The More Things Change . . .

African-American and white soldiers at a base in Italy during World War II.

Today there's supposed to be some further news from the Defense Department on Don't Ask, Don't Tell.  Some blogs and news sources are already reporting what they think will or won't be said.

Whatever the case may be, don't expect anything to change overnight.  It always takes time.  To illustrate the point, look at this timeline from the Truman Library, which shows how long it took from Truman's 1948 executive order until the military was fully integrated.

And note also the many committees, reports, studies, and recommendations the military put itself through along the way . . . as well as the foot-dragging and bellyaching and protestations that the military was "not an instrument for social evolution" (Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall, 1949).  Notice also the fulminating reaction in Congress:

[T]his proposed program would adversely affect the rights, privileges, and freedom of the people of all sections and of all walks of life in this country. It stabs at the very heart of the rights and freedom of all races, colors, and sections of our great country. For, if the Federal Government can repeal the poll tax in Mississippi and several other Southern States, regulate employment under the FEPC, punish innocent taxpayers under the Anti-Lynch Bill, and abolish segregation in the several States by usurpation of the sovereign rights of the several States of the Union, then we have indeed witnessed an end of constitutional government as conceived by the founding fathers. . . .

Is it any wonder then, Mr. Speaker, that a revolt has arisen all over our country, from Mississippi on the shores of the Gulf-kissed coast in the South to the stony crags of Maine in the North, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, by southern Democrats and those freedom-loving Americans everywhere, at this attempt to destroy the true civil rights of the citizens of our great and common country? . . .

But now, for the first time in the history of the country, and the loyalty of my section to the Democratic Party, a President of the United States has asked the Congress to enact such a devastating, obnoxious, and repugnant program to the people of that section and their Jeffersonian conception of democracy as this so-called civil-rights program. No President, either Democrat or Republican, has ever seen fit heretofore to make such recommendations. . . .

"Freedom-loving Americans."  Right.  Doesn't the tone of those remarks sound awfully familiar?  Can you say teabagger?

So you see, the decades roll on, but some attitudes just stay the same - only the names are changed.

One more thing I want to mention:  some people who want to keep gays out of the military talk about their disgust at the idea of straight boys having to take showers with gay ones, and all such as that; as if that's the most repellent idea ever, something no decent (heterosexual) male should ever have to be subjected to.

What some of my Yankee truckbuddies may or may not understand - something that is practically forgotten nowadays - is that white Southerners felt an equally strong aversion to fraternizing with blacks.  Speaking from my own personal knowledge and experience growing up in that legally segregated world, a great many white Southerners had an inward feeling - completely irrational, of course, but a strong one - that "Negroes" were somehow simply dirty, if not diseased, and therefore close contact was to be avoided - for example, eating together, or riding public transportation together.  Whites in that time and place felt contaminated by that kind of contact - physically so.

Which is utterly ridiculous - no, asinine - when you realize that they had not a shadow of hesitation about eating anything dished up by black cooks in the kitchen - either at home, or in a restaurant - and served to them by black waiters.  No, that never troubled anyone's mind for a second, not a bit.

You see how people are?

But to have a black person sitting at your elbow, eating off a plate next to your own - that was a horrifying thing, as much so as socializing with a typhoid carrier.   Plenty of people - including my own dear, kind, intelligent, college-graduate parents, I'm sorry to say - believed that "all black people have syphillis" or some such nonsense.  But even if you didn't think about veneral disease, still, as an ordinary Southerner, you usually felt the need to keep your distance from black people in certain public activities. 

I bring this up just to make the point:  no matter how the straight boys and girls foam on now about how awful it would be to shower with teh gayz, et cetera - and how amusing that attitude is, because it's a fact they've been showering with us all these years anyway, without knowing, right? - no matter how they carry on right now, it is a reaction that they can and will get over.

No one in the South now thinks anything about eating in a restaurant with blacks, or riding the bus with them, or sleeping in a motel bed a black person might have slept in the night before - or all the hundred-and-one other things that would have completely horrified white people down here, fifty years ago and more.  It's simply not an issue now, even if some other racist attitudes still linger.

And the homophobes of today will get over it too.  Once the laws are changed and enforced, attitudes will follow.  Just realize that, as with desegregation of the services, the process of dismantling DADT will probably take a few years, no matter what the President and the military chiefs say or do this week.  And just like with the Dixiecrats of 1948, there will be thunder and lightning in Congress too, no doubt - but it will all work itself out eventually, I'm sure.  Just not overnight.