In the 43 years since this lecture there are some things our society has excelled at since 1981 – Science, Technology, Modern Medicine. In 1981 no one had heard anything about a “digital revolution”, a first Woman in Space or MTV.
There were rumors of an incurable disease becoming more prevalent and more virulent, particularly within the Gay community – and maybe that was one element where AIDS put unwanted attention on an entire segment of our population – one more reason to direct hostility and frustration – put a finger and identify “the other” as the culprit; the dispenser of all ills.
But for all the advances and promises and concerns the 80s brought with them; a rise in Sexism, Racism and certainly Homophobia became more prevalent, more commonplace, more accepted than in other decades than anytime since the 1800s.
No question the climate in America has changed in recent years; a certain acceptance and even to embolden those people in search of the scapegoat – living in terror and in fear of losing their moral center. Relying on ancient phobias in order to seek comfort, preserve an outdated ideal.
If Sexism, Racism and Homophobia were on the rise in 1981, 43 years ago, it would be hard to imagine a person living in that year to comprehend that it could actually get worse in the new millennium. But it has – and this hatred and fear have spread. The desire to take the country, if not the world, back to the 1800s when Slavery was legal and Women were considered no more necessary than cattle has occupied center stage again. What’s worse is the ambivalence, the acceptance that the unacceptable has become the norm, just as it did in 1981 has come back, or maybe it never left and the noise and rhetoric have just gotten louder.
As an example of what America was coming to terms with, Johnnetta Cole the noted anthropologist, educator, museum director, and college president. Johnnetta Cole was the first female African-American president of Spelman College, a historically black college, serving from 1987 to 1997. She was president of Bennett College from 2002 to 2007. During 2009–2017 she was Director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art. Cole served as the national chair and 7th president for the National Council of Negro Women from 2018 to 2022.
Here is Johnnetta Cole, in a lecture delivered at Womens Studies Colloquium at University of Massachusetts, Amherst in August of 1981 and broadcast over WFCR, the National Public Radio station in Amherst.
And 43 years later . . .
