Month: October 2026

Since my twenties, I’ve been arguing that black people need to hire a highly capable public relations agency to change the false perception of black people as lazy, violent, ignorant and inferior. Since middle school, I was a state identified “gifted” student however my mother still had to fight white school administrators to enroll me in the most rigorous academic courses at the predominately white high school I attended.

The Civil Rights Movement brought us inclusion in New Deal programs, voting rights, non-discrimination in government hiring and contracts and school integration. However, since integration the default for black children in public schools was enrollment in the lowest academic rigor or special education. As whites fled integrated schools and neighborhoods, by systemic design, black children were financially denied sufficient academic preparation for college. The schools in black communities lacked everything needed for black students to succeed. One of my heroes, author Jonathan Kozol, exposes the educational injustice in his books, “Savage Inequalities” (1991), “Amazing Grace” (1995″, and “The Shame of a Nation” (2005). His books lay the foundation for why the doors to educational opportunities needed to be opened. I think Mr. Kozol would agree that a highly intelligent child who is exceptionally driven will find a way to excel academically even if he or she is self-taught. I think there is also a story to tell about how black women became the most highly educated demographic in the country.

An expanded Affirmative Action opened the doors to women and minorities who were “qualified” to enter colleges and universities. The greatest beneficiaries were white women and Asians. Black girls like me whose mother was courageous enough to demand that I be educated alongside the smartest kids in my white high school, also benefited. However, the backlash against Affirmative Action didn’t take long, and the easiest targets to attack the policy was the admission of black people to college campuses. However, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) continued to educate the greatest number of black students as the fight raged on for admission onto previously white campuses.

The white public had already been groomed for centuries to accept black intellectual inferiority as fact, and it was no secret that the K-12 schools they attended were inferior by systemic design, so it was easy to argue that Affirmative Action was “unfairly” giving less qualified black students enrollment preference over more qualified white students. This is why we needed a good PR agency to fight this false narrative about us. Some of the smartest, most innovative folks I know are black. And each of us has had to outperform our peers to gain entry and the respect we deserve. There has never been a benefit of the doubt given to us. Black pilots are better. Black surgeons are better. Black scientists are better. We have to be better because white fragility and envy put a target on our backs.

Since the end of slavery, we’ve allowed this country to define us primarily as athletes or artists or low-level workers. We’ve allowed this country to ignore. minimize or even hide our many intellectual, scientific and innovative contributions to the country. We’ve fought for this nation in every war. Our excellence, resilience, persistence, and strides forward were always met with the backlash fueled by a mixture of cognitive dissonance. fragile egos, and jealousy. White people burned down thriving black communities to punish and discourage our ambitions. White Americans expected humility and deference and always viewed black self-respect as arrogance. Many were hung from trees for this offense. Without a good PR Agency, the intelligence and dignity of the Obamas proved too much for many white Americans, and they instead turned to Donald Trump in cult-like loyalty to restore a false sense of white superiority. I believe that in their heart of hearts they know that Trump and his Administration are far less graceful, skillful, and intelligent than Obama and his Administration. And yet they proudly proclaim in front of cameras that Trump is the best president in history. They look stupid and that’s good PR.

Higher education’s response to the effective end of Affirmative Action by a conservative Supreme Court, was to recognize the importance of diversity in education. Unlike the general public, we knew that intelligence and creativity are spread across the human population without regard to skin color, ethnicity, or national origin. We knew that smart kids from underprivileged schools catch up quickly and excel when given the opportunity. We knew that harnessing the strongest brains made for the greatest human advancements. We knew and could document for the courts that the diversity of viewpoints and backgrounds enriched the learning environment for everyone. However, our greatest mistake is that we never bothered to hire a PR agency to sell this reality to the public. Instead, we allowed white men to complain when they had trouble competing with women and non-whites.

The same is true for equity. We dismantled the unfairness of cronyism wherein white men hired their friends and friends of friends instead of broadening their searches. That “old boys club” system kept the most qualified and best suited for positions out of the running. Equity is simple fairness. We started putting it in place without selling its merits to the general public.

