Guest post: It isn’t superheroes who win equal rights
Originally a comment by Lady Mondegreen on Spiked says solidarity is the work of the devil.
That is, equality was won by was won by ordinary women standing up for themselves one at a time and separately and without conferring or joining forces in any way whatsoever. Yeah! No need for solidarity, no need to organize, no need for campaigns, just each woman square her shoulders and be as great as she can be.
This is the story conservative America tells itself over and over again about how equal rights were fought for.
I grew up hearing that Rosa Parks was really tired one day after a hard day’s work, so she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person.
–Wait, Rosa Parks was secretary of the Montgomery NAACP? She had marched for civil rights and workers’ rights? She’d attended activist training? She wasn’t the first black person to be arrested for resisting bus segregation, but her case was chosen for the lawsuit challenging it?
What a disappointment. Rights are supposed to be won by individualistic individual heroes who are so strong and brave and good they vanquish the meanies and win over the public by virtue of their individual awesomeness. Anything else would be people organizing and fighting together against the powerful, and we can’t have that. That’s communism, and collectivism, and being contemptible helpless creatures.
Funny how libertarian/conservative types run down Hollywood while clinging to the most hackneyed and unrealistic star-vehicle narratives. It isn’t superheroes who win equal rights, Whelan.
Indeed, Rosa Parks’ protest was designed around—and likely succeeded by—respectability politics. Her age, her complexion, and get demeanor were all far better than that of the main previous sit-downer (Claudette Colvin, who is incidentally still alive, but who was younger, darker, and more crass than Parks.)
This was its own kind of identity politics, and it worked.
Seth, that’s lawyering, not identity politics.
I first heard the backstory of the Rosa Parks incident in right-wing media (The Weekly Standard magazine, IIRC, probably in the mid-1990s). I don’t remember what their broader point was, but they explained how it was a planned event designed to get an arrest and court date. I’d previously learned about her from school and mainstream media accounts, and that had always been the “tired older woman just wanted to sit down” narrative.
So at least in my case I heard the legendary version from the center/left and the more accurate version from the right.
(Interest in the full story has grown in recent years, so it’s now more often present as a planned court challenge anywhere you read it.)
Skeletor, when I first heard the full story (from a right-wing op ed in a college newspaper), the point of the story was to demonstrate that it was somehow not legitimate because it was planned, that Rosa Parks should be despised because it was manipulative and evil, and that somehow it would have been legitimate if “real” – the tired older woman needing to sit down story. I have no idea why that should matter; I didn’t then, and I don’t now. She put the issue out front and center, and won the day. It took bravery to do it whether she was just tired or whether it was planned by an experienced activist.
I somehow expect it she had been the “tired older woman who just needed to sit”, this right wing college kid would have written the opposite – somehow that would have made it less legitimate, or maybe he would have stoked up left wing language and referred to it as “exploitative”. For some reason, right wingers start to care about exploitation when (and only when) it can be used (at least in their minds) to make the point they want to make, and make the left somehow sound like hypocrites.