I Am a Feminist!

In 2020, the George Floyd mess opened my eyes to something: We are still a racist country. His death stunned the country. It took place during the pandemic, and it resulted in the prosecution of the white police officer who killed him. The bigger issue, to me, was that the relationship between blacks and whites in the U.S. was shown to be under pressure. He grew up in the Houston area and is buried in Pearland:

I was hopeful that this murder would help change things based on what I heard at first. But, years later, I don't think this has been the case.

While I don't believe I was ever racist, I felt like I had not done enough in my life to help erode the wall of racism. I had always felt funny about growing up in Piney Point Village in Houston, which was lacking non-whites. Two houses away, the great basketball player Elvin Hayes lived. I met him and hung out with his son, Elvin Jr. I was always surprised by how few neighbors got to know him, including my parents.

For the past few years, I have paid a lot closer attention to how racist Americans can be, though things have improved a lot over the past few decades. We need to do more!

As rampant as racism remains, there is another area of intolerance in my view: Women do not have equal rights to men. Like not being a racist, I don't think I ever caused a problem for women due to their gender. As an adopted person and a Jew, I certainly don't believe in judging others by their race or gender.

Like my view of myself never doing enough to combat racism, I feel as well that I didn't do enough to combat discrimination against women. The ladies of my early life, my mother and my sister, never were too involved in fighting for change, and my wife never encouraged me to more aggressively support the rights of women. I consider myself a feminist, though, despite no one ever trying to get me on board.

As a younger person, I didn't care for Gloria Steinem. I don't know why, but it was not anything I ever cared to learn about then. I was a Libertarian, and I believed that everyone should and did have the same rights under the law. This was not true, though! Well, I just read Gloria Steinem's first book, Outrageous Acts And Everyday Rebellions, and loved it.

To me, the best part was not her hilarious and famous story about becoming a Playboy Bunny, though I liked it a lot. My favorite chapter was her profile of five women. I knew about four of them, but I did not know about Alice Walker. She wrote The Color Purple in 1982. I saw and really liked that film when it came out a few years later. The other women, by the way, were Jackie Onassis, Pat Nixon, Marilyn Monroe and Linda Lovelace.

I haven't really changed my views at all. I have learned, though, that Gloria Steinem was someone I should have known better a long time ago. I have learned, too, that I should have become a feminist at a young age, though I never recognized myself as one.

I knew this, but did you? The Equal Rights Amendment never became law! Just like we need to make this a less racist nation, we need to also change society and the laws so that women are not oppressed. I really think that Gloria Steinem worked hard on both of these issues. She is 90 now. What a great person she is!