The same was true for inclusion, where we decided it was time to make others feel comfortable in spaces previously preserved for white people. We decided it was advantageous to invite newly qualified people to be included at the highest levels of decision making. We decided that certain roles didn’t have to be held exclusively by white people. But we didn’t bother to make a PR case for inclusion. We allowed fragile whites to feel like they were being pushed aside for no reason. So, of course there was pushback.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion were great policies that never got the benefit that a competent public relations campaign could have provided. Instead, we allowed powerful fragile white men to tap into old stereotypes and a deeply ingrained false narrative about the capabilities of black people and later women. We allowed them to label DEI as a misguided policy that gave unearned favoritism to unqualified black people. We allowed DOGE to fire highly educated and experienced government workers, the highest percentage of whom were black women. We’ve allowed the Secretary of Defense to fire black and female generals and to refuse to promote blacks and women to higher positions in the military. The war on DEI turned out to be a war on actual merit.

But we can clearly see what has replaced DEI. A restoration of the previous system of cronyism was never about merit. It was never about what was best for the nation nor for humanity. It was always about the preservation of power and wealth among a small group of white men. And they ensure this by reinforcing the false American mindset of white superiority among the masses. But it’s not working.

The Trump cabinet is a picture of leadership in this nation without the benefit of DEI and a return to cronyism. I think social media has taken the place of the PR Agency I always wanted to hire. Social media exposes the history of this nation in ways the classroom has failed. It exposes the outrageous lies, the ridiculous policies, and the incompetent hires at the highest levels of government.

It may be late, but I think we’ve finally gotten the PR agency we desperately needed through social media influencers who are determined to expose everything. And I’m here for it!

My last post earned me the label of “demon” by some random woman on Facebook last week. I’m not disturbed by this but rather encouraged that my observations struck a nerve. Some nerves need to be struck, and eyes need to be challenged to see where this nation is headed if we aren’t careful. I’m just as wary of the American Taliban (Republican white “Christian” nationalist men) as I am the Taliban in Afghanistan. They are no different in their agenda for women. I addressed the harmful Republican agenda to prevent access to abortion care, end female voting rights, avoid the prosecution of wealthy sex offenders, the defense of child marriage, and an end to no-fault divorce laws. The safety, livelihoods, and rights of women are in jeopardy. This week, I’m addressing the attack on higher education for women.

Let me begin by stating that neither sex is better than the other; they are simply different. Our marriages, our families, and our society thrive when we value what each person brings to the table. Some tasks require brute strength while others require a patient detail-orientation. Mostly men possess the brute strength and mostly women possess the detail-orientation. Gender differences when respected are beautiful and my husband and I maximize them in the running of our home as equal partners.

As the sister of two older brothers, the mother of two daughters and a son, and the grandmother of four grandsons I readily acknowledge that there are general differences between boys and girls. Girls are generally able to play quietly for longer periods of time while boys generally require frequent physical bursts of activity. Girls tend to be more articulate starting at an early age. One of my grandsons is in speech therapy and according to the therapist, nine out of ten of the other clients are also boys. Girls are generally more likely to pursue activities that engage their minds and foster interpersonal relationships while boys gravitate to physical activities that engage their bodies, stimulates mechanical analysis, and ignites their competitive nature. Unfortunately, our school systems are generally run by women, and the pedagogy is most often geared toward girls who can sit quietly and engage for longer periods of time than their male counterparts. It’s no wonder that girls tend to be more successful students than boys. Because our teaching style caters to girls, boys continue to make up over 65% of students in special education programs. We need to modify our teaching to be much more responsive to the learning styles of boys.

It should not be surprising that once the doors to higher education opened to women, women ran through them. In 1995, men and women were equally likely to earn a bachelor’s degree. However, since then the gap has been growing across all ethnic groups. According to Pew Research Center, 47% of women age 25 – 34 in this nation have earned a bachelor’s degree compared to only 37% of men. In fact, I know firsthand that colleges struggle to admit enough men each year to fill their freshmen classes with a reasonable number of males. The quiet affirmative action taking place by colleges is in favor of admitting more men who are often less qualified than their female peers.

In my own family, each of the women have earned higher degrees than their husbands. But interestingly, they are not the higher wage earners. Women tend to choose careers that are more nurturing, collaborative, and service oriented, and these jobs tend to pay less. They are also more likely to choose jobs that allow for time off to address family issues. History tells us that once women entered the teaching profession, teacher salaries decreased significantly. Our society has always valued the labor of men over women, paying men more for the same work as women. Men are more likely to be promoted than women by other men in positions of power. And many bosses are more willing to invest in and mentor men whom they believe are more committed to work than to family. I once had a boss tell me that he was giving a higher raise to a male subordinate than a female subordinate with the same job responsibilities because the male had “a family to support”. At the time, it just seemed like the naturally right thing to do.

