Remembering Rosa Parks

Thursday, November 03 2005 @ 02:12 AM EST

Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a White man in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. In so doing, she detonated the Civil Rights Movement, which had been building up for many years but which had not reached the prominence and strength that it gained after Mrs. Parks's protest and the subsequent Montgomery Bus Boycott. As someone who was born after many of the triumphs of Civil Rights, it is hard to imagine living in the United States without the protection of minority rights that is now part of U.S. law and culture. Other groups, such as gays and lesbians, a large variety of ethnic and cultural groups, women, and the disabled have benefited tremendously from what Rosa Parks started. There is still a large amount of prejudice against many groups of Americans, but the Civil Rights Movement has driven prejudice underground. People can no longer get away with loudly and proudly excluding people they don't like as a matter of official policy. For this, I am grateful to Rosa Parks and the millions of others who fought for Civil Rights for African Americans in the 1950's, 1960's, and today.

Like many people, perhaps the majority of people in the world, I belong to several oppressed groups. In some places and situations, women are an oppressed group, and therefore one could say that half the world's people are potential victims of discrimination and oppression. I, myself, have experienced very little discrimination because I am female, even though I studied mathematics and have worked in computers, both fields which are male-dominated or were male-dominated at the time I was involved with them. But I do experience persistent, frequent, and severe discrimination because I am mentally ill. In particular, each time I try to get medical care I am treated very badly, and I have a large number of health problems besides the psychiatric disorder so I am frequently attempting to access healthcare. I also can expect to be mistreated if I try to get a job, but long experience has taught me not to even make the attempt, because there is no way anyone will hire someone with a diagnosis of mental illness no matter how good their skills or past work has been. (People frequently claim that the Americans with Disabilities Act protects mentally ill people and other disabled people against employment discrimination, but this is simply not true, because the ADA has no enforcement provisions so cannot protect anyone from getting mistreated. After the discrimination has occurred, one has the right to sue for damages, but this is only practically possible for poor disabled people if they can convince a lawyer to take their case on contingency, which is not likely for anyone and is almost unheard of in the case of a psychiatric disability because these cases are hard to prove.) Worse than the discrimination I can predict are situations when someone discovers that I am "crazy" and excludes me or mistreats me unexpectedly.

Being vulnerable to arbitrary and severe discrimination at any time has made me better understand why Black people and other racial minorities are constantly "complaining" about racism. Many White, middle class, healthy people (I was once such a person), while they are aware of terrible racist events in the past (e.g. lynchings, Jim Crow laws or Apartheid in South Africa), do not understand why many Black people say that racism is everywhere, even now, and say that they, personally are a victim. My situation has made me realize that if one belongs to a despised minority, there is always the potential for discrimination and mistreatment, so that even if a person is financially secure and appreciated in their home and work community (and this is true for the minority of Blacks in the United States, who are significantly poorer than the national average), they must always worry in every new situation and whenever they meet a new person, that they will be the victim of prejudice and discrimination.

No matter how hard they have worked to "assimilate to the mainstream culture" (and in a just world, cultural minorities should not have to assimilate to the majority culture in order to avoid discrimination) their status is never secure. Members of despised groups may be mistreated by a sales person in a store, by a colleague, by a government agency, by a tradesperson they hire to fix something in their apartment or house, by their child's teacher, by the hair-dresser, by the bank, etc,. etc. in a never-ending list of potential oppressors. There is perhaps less really overt discrimination now in Western countries than in the past, but each person in a despised group experiences prejudice and racism many, many times before they even reach school age. Some racism is "nothing more" than an off-hand comment or a joke overheard in a crowd, but hearing people belittle or insult one's group over and over again creates a climate of unwelcome and fear, where one must always live with the reasonable fear that the background level of vaguely racist ideas will blow up into a situation where one's safety or rights are seriously compromised. I recently read an article in the French newspaper Le Monde about Azouz Begag, a Minister in the current French government (ironically charged with the anti-discrimination portfolio), who was subjected to a racially-motivated interrogation and search at the Atlanta Airport even though he was traveling with a diplomatic visa. This shows that members of minority groups are never secure, no matter what they have achieved professionally or economically.

