022417 Week 8 Legislative Report, Rep. Rick Holman, ND District 20

It’s crossover, the time when House and Senate bills switch sides. After starting with over 800 pieces of legislation we have cut the list down by about half. During the month of March, we will continue refining and adjusting the remaining bills to make them better. (or not).

Again, this session like the last two, we have been discussing and considering issues of discrimination. Last weekend, Marilyn and I attended the movie "Hidden Figures". It brought back lots of personal memories from the early ‘60’s but also connected to many things going on in the world today.

In 1961, I was just out of high school and a student at NDAC. My advisor was in charge of the new room size computer that had just arrived on campus. I played tic-tac-toe on the computer and have been interested in computer technology ever since. For me, the technology revolution started.

 

The movie brought back some other memories from the 1960's. In the movie, women in professional positions were mostly white, in supporting roles, and required to wear heels and dresses. African Americans both men and women were separated from whites. White men were in all leadership positions and wore white shirts, ties and dark pants. My first teaching job in 1965 had in the faculty policy manual that women teachers wore dresses and men wore a white shirt and tie. We even had separate faculty lounges for men and women.  We smoked in the men's lounge.

 

This movie Hidden Figures is about three brilliant African American women who for reasons of gender and race were relegated to inferior status, effectively limiting their ability to contribute to the NASA space program. It's easy to forget how only 50 years ago, we accepted this type of discrimination and control as normal. Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson, Person of Interest), was a mathematical prodigy who had her ability ignored until it became evident that she was smarter than any mathematician on the staff at NASA. Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer, The Help), embarrassed the men in charge of the new IBM computer by making it work when they could not. Mary Jackson (Janelle Mon’ae) became the first African American woman engineer at NASA. In order to get the required education, she had to have court approval to take a night class at an all-white school. We never saw this in ND but such rules were common in other places.  Separate bathrooms, bus seating and coffee pots for "white" and "colored" were common. Are those laws gone? Maybe, but the obvious and implicit messages that we send without thinking are still part of our culture. We often look at someone, make mental decisions about them, and then interact based on those thoughts.

 

As we were watching the story evolve, memories of the space race in the early sixties came back to me along with the words and actions of John Glenn and John Kennedy as the Russians beat the US putting the first man in space. It’s interesting that nearly sixty years later we are still talking about Russian influence and the effects of racism and discrimination in our culture. Many of the younger people attending the movie commented, "Was it really like that?" It was.

 

Here in the 2017 ND legislature you can sometimes hear negative comments about Native Americans, Immigrants, Muslims or LGBT persons. The code words "Those People" are often used to identify a group. Such comments and actions are seldom on the public record, but they come through in support or non-support of certain pieces of legislation. We’ve come a long way but still have a long way to go.

Rick Holman