While women tend to choose careers that fulfil our need to nurture others, a few women prefer more physically challenging jobs that also pay more. It wasn’t until the 1970s after legal challenges and cultural shifts that women were finally permitted to break into physically demanding careers like the military, construction, policing, firefighting, piloting, and forestry. By the 1980s fields like law, finance, engineering, science, and technology that were previously closed off to women, not because we lacked the mental ability to do these jobs, but because universities limited our access to their programs and then later because the competitive culture in those jobs served as gatekeepers. For the past ten years, women have outnumbered men in law schools. Similarly, women make up about 55% of medical school students.

Female access to all educational fields and a commitment to full-time careers have made marriage a choice, not a necessity for many young women. Highly educated women expect more from a partner because they recognize that they can live a fulfilling life as a single person with friends and family and maybe a cat or two. Although most would prefer it, they don’t need to marry to become a mother. It is up to us to encourage our sons to become partner-oriented, not domineering.

I understand that female independence is bothersome to conservative men and women who view this change as worrisome. However, just as it was a lie that gay marriage harms heterosexual marriages, it’s also a lie that single women harm traditional families or that partnership in marriage is a desirable arrangement. I suspect uneducated women may envy women who have chosen independence over dependence. I suspect men who think they are entitled to a subservient wife resent independent women. There are a lot of social media hate comments directed at educated unmarried career women these days. I find it somewhat funny that some men threaten these women with loneliness. They wrongly assume women are desperate to get married and so they rant about their requirements for a wife, disparaging their education and independence as a liability. The problem is that these men clearly want helpless sex and kitchen slaves, not partners.

But worse than the insults are the Republican policies that are rolling back access to federally funded student loans for careers that don’t pay as much as other degrees. Without openly targeting women (that would be illegal), this Administration is targeting the degrees and certifications that women are more likely to pursue such as early childhood education, English literature, social work, cosmetology, massage therapy, arts and music. Limiting access to the federal loans to help fund these programs effectively limits access to the bulk of education programs that give women the ability to balance family and career while providing the level of independence that ensures their safety.

According to Pew Research Center, when men decide against higher education, they say it’s because they just don’t want to. However, when women decide against it, they say it’s because they can’t afford it. The Republicans are seeking to undermine the free will and independence of women by cutting off their access to voting, to abortion, to no-fault divorce, and now to their preferred educational programs. Pete Hegseth is firing female commanders and not promoting women in the military. These are direct attacks on women. Too many Republican women are likely unaware of the negative implications these policies will have for their daughters, nieces, and granddaughters moving forward.

My advice to young women is to get your education anyway. Choose a less expensive community college or state school if you have to. Seek scholarships, not loans. Educate other women about these Republican policies. And then support and vote for candidates who value the safety and equal rights of women and girls. My advice to mothers is to teach sons and daughters to honor the gender differences with mutual respect and collaboration; not domination.

I don’t care about being called a “demon”. I care about not allowing our nation to move backwards. Too many women fought long and hard to gain us the rights we now have. I’m doing my part to expose Republicans who are trying to undermine women’s freedoms and to return us to the miserable days of dependence and servitude. Let’s not go back without a fight.

I’m an educator by vocation and profession. I love learning and teaching others. When I was a child, I often lined up my dolls to play school and I was their teacher. I began college as an education major but on the advice of my parents, I switched to business because they feared I could never make a decent living as a teacher. They were right. They never wanted me to be dependent on a man for my wellbeing. I confess to being resentful at the time, handing my mother my mock diploma at graduation and declaring that my “debt was now paid”. However, taking my parent’s advice has served me well. After my mother’s death and my subsequent divorce because of his second incident of infidelity, I eventually returned to my first love, education, earning both a master’s degree in counseling and a doctorate in education to support and advance my career. The combination of my business degree and my education degrees helped me negotiate fulfilling and acceptably high paying positions as a counselor, university administrator and part-time professor.

I’m actually grateful to my parents because my finance, accounting, marketing, organizational behavior, and business law classes proved useful to me in my early business career wherein I made good money and it especially helped me in my work in education and enabled me to build a strong financial investment life that has resulted in financial independence and multiple protections against fraud and financial exploitation over the years.

