What Unites Us

by Dan Rather

  Like so many others in our country, I journeyed from ignorance to tolerance to inclusion. By the late 1990s, I had come to realize the undue challenges facing gay and lesbian people in American society, but the true burden many of them faced hadn’t fully struck me. And then one day I was sitting in my office at CBS News when a longtime close colleague came in and shut the door, saying that he needed to talk to me. As soon as he sat down, he blurted out, “I’m gay.” I saw in his eyes an anxiety I hadn’t ever seen during our years of working together, even on the most dangerous or difficult assignments. In that moment I understood the courage it must have taken him to tell me this, and the energy he must have had to expend over the many years we had known each other to keep this central part of his life hidden.

  I assured him that what he’d told me wouldn’t change our relationship as coworkers and friends. As we spoke, I could see his whole demeanor shift, as if a tightly wound spring was finally allowed to relax. How can people be so blinded by prejudice as to not see the common humanity? Thankfully, we have, as a nation and as individuals, made meaningful steps in the right directions. We must be vigilant and keep up the momentum, and there are new threats in the moment and on the horizon. Sadly, we have seen a growing movement of religious objections to same-sex marriage, with business owners denying service to gay customers. Transgender people, in particular, have not benefited from the same level of inclusion as gays and lesbians. And racial minority members of the LGBTQ community face extra levels of discrimination. But so many organizations and businesses—from the military, to government, to our major corporations—have been integrated with gays and lesbians living openly. Our society has been changed forever, and we are a stronger and more just nation because of it.

  Inclusion on race has been a very different journey, and I worry that for all the progress we have made, we are stuck in the purgatory of tolerance. This may not be a comfortable thought for many who pride themselves on their progressive beliefs, but it is the truth. We have of late seen evidence of a great racial divide that remains, and in some ways even appears to be expanding, more than a half century after the major legislative victories in the civil rights movement. While tragedies like the high-profile shootings of African Americans at the hands of law enforcement get a lot of deserved attention, these are symptoms of a much deeper problem. We are still largely segregated as a society, and our political divisions increasingly fall along the lines of race. The Republican Party has become whiter and more conservative, and the Democrats have become more diverse and progressive. This shapes not only how African Americans sort politically, but increasingly Hispanics and Asians too. Yes, we saw a historic moment in the 2008 election with our first African American president, but how distant all the talk of a “post-racial America” seems today. The election of President Barack Obama was a mark of progress, but the racist and demeaning comments from some of his critics (like the lies about his birth certificate) during his presidency highlighted the intransigent lines of division that remain within our society. This environment has only intensified since President Obama left office, as a political climate of greater polarization now emanates from the highest levels of government. The long shadow of slavery, segregation, and racism still looms over this nation.

  Several years ago I worked on a documentary on the public school system of Detroit. The city has become a potent symbol of so many of the challenges that face this country, race being first and foremost. But for the children growing up in the poverty and hopelessness of much of Detroit today, symbolism doesn’t matter. This is their one and only chance at a life, and the historical, political, sociological, psychological, legal, and other headwinds they face seem disproportionate and cruel. The documentary found a broken city of families struggling against the odds of deserted neighborhoods, inadequate public transportation, and low-paying jobs. Meanwhile the school system has been plagued by corruption and mismanagement.

  Amid all this, one truth cannot be ignored: The Detroit public schools are almost entirely African American, and the schools in the surrounding suburbs are overwhelmingly white. This is not an accident. In 1974, the Supreme Court heard a case that centered on Detroit’s schools, both in the city and in the surrounding communities. In Milliken v. Bradley, the court ruled in a 5 – 4 decision that a metropolis could in essence be segregated along district lines, just not within those districts. In other words, it was okay if there were real racial divisions, lines of exclusion, between suburbs and cities. And that is the system we largely have today. When you hear the term “inner-city schools,” close your eyes and picture the student body. Now picture a suburban school. I am pretty sure that race was part of your mental image. This is not a mirage. Recent governmental and academic studies have shown increased de facto school segregation in the last few decades. In a blistering dissent to the Milliken decision, the first African American justice on the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall, predicted our current reality: “School district lines, however innocently drawn, will surely be perceived as fences to separate the races.” We have become a less inclusive nation as a result.

  In our reporting for the documentary, I interviewed a remarkable young woman named Deanna Williams, who was a high school student at the time. In the emotional apex of our conversation, with tears streaming down her face, she explained the very human cost of this segregation. When she watched TV news about suburban schools, she saw resources aplenty. But in Detroit, they had very little. “It’s frustrating to know that I could be learning all of these things and I could be doing all of these things, and I can’t,” Deanna told me. “And people think . . . that the children in the Detroit Public Schools are stupid and brutish because of what they see on television. And it’s not true. We want to learn. We want to be able to do what the other children are doing. We want to have the same opportunities. But they keep taking them away from us. They keep—it’s like they’re keeping us down! . . . And every day I want to know why. Why is this happening?”

