Giving due credit harms nobody else
William P. Stroyan’s July 9 letter (“Thank our white forefathers”) leaves me wondering how I can best respond in order to provide some perspective. Let’s try this:
The irony in his letter, in which he lists the successful endeavors of those white male inventors who bettered our society through their creations, is that the very reason he can so quickly identify the accomplishments of this exclusive club with which he’s so enamored speaks to the very issue we are currently wrestling with in terms of equity and basic rights.
Not for a single second do I wish to demean those folks’ achievements, products of their intelligence and determination, to be sure. I’m as grateful to have air conditioning and toilet paper as the next guy. But the reason that white males were always put at the top of the list in my early schooling and beyond is because for centuries women and people of color were not granted the same opportunities leading to successful innovation, and on the rare occasion that they were able to overcome those obstacles, those successes were more often than not completely under recognized.
For 300 years women were not regarded as complete citizens, and minorities even less. Given more space, I could provide a long list of exemplars showing how women and minorities were actively prohibited from realizing dreams on par with those of white males (OK, here’s one: future Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, upon graduating from law school in 1952, was not considered for a law firm job for years until she got her first job agreeing to work for no pay).
Additionally, I could detail an equally long list of accomplishments of people of color and women that were completely ignored publicly. Tuskegee Airmen? Never heard of them until my late 40s. Code breaker Elizabeth Friedman? J. Edgar Hoover insisted on taking all credit for the critical work she did breaking up a Nazi spy ring almost entirely, and sadly, anonymously, on her own.
The point is that in giving women and ethnic minorities their due, we are not discounting the legitimate achievements of anyone else. The right’s defensiveness on this issue gets us nowhere.
Warren Wheeler
Nine Mile Falls