Equality: What Do You Think About When You Think of Equality?

By Paul Alan Fahey, Susan Reynolds and Victoria Zackheim

In the tradition of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Stride Toward Freedom and Malala Yousafzai’s, I Am Malala, Equality: What Do You Think About When You Think of Equality? presents thought-provoking and compelling personal essays that probe a concept professed to be the very foundation of

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vine Leaves Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781925417272

Book preview

Introduction

In the United States and around the globe, we continually observe how easily a click of a mouse or a few strokes on a keypad can send a torrent of hate into the universe. As recent examples, witness the racial unrest in the U.S., specifically in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland; in the determined, frustrated efforts of women and minorities to gain equal pay and opportunity; in immigrants’ fight for due process and human rights; and in the outright bigotry and hatred espoused by one of the candidates embroiled in the recent 2016 U.S. presidential race.

We see this seemingly never-ending struggle to be treated fairly and equally whenever we pick up a newspaper or watch the evening news. The multi-faceted issue of equality is ubiquitous and incredibly relevant.

But what does equality really mean? More important, what does it mean to you? Webster’s defines equality as the state of being equal, especially in status, rights, and opportunities. Extend that and you have issues of equality across a spectrum: racial, social, political, religious, marital, and gender. Equality in the home, equality in the workplace, and equality in all things legal.

In Equality, twenty-five of our best writers, teachers, and activists including Dennis Palumbo, Felice Picano, David Congalton, Michael Nava, Catherine Ryan Hyde, Anne R. Allen, Barbara Abercrombie, and Victoria Zackheim, examine their views on equality in all its definitions, permutations, and possibilities, yet always in deeply personal and intimate ways. Each essay in this book is a unique exploration of what equality means to them.

In Everyday Equality, writer and editor, Barbara Jacksha explores her thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and behaviours, to discover if she sees and treats people equally. And does she? How would you fare on The Equality Test?

Christopher Bram, famed novelist, critic, and essayist, takes a close look at the Declaration of Independence to uncover what Thomas Jefferson really meant when he wrote all men are created equal in the preamble to the famous document. Bram explores why our founding fathers in America insisted on equality in the first place, speculates about those turbulent revolutionary times, and makes some interesting inferences along the way that may surprise you.

International bestselling author, Anne Perry, asks the question: If I say, EQUALITY, what do you think? Her essay suggests we look within ourselves to our emotions, past experiences, and profoundly held beliefs before we attempt an honest and truthful answer.

Susan Reynolds, author and editor, begins her essay with the powerful and disturbing sentence: I was born into inequality, but, in truth, all women are—even American women in this 21st century. She recounts the women’s movement from the 1800s to the Equal Rights Amendment (E.R.A) ratified by the United States Congress in 1972, and the continuing struggle for equality today.

As a veteran massage therapist for twenty-three years, Eldonna Edwards shares a lesson in human vulnerability in Body Language: The Naked Truth. She leads us through an intimate examination of individuality and the equality of the human spirit.

I guarantee as you read through these compelling and insightful essays you’ll start asking yourself: What do I think about when I think of equality? It’s bound to happen. All you need do is turn the page.

Paul Alan Fahey

Nipomo, California, USA

Lani Silver: A Voice for Equality

David Congalton

On a hot June night in 1998, James Byrd, Jr. was walking home from a party in the small East Texas town of Jasper when he accepted a ride from three men, only one of whom he knew somewhat. What the forty-nine year old African-American didn’t know was that all three men were white supremacists.

What followed is not for the faint of heart. Police reports indicate that Byrd was taken to an isolated country road, where the men beat him and tied him to the back of a truck by his ankles. Then the truck sped off down the country road for more than three-and-a-half miles, dragging Byrd with it. His head was severed; police found Byrd’s remains in eighty-one different places along the road.

The news triggered shock and outrage across the nation as media pundits and ordinary people alike grappled with the Why of such a horrific tragedy. The death of James Byrd, Jr. particularly touched a nerve with a prominent forty-nine year-old San Francisco activist, a woman who had spent her entire adult life as a voice for the disenfranchised. Lani Silver would spend the next decade using what happened in Jasper to encourage a national dialogue on racism, even if it meant exposing the warts of everyday society. As she would argue repeatedly, We’re all racist to some degree.

