opportunity for African-Americans. A century’s worth of experience since the Civil War showed that whites in the Deep South could not be trusted on matters of race. Congress therefore prohibited, through Title VII of the act, racial discrimination in employment. Over the next several years, courts and administrators issued rulings to allow affirmative action in order to ensure that African-Americans were being offered the opportunity to be hired and promoted in all jobs for which they were qualified.

Today, however, employers have come to value racial differences in ways that were unheard of in 1964, and do not fit with traditional conceptions of affirmative action. Organizations of all kinds today hire and place workers using a practice I have called “racial realism”: seeing color as a real and significant part of workers’ identities, a qualification that is good for business.

As with the Lakers and Lin, employers use racial realism to make customers of different backgrounds feel comfortable and welcome. As Wells Fargo, the San Francisco-based bank, explains on its website: “To know our customers and serve them well, the diversity of team members throughout our ranks should reflect the diversity of the communities we serve.” The Walt Disney Company similarly states, “When our people reflect the communities we serve, it enhances the way we connect to our guests, audiences and consumers.”

Government employers, including police departments and school districts, also have invoked racial realism, seeking to mirror the populations they serve to deliver more effective services. For example, California’s Education Code declares that the state traditionally employs a “disproportionately low” number of racial minority teachers, and should rectify this situation so that “the minority student [has] available to him or her the positive image provided by minority classified and certificated employees.”

And in low-skilled jobs, racial realism is often linked to perceived variations in abilities, rather than customer reactions. Sociologists Roger Waldinger and Michael Lichter’s study of Los Angeles employers found a common pattern of preference for Latinos due to their perceived diligence in manufacturing, food service, and other jobs.

While racial realism lacks the animus that characterized the racism of the Deep South 50 years ago, it is still problematic—both legally and for minority opportunity. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act provides no authorization for race to be a job qualification. And the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has denied the legality of motivations of firms such as Wells Fargo and Disney’s. If employers in Alabama could claim they preferred white workers because their customers preferred white workers, the cause of equal opportunity would never have gotten off the ground. This is why courts have ruled that firms should have their workforces mirror their job applicant pools, not their customer bases.

Court interpretations of the Constitution allow for racial realism in policing. Courts have argued that the “operational needs” of police departments require race-based hiring to serve and protect nonwhite publics. But these decisions make no allowances for teaching. California’s rationale for teacher diversity would seem to have been precluded by a 1986 Supreme Court decision, which explicitly stated that hiring teachers to be racial role models was impermissible racial discrimination because it could go on forever, with no remedial purpose.

Moreover, the employer preference for Latino workers, often immigrants, provides opportunities for eager workers, but is often propelled by stereotypes that Title VII was supposed to eliminate, and often at the expense of other workers stereotyped differently, especially African-Americans. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has initiated action against employers who use this strategy, grouping the cases under the heading no one would have considered in 1964: “Hispanic Preference.”

For high-skilled nonwhite workers, racial realism can be a double-edged sword. They may have ready access to jobs—then find themselves stuck in positions where they deal with same-race clients or citizens. For example, sociologist William Bielby’s analysis of Merrill Lynch found nonwhites were continually limited to positions where the firm thought their presence could help penetrate minority markets. The problem can be exacerbated when compensation is linked to sales or other measures of effectiveness, and certain employees are pigeonholed into less profitable outlets or divisions in poorer African-American and Latino neighborhoods. African-American managers sued Walgreens drugstores on this basis, claiming lost promotion and advancement opportunities, and won $24 million as compensation.

Why the shift from equal opportunity to racial realism? Demographics. Beginning in the 1960s, American birthrates declined as the country became more educated. By the 1980s, these factors had created a great demand for low-skilled immigrant labor—first in California, where history, geography, and network ties combined to attract newcomers—and then the country as a whole. Immigrants brought or started families in California and followed one another here; as a result, the state’s Latino and Asian immigrant communities grew rapidly. By 2000, California was a majority-minority state where nonwhites outnumbered whites; in March 2014, Latinos became the single largest ethno-racial group in California. The authors of the Civil Rights Act could not have anticipated this shift—and included no provisions for it.

Employer demand for labor brought immigrant workers here, but now immigrants themselves, and their descendants, are shaping employment patterns as consumers of private and public goods. Employers are feeling pressure to balance the rights of their workers, especially those workers of color who for too long have faced unequal opportunities, and the interests of customers and citizens, including those of color, who rightfully expect the best service from businesses and especially from government.

The Civil Rights Act, as written, puts employers and employees alike in a bind. It is time to revisit the law, and make adaptations that fit our new demography—and the law’s original goal of equal opportunity for America’s most disadvantaged.

The post The Civil Rights Act Is Broken appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.