I do not want to claim that being mentally ill is "equivalent" to being Black, in terms of the amount or kind of discrimination I experience, just that being hated for something I cannot help has made me understand what it is like not to be able to count on an average level of decent, impartial treatment from strangers. The Gay Community uses the expression "heterosexual privilege" to describe the automatic extra degree of respect people get if they are (assumed to be) heterosexual. A similar thing is true for Whites, for abled people, for financially secure people, for people who speak English in the U.S., etc. I am White and I live in a racially-mixed area, and I am frequently aware that I get treated with more politeness (for example I am usually able to hail a Taxi without being passed by numerous times by vacant Taxis) than people who can be immediately identified as members of a minority group -- unless I am identifiable as poor or crazy or it is a situation where being overweight leads to discrimination. The privilege of the majority, and its flip-side, the discrimination experienced by minority groups, can be almost invisible to people who have not been members of despised groups.

However, the criteria by which people are classified as despised minorities are constantly changing, and no one can be guaranteed that they will always belong to the privileged group. For one thing, a large portion of White, financially-secure males eventually become sick and old, and then they may be treated like garbage for the first time in their lives. The lives of the sick and elderly are routinely considered to be less important than the lives of healthy young people by hospitals and doctors, and there are even mathematical models for calculating the cost-benefit ratio of various health care policies that officially assign a discount to the value of a human life if the person is sick or old. This is reminiscent of the original United States Constitution (which we should not forget in our desirte to think of the U.S. as a histoorically democratic country), that valued Black lives as being worth three-fifths of a "full" human life. Because no one is ultimately safe from discrimination, there is a practical and selfish reason why every person should fight for equitable treatment for all minority groups, regardless of their personal sympathies with the groups involved. I also believe that opposing discrimination is a moral imperative, and that no one is free when some people are oppressed, but moral judgments are subjective and personal to each individual, and there are minority groups with whom I do not feel personally sympathetic (for example smokers, convicted sex offenders, fundamentalist Christians), and whose rights I would not be inclined to fight for on emotional, personal grounds. However prejudice and discrimination against anyone makes it more likely that other minority groups will be oppressed. Thus I think it is important to stand up for the rights of all people, whether or not one feels personally aligned with that group.

To return finally to Rosa Parks, whose brave act began this essay, I have noticed that many accounts of her story do not give her the respect she deserves. She is often described as "a seamstress whose feet were tired after a long day of work" who remained seated because she was weary, or whose act of defiance was a random impulse. This account casts her as a symbol for the oppressed Black laborer, and robs her of her individual bravery and conscious choice to take action. Rosa Parks was a seamstress, who had worked all day standing up on the day she made her stand, but in many interviews up to quite recently, Mrs. Parks has made the point that she was primarily "tired in spirit" of being oppressed. She (with her husband) was a member of the NAACP long before she sat down, and she was well aware of the implications of her act. She had worked to register Black voters in the South, and was part of the Highlander Folk School. When she remained seated, she made a conscious decision to oppose the routine discrimination which she had experienced her entire life, and she knew what the personal consequences of her actions would likely be. There had been other arrests in Montgomery of Black riders who disobeyed the segregation laws, but none of them had been able to withstand the pressure they experienced after their arrest, and their resistance was quietly forgotten. Although Rosa Parks was known as a quiet, polite woman who didn't go out of her way to be noticed (and people who knew her through the NAACP and other activist groups she belonged to were surprised that she was the one who ended up at the center of the Civil Rights Movement in Montgomery), she had a well-developed political consciousness, and knew exactly what she was doing. She lost her job because of her act, and was eventually driven out of Montgomery and the South. She settled in Detroit with her husband, where she worked for many years as a Congressional aide. She also started a foundation, The Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, to educate youth about the history of the African American struggle, beginning with the Underground Railway. She is the author of the memoir Quiet Strength.

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