I am well aware that none of the life I have experienced would have been possible without the fight of the feminist who came before me, opening up access to education, personal banking and investment accounts, as well as the ability buy property in my name and to advocate for myself. I recall having to obtain my husband’s signature in order to get my tubes tied after the birth of my third child. In 1985, the doctor advised that it would be dangerous for me to have another child, and yet my husband’s approval was required. I’m glad that is no longer the case for women today, but some are trying to return to those days.

The workplace was no freer than the hospital for women. At one point, I was subjected to sexual harassment prior to laws protecting women. My choices at the time were to stay at that high paying job and endure it or to leave. I chose to leave that very lucrative finance position only to learn a few months later that my first husband (we’re now divorced) was sexually harassing our young live-in nanny at the time. She also quit. The level of anger and betrayal I felt was nearly overwhelming, but my pastor convinced me that it was my Christian duty to forgive my repentant husband and to take some responsibility for the infidelity. I hurt for me, but I hurt even more for young woman whom he violated in our home. When Donald Trump was confronted with the possibility of his daughter being sexually harassed in the workspace, his response was to say that he hoped that she would have the courage to quit that job. Notice he was not at all interested in prosecuting the harasser or changing the conditions in the workplace for women.

Sadly, our nation remains plagued by the dangerous Trumpian attitudes toward the sexual exploitation of girls and women, where sexually assaulted girls and women are either ignored or even blamed for their own exploitation and sexual assaults by clergy, by wealthy Epstein Island offenders, by random men in public spaces, by dates or boyfriends, by coworkers or bosses, and on college campuses. We are watching the “boys will be boys” defense regarding the gang rape of a female college student by seven fraternity men at Cornell College. For years, judges have given young white men a slap on the risk for their sexual assaults, claiming they didn’t want to ruin his life. Notably, black and brown men were never given a pass that way.

What does it say about our country that we knowingly elected a president who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy and who was accused of sexual assault by 26 different women and was eventually found liable for sexual assault in court? It turns out that he was besties with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and his name is mentioned as a perpetrator in the files. What does it say about our society when female sexual assault victims are bombarded by questions like: why was she there? why was she dressed like that? why was she drinking so much? why didn’t she run or fight back? why was she there alone?

Our society, including too many women, hold women responsible for the lustful and unhinged behavior of men as though men cannot be expected to exercise decent levels of self-control and women must somehow protect men from their own despicable behaviors. Jesus’ answer to men was to take responsibly. “If your eye offends you, puck it out!” The Taliban’s answer to the problem is to have women cover themselves from head to toe in public and to be escorted by a male at all times. Women in Afghanistan are no longer permitted to even speak in public nor to take public transportation alone. In some countries, the shame of a woman being sexually assaulted by a man leads to her marriage to her perpetrator or worse, her death at the hands of family members. I’m concerned that there are Christian nationalist in our country who want to impose some of these restrictions on women to protect men from their uncontrollable lust. You hear them on social media talking about how some women deserve to be sexually abused for how they present themselves.

It is despicable that child marriage is legal in the U.S. despite the overwhelming evidence that child marriage is emotionally, educationally, physically and financially harmful to young women and yet this Republican Congress has failed to pass the “Child Marriage Prevention Act of 2024” that was introduced by Democrats on August 1, 2024. As of today, only thirteen blue states have raised the minimum age to 18 years old for all parties. Girls as young as 10 years old have been married off to adult men in recent years, although most are 16 and 17 years old. We know that human brains aren’t even fully developed until our mid-twenties, so it makes no sense to allow a girl to marry a grown man.

The saddest part to me is that Republican women, particularly those with religious values and who genuinely care about others are completely blind to the conservative policy agenda that is designed to protect men who sexually assault girls and women, while simultaneously actively working to remove the voting rights of women, to prevent women from accessing bodily autonomy, and placing limitations on their access to healthcare, education, jobs, promotions in their chosen fields, and even their right to leave a bad marriage.