So when asked what I think of, when I think about equality, there is no hesitation. I always think of Lani—oral historian, teacher, journalist, author, and social activist—a woman always willing to fight the good fight for her community. Oh, and friend. Always a friend.

I wish I could say that I knew Lani for a really long time, but in truth our paths only crossed for an all-too-brief four years, most of it through radio interviews and late night phone conversations.

Brain cancer came along and snatched her away in 2009, just nine days into the young presidency of Barack Obama—a man Lani admired greatly and campaigned for, despite her illness. We’ve gone from Jasper to an African-American president in the White House in a single decade. That’s progress, Lani liked to say in those final weeks, her voice barely a whisper. Even when she knew she was dying, Lani had hope.

She was only sixty years old.

South Africa.

Of all the places, in all the world, Lani had to go to South Africa to find her purpose in life. Raised in San Francisco as one of three daughters, Lani initially saw herself politically as a conservative. Then she hit nineteen and her parents whisked her away to South Africa on a vacation.

The trip was transformative. Driving through the streets of Pretoria became Lani’s official introduction to racism in the form of apartheid. It smacked her in the face, turned her stomach, and kept her awake at night. Her life had been a sheltered one up until this trip. Now she was seeing firsthand how the white government was oppressing the black population.

If you were black in South Africa in 1968, well, it doesn’t take much to imagine the injustice witnessed by the Silvers. I saw corrugated steel roofs and naked children in the streets, Lani recalled in a 2007 speech. There was trash and dirt roads and other things that opened my eyes.

Blacks were essentially a second-class citizenry and nobody seemed to care.

But Lani did.

She came home to San Francisco. It was 1968. The summer of love. Haight-Ashbury. Anti-war protests. Bra-burnings. Civil Rights demonstrations. There was activism in the air. Equally haunted and disturbed by what she had seen in South Africa, Lani took a deep breath and never exhaled.

Her work began in her own Jewish community, balancing advocacy with classes at San Francisco State University. Over time, she would amass what one colleague later described as a breathtaking list of passionate and important causes—everything from feminism to gay marriage to First Amendment rights. If there was a rally in town, a fight to be fought, people learned to expect Lani to be involved.

In 1981, Lani, by then an established teacher and journalist, attended the first world gathering of Holocaust survivors in Jerusalem. As with her previous trip to Pretoria, Lani was overwhelmed with unexpected emotion and revelation at what she had experienced. The visit inspired her to launch the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project that eventually gathered 1,700 interviews of Holocaust survivors.

Lani said in a 1985 newspaper interview that the recordings were not just for the world, they are also for the survivors. Sometimes they haven’t even told their children. Many times the children sit in when they finally tell their stories to us. Soon, everyone is crying, including me.

Her work eventually caught the eye of film director Steven Spielberg as he was working on his masterpiece Schindler’s List. Spielberg used Lani as a consultant, both on the movie and for his newly formed Shoah Foundation. Lani trained five hundred interviewers for Spielberg, and the foundation has since collected tens of thousands of interviews.

It’s not surprising that Lani would embrace the interview approach. I talk to people for a living, so I understand the challenge of pulling information out of often reticent sources. Lani, however, had the gift, an uncanny ability to put people at ease, while coaxing them to openly share their innermost secrets and feelings. We once compared notes on technique. I find the use of a pause always helps me, Lani confessed. You ask the question and you stop. There’s something about the silence that prompts people to start talking.

Lani gathered survivor interviews for sixteen years, before finally stepping away in 1997, restless for a new challenge. She found one in less than a year.

In a small speck-of-a-Texas-town called Jasper.

Pretoria. Jerusalem. Jasper.

Lani made three important, life-changing, trips, leaving her Bay Area cocoon to give witness to the dark side of the human heart. Each visit became an epiphany, a calling to a greater cause. What exactly drew Lani to the death of James Byrd, Jr.? When did she first visit Jasper? What did she hope to achieve? I don’t know the specific answers. However, it’s clear that Lani spent her final decade grappling with the more important question of how to discuss racism openly and reduce hate crimes.

