Ruby Bridges Quotes
Administrations and administrative faculty work very hard to see that schools are diverse as much as possible.
Bridges, Ruby. Through My Eyes. Scholastic Press, 1999.
He was the first FHA administrator to make statements saying that non-discriminatory housing services should be available to the American people. At the time the Southern states had laws allowing and protecting legal segregation especially in housing. The Southern field staff interpreted his instruction to be sure that both blacks and whites had access to FHA services, but they used the “separate but equal” doctrine: Provide services to both races but always in segregated housing projects. This was typical of the kinds of problems that motivated the Civil Rights Acts offered by President Kennedy in 1963 and passed by President Johnson in 1964. See {637272} for a similar Mason statement.
This seems counter intuitive, but Stenner is not referring to the reaction of all people. She argues that such programs do not change the behavior of those who are already tolerant and accept multiculturalism and pluralism, and and often backfire with people we would like to be more tolerant because the primary reason for their intolerance is an authoritarian personality. These people cannot fare well with all the differences and little that is structured as right. She and others who have had experience with authoritarian personalities urge that we not try and persuade the of the desirability of allowing a society to have many different cultures with no dominant norm. Instead, they urge that programs to make authoritarian personalities behave with tolerance is to take a very rigid and authoritarian approach. The Government has made laws that requires all American citizens to be tolerant of different races, genders, cultures, sexual orientation. To maintain the unity of our society, we all most behave that way. Liberals, often find this hard to do as to them tolerance is such a fundamental value that everyone should accept it as desirable and see its virtue—they want hearts and minds. Steiner argues that they should forget about hearts and minds reading tolerance. With authoritarian personalities, get the behavior and leave it at that. For them the moral appeal is to obey the law.
Ruby Nell Bridges Hall is an American civil rights activist. She was the first African-American child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis on November 14, 1960. She is the subject of a 1964 painting, The Problem We All Live With by Norman Rockwell.
