On the road to equality there is no better place for blacks to detour around American values than in forgoing its example in the treatment of its women and the organization of its family.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the need to recognize and improve the treatment of women in order to achieve true equality for all, especially for the black community.
Eleanor Holmes Norton points out that the pursuit of racial equality cannot ignore the systemic issues present in the treatment of women and family structures within American society. By highlighting these specific challenges, she suggests that the injustices faced by black individuals are intertwined with gender-related inequalities, indicating that true progress in equality requires addressing both fronts simultaneously.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of social justice, I might say, 'As Eleanor Holmes Norton once said, on the road to equality...' to highlight gender issues.
Affirmative action is the most important modern anti-discrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination. No one who knows anything about the subject would say it hasn't worked. It has certainly done something, or else it wouldn't have provoked so much opposition.
I agree that income disparity is the great issue of our time. It is even broader and more difficult than the civil rights issues of the 1960s. The '99 percent' is not just a slogan. The disparity in income has left the middle class with lowered, not rising, income, and the poor unable to reach the middle class.
Affirmative action is the most important antidiscrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination... Affirmative action, by all statistical measures, has been the central ingredient to the creation of the black middle class.
In sum, the truth is that we luxuriate in the comfortable assertion that women enjoy equality. We have salved our consciences by eliminating the more obvious discriminations like unequal rates of pay for work of equal value. But, in fact, we have not eliminated the inheritance of the millennia that women are lesser beings, an inheritance which still manifests itself in a whole range of prejudice and other forms of discrimination.
Separate inherently is not equal. There's a reason why $45 million was spent against marriage equality. It's because people understand the word does have meaning. And equality comes when we accept the same notions and the same institutions for everyone, regardless of race and gender and regardless of sex orientation.
The media says that equality for women has arrived, but if you look around, you still don't see girls playing guitars and having success with it.
If a man can coach a female, why can't a female coach a male? When I was looking for a coach, the gender of the coach never occurred to me. It was about who I thought was good and who I could get along with and listen to.
If you believe, as I do, that merit is equally distributed between the sexes, then any result that isn't around half and half should be troubling.
It's terribly important that we extend the promise of equality that the Supreme Court and that the district court articulated in the DOMA case and in the Perry case to all Americans in all 50 states.
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