In Defense of the Fifties

IN her admirable battle to "stop bigotry and racism" at Harvard, Assistant Dean for Minority Affairs and Race Relations Hilda Hernandez-Gravelle has found a new and unfortunate target: Harvard's Dining Services.

Cafeteria workers, Hernandez-Gravelle maintains, were "insensitive" to "people of color" and women because they invited students to "join in a night of nostalgia celebrating" the "fabulous," "fun" and "carefree" 1950s.

Somebody should give these cafeteria workers a break. Last year, a house master questioned their ability to do basic math. And now an assistant dean is accusing them of racial insensitivity, a charge that is unfair and insulting.

It's not that there's no racial and sexist insensitivity at Harvard. The University's reluctance to increase minority and women in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences shows great callousness. And the University's divestment policy is further evidence of an administration that seems not to care. Perhaps instead of focusing on the kitchens, Harvard should take a look at its all-white Corporation.

BUT is it really insensitive or racist to call the 1950s "carefree" times? Compared to the 1940s--which brought us Hitler, the Holocaust and the atomic bomb--the 1950s might seem carefree. Next to the 1960s and 1970s--which gave us race riots, Vietnam, Watergate and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that decade might seem like "Happy Days." But the truth is, no decade can fairly be termed "carefree."

These workers aren't the first people to glorify the '50s: the American media has been doing it for years. Most Americans view the '50s as an era of peace and prosperity. Fonzie and ABC made millions by perpetuating this image. Theater and television make the decade seem almost mythic.

The 1950s were "painful" and "complicated" for Blacks in America, as were the 1940s, the 1930s and every preceding decade. But Jim Crow and segregation weren't invented in the 1950s--indeed, the 1950s sounded the death knell for government-sanctioned discrimination in the United States.

The Civil Rights movement began to blossom in the fifties: the Supreme Court threw out the "separate but equal" doctrine and ordered school desegregation in the 1950s. Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus in the 1950s. Martin Luther King rose to national prominence in the 1950s. And a man from Missouri, Harry S. Truman, desegregated the nation's armed services.

The assistant dean believes "women were mostly treated as sex objects" in Eisenhower's era, but again ignores advances women made during that era. World War II gave women unparallelled employment opportunities, and the drive toward economic equality took off not in the 1970s but in the 1940s. The '50s was not an awful era for women, a step backward on the road to equality.

If Hernandez-Gravelle had her way, we would do away with nostalgia. If she's correct, then it is wrong to romanticize the past, for every decade has its blemishes and every year its flaws. Twenty years from now, it will be insensitive to be nostalgic about the 1980s, to remember these college days as "fabulous," "fun" or "carefree". Without a doubt, this decade has been "painful, complicated, and even life threatening" for the gay community, for the homeless and for the millions of Americans living in poverty.

PERHAPS Hernandez-Gravelle is right in that sense to denounce nostalgia. But she could oppose romanticizing the past without singling out employees who are only trying to enliven an otherwise mundane evening meal. Students enjoy '50s night and other special meals, and they appreciate the extra efforts of the dining hall employees.

The dean was wrong to publicly renounce the workers, to accuse them of subtle if unintentional racism. By focusing on divisive theoretical questions, such as whether nostalgia inevitably constitutes racism and sexism, Hernandez-Gravelle merely diverts our attention from the far more important issues of minority faculty recruitment and University divestment.