  We titled the film A National Disgrace, not only because of the deep dysfunction of the Detroit schools, but because we as a nation allowed this to happen. And studies have shown that some of the most segregated school districts are in the most liberal cities—like New York and San Francisco. What lessons are we teaching our children? We may support social programs that we think help those who are disadvantaged or who have faced discrimination, but if we do not fully engage in a spirit of inclusion on a personal level, we are failing. We live largely separated from one another, and most people seem to be okay with that. It is not good enough to vote for politicians who will do the right thing on racial issues, or even to give money to worthy causes. If we are not actively trying to tear down the “fences to separate the races,” as Justice Marshall described it, then we are all part of the problem.

  Building a more inclusive nation for women presents a unique set of hurdles (keeping in mind that LGBTQ women and women from racial minorities face multiple forms of discrimination). We have made great strides. But I worry deeply that the biases against women have proven difficult to identify and correct within individuals. And this condition doesn’t apply only to men; I have known many women who have great talent and intelligence but who diminish themselves in accordance with the expectations of society at large.

  The struggles women face in achieving equality remain both legal and cultural. In 2007, my reporting team and I investigated a story of female and minority custodians in the New York City public schools who claimed they had faced discrimination in the early 1990s. Of the nearly 900 custodians, 92 percent were white, and only 12 individuals were women. The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice brought suit in 1996. But when New York City agreed to a settlement, a group of white male custodians sued, claiming reverse discrimination. The American Civil Liberties Union became involved to look out for the rights of the female and minority custodians, but a final resolution wasn’t reached until 2014, when a federal judge gave final approval to another
settlement that seemed to address the concerns of all the parties. This story is a reminder that often the plights of women and minorities are linked, and that justice is often delayed if not denied.

  The division of the ACLU that had taken up the custodians’ case was the Women’s Rights Project, which was cofounded by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the early ’70s. Ginsburg directed the unit until she joined the federal bench in 1980, and during her time at the ACLU, in a series of landmark cases before the Supreme Court, she ushered in a new era of law for gender discrimination. It was something she had experienced firsthand: As one of only a handful of female law students at Harvard, she was denied a clerkship to the Supreme Court because of her gender, and after graduating tied for first in her class from Columbia Law School, she was not offered a single job by a law firm. Inspired by the civil rights movement, Ginsburg decided to join the ACLU and use the legal system to tackle the injustices facing women in American society. “Our strategy was the soul of simplicity,” Ginsburg has said. “It was to go after the stereotypes that were written into law.”

  When Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993, 106 justices had preceded her, and only one, the trailblazer Sandra Day O’Connor, had been a woman. I met Justice Ginsburg recently in her chambers, and to be in her presence is to feel that she is a quintessential Supreme Court justice. She is thoughtful, wise, and clearly blessed with a brilliant mind that has been honed and shaped through years of scholarship. It is hard to remember that because of her gender, for most of American history almost no one would have thought of her as even a small-town lawyer, let alone a Supreme Court justice.

  There is no doubt that having women on the bench has had a profound effect. In 2009, the court heard a case involving the strip search of a thirteen-year-old girl. At the time, Ginsburg was the only woman on the court, and during the oral arguments of the case, many of the justices expressed skepticism as to whether the girl’s rights had been violated. “They have never been a thirteen-year-old girl,” Justice Ginsburg explained to USA Today. “It’s a very sensitive age for a girl. I didn’t think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood.” It is believed that Justice Ginsburg set out to make sure her colleagues understood. In a result that surprised many court watchers, the justices ruled 8 – 1 in favor of the girl. This is the power of inclusion.

  The more we are around people with a variety of life experiences, the more we can understand and value the needs and worth of our fellow citizens. But our own life experiences can also shape our views. In 2003, the conservative chief justice William Rehnquist issued a ruling upholding the Family and Medical Leave Act for state employers, a decision Justice Ginsburg called “such a delightful surprise” in an interview with the New York Times. Chief Justice Rehnquist had shown skepticism of such issues in the past, but Justice Ginsburg attributed his change of heart to the facts of his own life. “When his daughter Janet was divorced, I think the chief felt some kind of responsibility to be kind of a father figure to those girls [his grandchildren]. So he became more sensitive to things that he might not have noticed.”

  In many ways, we have made important legal progress when it comes to women. As the proud father of a daughter who came of age in the wake of a growing feminist movement, I saw how she benefited, as did many students and athletes, from the famous Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972. That act stated: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” But it’s one thing to have greater equality of opportunity under the law (itself an elusive goal), and another to see it happen in practice. How do we modify a work environment to better acknowledge the biological realities of pregnancy, childbirth, and the need for day care? How do we counteract the shaming of women according to how they look or act when we see case after case of a reinforced gender hierarchy in our media, on Wall Street and Main Street, in Silicon Valley, and from some of our highest elected officials? How do we ward off the subtle undertow of the prevalent belief that women are not good in science and math, which can lead to what social scientists call the “stereotype threat”? These are not easy questions, and they defy easy solutions. But as society has gotten more inclusive, we can no longer ignore them. And that, in itself, is a form of progress.

