The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America by Poo Ai-jen

Author:Poo, Ai-jen [Poo, Ai-jen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781620970461
Publisher: New Press, The
Published: 2015-02-02T22:00:00+00:00

Three Fronts

Establishing the Caring Majority framework hadn’t just built the short-term power we needed to win our legislative fight. In important ways, it began changing the nature of relationships, particularly the behavior of individual community members toward domestic workers. It also began the essential work of shifting popular culture toward noticing, appreciating, and valuing work that takes place in the home. The New York campaign proved that in order to transform our nation into a caring nation, we are going to need to create change in three arenas of society: cultural, behavioral, and structural.

We can sometimes forget that deep, lasting change requires work on all three of these fronts. For example, as part of a larger strategy for deep social change, the civil rights movement had a clear agenda for legislative change: to end the racial segregation that was established by law in the southern United States. And the movement was successful: restaurants and buses were desegregated, African Americans won the right to vote in the South, and more. Some people thought the movement for racial equality could and would end with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, but it continues today.

In fact, schools are more segregated now than they were in the 1960s,1 and housing segregation is also on the rise.2 We are still fighting racism on the level of individual interactions, whether it’s the racial profiling by individual police officers or the tragic killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2013, and the institutions, such as the court system, that reinforce these individual actions. Racial inequality is so deeply embedded in U.S. society that it will take a holistic approach to social change to undo it. To manifest the vision of the civil rights movement, we need ongoing strategies that address the ways that racial inequality continues to underlie and shape government policies and the economy, strategies that understand that today’s racism plays out in different ways than it did in the 1960s, some less obvious. And we need to keep challenging the cultural assumptions and behavioral patterns that continue to divide us from one another.

The women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s gives us another powerful example of an integrated approach to social change. While the women’s movement won a number of important policy victories, its core platform—the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have amended the Constitution to ensure equal rights for women—failed to pass. But even with this political defeat, the social and cultural efforts of the women’s movement have radically changed our society. Today, women are doing things that would have been unimaginable just half a century ago. Cultural change was at the heart of those structural changes.

These two movements saw the work to win equality as a long-term process. Their leaders knew that they had to work on all three fronts if they were going to make progress. That is the approach we need to take if we are going to find our way to a new era of caring in America.

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