Jamelle Bouie is a serious thinker and writer. I was struck by the concluding sentences of this essay, especially the last sentence,, quoting MLK: "We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.” When I entered law school in 1967, our class consisted of almost 120 students, of whom 5 were women. Throughout the country, in the 1960s, women comprised LESS than 5% of law students. By the mid 1970s, the number was about 25% and by the 1980s the number was about 40%. I saw this growth firsthand as a member of a law faculty during most of those years. Guess what else I saw firsthand - women are every bit as capable as law students and as lawyers as men are. Their academic and professional performance often surpassed that of their male peers. My point is that prior to the 1970s, there was an abundance of legal talent in this country that was unused, untapped, because of cultural norms, role expectations, bias and gender bigotry. All of our nasty "isms", like sexism, racism, ageism, etc., have contributed and continue to contribute to an enormous waste of human potential. (Consider just by way of example, the oppression of women in Saudi Arabia and in Afghanistan under Talliban rule). Women's liberation (and 'the pill') helped to correct some of the inequities of sexism and gender discrimination. Civil rights laws have helped to ameliorate some of the worst practices of racism but social and economic data make it abundantly clear that we have a long, long way to go, and until we get closer to something like MLK's 'beloved community,' we will continue to suffer from an enormous waste of human potential, like those in Thomas Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard':
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
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