  When I was young, we heard often of how the United States was a great melting pot. It is a fine metaphor as far as it goes. But inclusion, not assimilation, should be the key concept in seeking, ever seeking, a more perfect national union. Our own history has shown that we are stronger as a mosaic than a melting pot. Our nation is bound together more by ideals than by blood or land, and inclusion is in our cultural DNA. We should feel proud that we are not all the same, and that we can share our differences under the common umbrella of humanity. To do so, we must confront the voices of intolerance and come to terms with our own complicity in condoning the divisions in our society. We have seen that progress is possible, within ourselves and the nation at large. But it requires perseverance, hard work, and a commitment to respect the dignity of all who call America home.

  Empathy

  I am not sure if the word “empathy” was in either of my parents’ vocabularies. It wasn’t the kind of word one heard growing up in my neighborhood in Houston. But my parents taught me about the importance of empathy through their words and deeds. And they made it clear that it was part of the glue that held together our family, our neighborhood, our community, and the United States itself.

  My earliest memories are of times of despair and the Great Depression. Our family home was on Prince Street, on the extreme outer edge of what was the Houston of the 1930s. It was more of a big town back then, not yet really a city. We lived in the Heights neighborhood, which today is hip and gentrified, but back then our street was just a lightly graveled road. It was considered a rough, tough neighborhood, and there was only one street—a dirt street—between our house and the open country. Across that road was a large field, a creek, and, beyond that, a densely wooded pine forest. I thought of it as the Great American Frontier, and the truth was, in those days before interstate highways, you might have been able to find a path to walk from the end of my block to the Canadian border without seeing many, if any, other travelers.

  Our house was nothing to brag about, but at least it had four sturdy walls, with two bedrooms, a small living room, a small kitchen, and one bath. My brother and I shared a bed, and my sister slept in the same room until she got a little older, when my father and uncle added a small room to the house. Across our street was a poor frame house in a state of semicollapse. A half block down lived a family who didn’t even have a house, just a corrugated tin roof held up by four posts in the corners and one in the middle. Their floor was dirt.

  Nobody in either of these families had a job. That was not unusual in our neighborhood during the Depression. And the families that were lucky enough to have work usually had only meager part-time jobs. A full-time job like the one my father had working the oil fields was rare and considered a blessing, no matter the pay, the hours, or the amount of backbreaking labor it entailed. This was what the United States of America was like not that long ago: a country where families struggled to live on dirt streets, with dirt floors and little or no income to pay the grocery or medical bills. None of this was considered particularly unusual at the time. It was just the way things were.

  The father of the family in the dilapidated house had lost a leg. Exactly how he’d lost it was unclear, but the prevailing belief was that it had happened after a misjudged leap from a boxcar. Riding the rails was not uncommon then as a means to get to your destination, but it was uncommonly dangerous. His condition brought a crushing change to his fortune and that of his family. Before the accident, the father had been a day laborer for hire, a man with a shovel who could dig you a ditch. But there wasn’t much demand for a one-legged ditchdigger.
He had likely not gotten good medical attention after the accident, and I remember him clearly as a frail man with a bad cough. He, his wife, and their four or five children had no money. Zero. They eventually applied for some form of relief, but it came only sporadically.

  The family under the tin roof had a passel of kids as well, maybe as many as six. I remember thinking how elderly the father was, although he was probably much younger than he looked. A hard life will do that to a person. For some reason this other family, despite their abject poverty, didn’t seem to qualify for the government’s new “relief” program (otherwise known as “the dole”). Perhaps they didn’t know how to fill out the paperwork. Public support was far less systematic than it is today. Around the neighborhood, this family had a reputation for often being in prayer, and as a boy I wondered how God could be so seemingly blind to such suffering.

  The neighborhood tried as best it could to help these families stay alive. If we had leftovers after supper, we would walk them across the street. One of my earliest impressions was taking that short journey with my father. You might think that these families were humiliated by the offerings, but there is no dignity in being hungry. And there was no judgment or disdain on the part of those offering assistance. No one wondered why those neighbors weren’t working, and no one passed moral judgments on their inability to fend for themselves. We understood that, in life, some are dealt aces, some tens, and some deuces.

  Food wasn’t the only assistance we provided. One morning I watched my uncle John dig a ditch from our house across the gravel road to the ramshackle house. The family had been unable to pay their water bills, and my uncle was good with pipes. So he connected the two houses, and we shared our water with them. These acts of kindness were also not unusual among neighbors. Necessity was a great motivator for innovation and empathy.