Not one inch

My wife is crying. It is four days after the election and my wife is still crying. After four days she was finally able to explain to me why she was so upset. She is terrified that the election of Donald Trump means that all she has worked for, all her closest friends have worked for, cared about, and fought for to reduce intolerance and promote dignity and equality will be erased with the stroke of a pen.

I met my spouse while working at a university in Nashville, Tennessee. She grew up in rural Tennessee about 40 miles north of Nashville, in the ’50s and ’60s. For her, racism, sexism, and intolerance were living breathing realities. Her experience was so different than mine. The struggle for equal rights were something that was talked about on the news. As a Montana kid, a white kid, in a white state and a white high school it never occurred to me that the world might be different from my experience. The one Chinese student and one Native American student got along fine with the nearly 400 white students in my graduating class. They both always came to the dances. My high school seemed to have a dance every three weeks. That was normal. My wife’s high school was integrated during her freshman year. Of course, they did not have to worry about integrating dances because in her part of the South there were no high school dances. My perspective has changed since high school.

I have lived and worked all across the United States. Racism and sexism are no longer theoretical shadows on television but real pain felt by actual people. I think about hearing a black friend sigh at the looks we received when walking into a restaurant together. I remember the hollow feeling when a clerk at a store excused herself from waiting on me to follow two brown faced people while they shopped. Every couple of years, I will have a female student drop by my office to tell me she was wrong, some employers do treat women different than men and there are invisible rules and expectations that should never exist.

I first heard the saying “If you give ’em inch, they’ll take a mile” from one of my grandfathers. When I first heard it I don’t know if I really understood what it meant. Now I do. Every step we have taken as a country to stop racism, ensure equality and banish intolerance and bigotry has taken the effort to go a mile to move forward an inch. My wife has stopped crying. But my own feelings are beginning to smolder. I teach that when involved in a conflict you have the most control over your own actions even if we would rather change the actions of others. So I have to ask myself: what will I do?

I will not be quiet if any group tries to use this election as an excuse to move us backward from what has been gained. We will not lose the ground and be pushed back into a place of accepted intolerance.

I will speak out against any group or anyone who tries to claim that another human being is somehow less because of the color of their skin, where they choose to worship, or who meets them at the door when they go home. We will not lose ground and relive our mistakes.

I will not accept intolerance whether it is from friend, family, colleague or stranger. I will not pretend a joke is funny and I will not just “let it go.” We will not lose ground and be pushed back into an atmosphere of fear and quiet desperation.

I will take action when I can and support those who are targeted or abused. I will try to do this without hate in my heart, with a fire in my belly and with iron in my spine. Now is not the time to despair. Now is the time to stand fast. We will not lose ground;

NOT. ONE. INCH.

——

Mark Seiffert is a professor of communication at Montana State University-Northern