The vice president, JD Vance, and Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, are advocating that women remain in abusive marriages by pushing for an end to no-fault divorce. In fact, conservative lawmakers in red states like Texas, Louisiana, Nebraska and Oklahoma are actively trying to end no-fault divorce for irreconcilable differences. This means the state will get to decide if conditions in a marriage like infidelity, cruelty, excessive drinking, imprisonment, or physical abuse are bad enough to warrant a divorce. In 1969, California ended what was a nightmare scenario that kept women trapped in unhappy and even dangerous living conditions by passing no-fault divorce. The first result after the passage of no-fault divorce was a decrease in female suicides. Cases of domestic violence and women being killed by their husbands went down. As expected, the divorce rates increased for a time, then steadily declined. Since then, no-fault divorce is legal in all 50 states, but Republicans are trying to reverse that and that is especially scary for the health, welfare, and safety of women. Republican women are told that liberals hate men and marriage and families, opting for debauchery and cat ownership instead, and so they are apt to agree with the “sanity of marriage” without realizing that things can go terribly wrong within it and a safe path out of a nightmare will be blocked, particularly for women.

That conversation I had with my mahjong friend last week briefly continued this week when I was able to assure her that I looked up the facts about post-birth abortion and that harming or even killing a baby after it is born is illegal in all fifty states and that the comments of former Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia, who is a practicing pediatric neologist were taken out of context. I assured her that doctors offer parents at the birth of non-viable infants the choice between palliative care or extraordinary measures to save the life of the newborn. No one is actively aborting healthy late term babies. Her response was that she was glad to hear it, but she was concerned that our country was moving away from valuing human life and I agreed with her. I agreed that we need to do everything we can to value and protect all human life. We agreed that we were torn up over the newborn who was recently discovered in a garbage can. I briefly mentioned how tragic the situation was and how desperate that young mother must have been to do such a horrible thing.

What I am discovering is that Republican women genuinely care about people. However, they are under-educated by design. Because of this, they are particularly vulnerable to misinformation and easily manipulated to vote against their own interests and those of their daughters. It is evident that they didn’t realize the harm caused to women when we no longer have access to medically necessary abortions because they have been manipulated to believe that liberals do not value the lives of babies. They do not know that less than 1% of fetuses are aborted after 21 weeks’ gestation and that the vast majority of those aborted that late is because the fetus is not viable or the mother’s life is in grave danger. Forcing continued pregnancies is causing preventable deaths of women in red states and forcing the birth of horribly deformed non-viable infants is leading to another kind of heartache. If they knew the reality about the rise of infant and pregnancy associated deaths (John Hopkins University study) since the abortion bans have taken effect, they would vote differently. Texas women experienced a 50% rise in the sepsis rate of women who miscarried in the second trimester. Physicians in red states report delaying life-saving care for pregnant women until they become critically ill. We must have the difficult conversations with Republican women to expose the truth of these Republican policies.

Since the abortion bans took effect in red states, the birth rate has more than doubled among Hispanic and black women and other racial minorities. Not so for the many more white children Republicans hoped to have. As expected, the infant mortality rates also increased nearly 11% as severely sick babies (non-viable) were forced to be born.

We must also expose the fact that Republicans are actively trying to limit female access to the ballot box by requiring our current sir names to match our birth names. According to the League of Women Voters, since 2004 women have been registered to vote at higher rates than men. And women make up slightly more than 50% of the U.S. population. And black women have proven to be the most motivated voters. This gives Republicans an incentive to influence our voting habits whether by redistricting or making names an issue. Personally, my sir name has changed three time during my lifetime from birth and two separate marriages. Thankfully, I have my actual birth certificate, marriage certificates, a driver’s license, a social security card, and a current U.S. Passport. I’ve kept all these records safe and accessible. But how many women have them and know where they are?

Of course, there are women-hating influencers on social media and in some churches saying that women should not be able to vote at all. They want to repeal the 19th Amendment. These men and some young women, want women to believe that they are intellectually inferior to men. They themselves know that nothing is further from the truth and these men are terrified that they now have to compete with educated, articulate, strongminded women. Their insecurity is leading them to seek ways to dominate and oppress women. Sadly, some young women are willing to allow their husbands to vote on their behalf. We must educate and empower our daughters, nieces, and granddaughters to defend their civil and human rights or they will lose them. Voting affects the policies that affect our actual welfare, freedoms, and future prospects. We must never abandon our right to choose those who represent our best interests.

This post is getting a bit long, so next week I will address the not-so-subtle Republican policy attacks on female access to education, jobs, careers choices, and promotions by the Republicans in charge.