A Mother's Day charge to end gender inequality!

We must fight for equality!

Happy Mother's Day!

Long before I was ever lauded with two Florida Bar Media Awards, the American Honda “Power of Dreams” Award, or was nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary, my very first writing award came way back in 1981 when as a fourth grader, I won the United Ebonettes of Tallahassee's Mother's Day Essay Contest for a 250 word piece that described why my mother, Vivian Hobbs, was the best mother in the world.

Now, this award surely was not given for my handwriting because to be real, whenever my younger ambidextrous self decided to write with my right or left hand, the script more often than not was chicken scratch! Yes, I was one of those children whose handwriting warm-up assignments NEVER was taped to the wall by the teacher as an example of good penmanship 😆.

Where I was highly skilled, however, was with what I wrote, a gift that is owed to my mother, a secondary school English teacher turned college English professor who to this day, is busy editing my soon to be published book. So I thank God that the Ebonettes were more concerned with the substance of my essay than the form because had they focused on the latter, I probably would not have placed.

That substance, mind you, was one of a boy who LOVED his momma, a love that has led me in the past to fight battles in courts of law and public opinion to eliminate all vestiges of inequality against women.

Last year, as America celebrated the centennial of the 19th Amendment and its provisions allowing women (white women) to vote, the comments on social and traditional media sites revealed that far too many of our fellow citizens either didn't realize or refused to acknowledge that within my own mother's lifetime, that Black women (and men) couldn't vote, that women couldn't serve on juries, and in many jurisdictions, women couldn't own property and were considered “property” of their husbands.

In fact, the very recent history of gender based discrimination flows from the past and is equally problematic, what with current income inequality, glass ceilings that prevent talented women from reaching the upper echelons of leadership in myriad professions, and the realization that poor women, particularly poor women who are single mothers, are still being castigated by heartless politicos who wax foolishly about “welfare queens” who “don't want to work.”

Cognizant of these issues, it is my sincere hope that as we pay homage to all of the mothers across our land today, that we resolve to do our parts to combat the rank misogyny that informs so much of public opinion and policy in our nation. We can do this by speaking up, clapping back, and voting for leaders who realize that gender equality must be more than a notion!