I think it gets overdone sometimes. The first ‘first’ is notable, so are a few more, but the first ‘labeled person’ to eat pretzels in every state capital is not newsworthy. It should be insulting to someone with a real accomplishment getting noted only for being a first ‘label’ to accomplish that instead of being a person who has done something few others have.
While it’s a common way to mark the changes in society we can’t become so invested in it that we forget the goal is point where such mentions are no longer necessary or interesting.
As an Aggie, I’ll say that I was more than a bit surprised to see this. The school has long been a rather conservative, religious and rednecky place, with a surprisingly large contingent of rural small-town people.
That said, I think it’s more reputation than reality these days; even when I was in school some 20-25 years ago, there were black student leaders, on a campus that was something ridiculous like 5% black (or possibly even less). And the school/area has apparently (as told to me by a gay Aggie friend of my wife’s who I met after we were out of school) long had a quite vibrant gay community, although it was never very prominent or visible in the sense of didn’t have Pride Parades down Texas Avenue in College Station or anything like that.
Electing a gay student body president is kind of what I’d expect by now, actually. But I’m not surprised it’s news either.
I completely agree with the OP. Do you know how many thousands of people graduated from Little Rock Central, Ole Miss, and UGA before Ernest Green, James Meredith and Charlayne Hunter-Gault came along? And yet they’re considered special, somehow. Not only was Susan B. Anthony about the umpteen-millionth person to cast a ballot in this country, she did it illegally, so it shouldn’t even count (in fact, it literally didn’t), but we put her on a coin like she invented voting. Why should the accomplishments of the real “firsts” be diluted through the historical accident of women and minorities suddenly being allowed to duplicate their achievements at some later date?
I have this reaction occasionally, too, but I have it more frequently in the other direction: when I hear of some politician or business leader or college president or whatever being the 47th white man to hold the position, I wonder if their being a white man was part of the reason that they got the position.
I recently started working at a company where the majority of workers are “protected class” minorities and I have found myself playing up my “ethnic white” status more often than I historically have done. Some of it is my own rediscovery of my heritage, but there is also a temptation to be seen as a “fellow minority” in some way rather than as “the oppressor”.
Someday, I’m going to earn some meaningless minority ‘first’ in order to boast about it - maybe “The first Pennsylvania Dutch person to hang glide across the entire Aleutian Islands chain”. Yeah, I’ll do that and then make a hex sign of it. And a barnstar. Then I’ll become the first PA Dutch person to air-drop a barnstar onto each of the Aleutian Islands. Yay ethnic minorities! We can do anything! Of course, this is despite the fact that the only thing that was particularly PA Dutch about my childhood was finding great-grandma’s stash of German reading material one time. No one else could read it and she never talked about it with me.
I understand your resentment, Sigene. However, I think you owe yourself some more thought on it, to improve your understanding of both yourself, and of what you are actually observing.
First yourself: your gripe is identical to the older children in a family, who are no longer noticed for their minor accomplishments, and are grumpy about their younger siblings getting praised for “first steps,” and “first self-toileting” and so on. Recognizing that that’s what you’re doing, might help you not to. In the bigger picture, you have nothing valid to complain about, for the most part, because the fact that it isn’t special when YOU do any of those things, doesn’t mean that it’s not special when someone else does them for the first time. It is.
As to what you are observing, there’s more than one thing going on. I think there’s basically two things. ACTUAL “firsts,” and media advancement sort-of “firsts.” The second kind are the ones that I would side with you on, in that they aren’t the result of the actual person accomplishing the “first,” feeling any sense of value about it.
What’s actually going on is ANOTHER child-like competition. Some reporter saw that other reporters were getting lauded for “announcing” a “first ever by whatever,” and they want to get patted on the back for celebrating an “important first” as well. So they go prowling down every side street, until they find some poor slob who they can claim is “special,” so they can announce that they discovered the first ever whatever.
It’s that second kind that I get annoyed by myself, because those stories are obviously never about the actual person accomplishing the “first,” they are about the REPORTER.
I hate how esoteric these firsts get in baseball. The announcers always have to grasp at straws to make it sound historic. This is the first time a shortstop born in Southern Japan hit an RBI triple against a Canadian pitcher on a Friday during game two of the NLCS!
Who cares!
Boy, don’t watch the Amazing Race. Everybody is a first.
Meet Bob and Michelle from Wichita Kansas. Michelle is the first 26 year old English Welsh Scottish 1/16th Norwegian American with an astigmatism to compete on the Amazing Race!
Michelle: “I just wanted to prove that if you follow your dreams and never give up you can do anything. I also wanted to show that 26 year old English Welsh Scottish 1/16th Norwegian Americans with astigmatisms can do the same things other people do!”
I’ll be the first Pennsylvania Dutch Irish Appalachian Scots Puritan Bahamian American between 35 and 40 who knows at least 5 but not more than 10 programming languages and who got an “A” in his first semester of middle school math to compete! Descendants of the survivors of the Great Famine of Ireland can accomplish anything!
I think it’s a positive sign of the times that the OP is underwhelmed by these firsts, truly.
Dad and I watched 42 yesterday, and while it was a good movie just because of the plot, my mind wandered a bit. The Jim Crow laws that he and his wife encountered back in the 40s didn’t end until 1965. And honestly, it has always blown my mind that they were ever a thing. This is sort of remarkable because I was born in 1977 and grew up with the sense that having non-segregated facilities is normal, and that the Jim Crow era was wrong. Twelve short years is all it took (if even that) for the new status quo to seem perfectly normal to people who hadn’t lived under the old one. Society must’ve done quite a shift for there to be no noticeable trace of resentment of losing the old ways to be around for us to detect. Granted, it might have been different in the South, but people pretty far north were pissed off about Jackie not too terribly long before then.
If we’re getting to the point that firsts no longer inspire awe, good for us.
I completely agree with this, and with the OP. The whole “first Black dogcatcher/mayor/senator/president” thing is totally demeaning. It implies that the minority group in question is inferior in some way, and that one of them has finally succeeded at something that “normal” people have been doing all along. If I were a member of that minority group, I would find it totally offensive.
It’s like saying, “Wow, you’re pretty smart, for a girl!”
My fault. I wasn’t clear, and sarcasm in this forum is in questionable taste anyhow.
Perhaps robert_columbia could become the first of his heritage to fail to secure a decent mortgage because of redlining. That would be an accomplishment.
This an interesting point, that I can appreciate. How does one define ‘oppressed and disenfranchised’? Do you assume because they are gay or black or female that they are automatically oppressed and disenfranchised? Is it not possible at all for a white heterosexual male to fall into this definition of oppressed and disenfranchised because of who they are?