In an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled "Kennedy's Finest Moment," Peniel E. Joseph, an African American history professor at
That morning, President Kennedy had used the forces at his disposal to stand down Governor George Wallace in his effort to block the integration of the
However, to this day, the conservative movement engages in strident anti-1960s rhetoric that seems to enshrine the 1950s as the good old days -- before the black civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s helped advance desegregation.
In addition, the strident anti-1960s rhetoric of the conservative movement is aimed at attacking the women's movement that emerged in the late 1960s.
In another op-ed piece in the New York Times titled "Sexism's Puzzling Stamina," columnist Frank Bruni discusses the issue of gender in American culture today.
Now, in the 1950s, white supremacy and male chauvinism were two strong struts, as it were, in forming the identity of white American males. For this reason, the strident anti-1960s rhetoric of the conservative movement should alert us to the underlying masculine identity crisis of American males.
In Walter J. Ong's short and accessible book FIGHTING FOR LIFE: CONTEST, SEXUALITY, AND CONSCIOUSNESS (Cornell University Press, 1981), the published version of Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University, Ong argues that males need to work out a specifically masculine sense of identity.
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