Her initial visit to Jasper, the first of many, came at the invitation of Byrd’s sisters, Clara Byrd Taylor and Louvon Byrd Harris. The two sisters, not surprisingly, bonded almost immediately with this passionate activist from San Francisco. They introduced her to the sheriff, Billy Rowles, who headed up the murder investigation. Friends and neighbours were encouraged to speak openly.

On her blog, Lani wrote how impressed she was by the people of Jasper, especially the victim’s family. I am inspired by the Byrds and their courage. Instead of rage, they are looking at what happened to their brother in a more positive light. And that light is about racial healing.

The time spent in Jasper inspired Lani to organize the James Byrd, Jr. Racism Oral History Project in 2000. As with the Holocaust effort, Lani’s goal was to encourage a conversation about racism, to have people tell their stories. For Lani, dialogue was an important part of the healing process. I honestly believe that if we talked more about racism, we would reduce it.

During the next eight years, Lani and her trained volunteers conducted 2,600 interviews with people in Jasper, Houston, and San Francisco. The key question being, How has racism affected your life?

Lani had a particular interest in students. She believed that it wasn’t too late to shape their attitudes. They’d say horrific things, Lani explained in a 2008 public radio interview. Like ‘Last week someone called me a name’ or ‘My parents didn’t get the job because they weren’t white.’ As a teacher of thirty-six years, I see racism every day, every week. There’s jokes and abuse going on all day long.

The oral histories were Lani’s springboard into the larger discussion of racism, but it was more than just talk. She was heavily involved in the campaign to pass hate crime legislation in the state of Texas, and even released several protest songs she had written and recorded with others. Lani helped the Byrd sisters set up a national foundation to honour their slain brother and combat racism. Invitations to speak on college campuses followed, and Lani took her message wherever she could find an audience, always asking that question about racism and how it affected their lives. It was an easy question for Lani to answer, given Pretoria, and what she had seen there in 1968.

But it was a life over far too soon. There have been so many times since 2009, so many heartbreaking headlines, when I’ve wanted to pick up the phone and call San Francisco. One can only imagine what Lani would think about or what she might do in response to some of the major racially-tinged events of the last eight years: Ferguson. Trayvon Martin. Black Lives Matter. Eric Garner. The Charleston church shooting. Tamir Rice. The rise of Donald Trump.

Two of the three men who murdered James Byrd, Jr. ended up on death row in Texas; the third was sentenced to life in prison. How do we prevent more Jaspers, more hate crimes? Lani believed the answer lies in dialogue, open and honest. Recent history, sadly, has proven her correct. When there is no dialogue, violence rears its ugly head.

Two weeks after Lani’s passing, Senator Barbara Boxer of California took to the floor of the United States Senate to pay a special tribute: Lani Silver stood out as a driven activist who cared for her community deeply. She will be remembered by friends and colleagues as earnest, humble, and dedicated to the ongoing fight for equality and fairness. Her optimism, dedication, and courage are reflected by the thousands of individuals whose lives she has enriched and improved. We will always be grateful for Lani’s example of passionate activism.

Lani was once asked what kept her going after spending decades in the trenches of social justice. She said simply, In some moments, you have a choice of doing the right thing, or giving up. You can’t give up.

That’s what I loved about Lani Silver. And what I miss the most. She never gave up.

Limit

Nathan Burgoine

I had a teacher in high school who had a brilliant gift explaining math concepts. I was proficient at math, though not naturally gifted with numbers. Despite this teacher, most of those concepts are now long gone from my memory—but not all. There’s one explanation in particular I remember clearest. I don’t recall why it was useful in mathematics, but the concept explained was the approach of a value so close to a particular number, that it might as well equal that number, even though it never quite does. It was called limit.

The teacher demonstrated this concept with a long piece of string. Two students held the string, one at each end, at opposite corners of the classroom, holding the line taut. I got picked as one of the students, a friend of mine as the other.

The teacher explained that I was zero, and my friend was any other number. He told me to move my grip from where I was to halfway along