More food for my thoughts

Last night, while reading yet more interviews of writers by writers, I came upon one of Marilyn Robinson answering questions and talking to Cornelia Nixon, whom I'd never heard of. Robinson I was familir with; she wrote a novel called Housekeeping, published in 1980, which I took a look at and wasn't enrapured with at the time. Her most recent is called Gilead, and the reviews of it did not spark any interest. It has much to do with religious faith, being in the form of one long letter from a 76 year-old Reverend John Ames to his 7 year-old son, in the year 1956. However, reading Ms. Robinson's remarks have made me reconsider. Part of her response deals with the Abolitionist movement, and its adherents' very hard and extensive work to rectify the crimes of slavery, primarily through educating former slaves, founding colleges which had thoroughly integrated student populations. But at a certain point, they hit a wall, were treated as fanatics; Robinson describes it thusly: "This huge kind of cultural overturning like an iceberg rolling over. And everything just gets lost and goes into abeyance." She goes on:" It's one of the most powerful lessons that American history contains, that so much could be done so insistently and patiently by people of great idealism, and it can all be lost. One of the things that is most painful about it, and I think one of the reasons it was most effective, the turnover, is because it started from the top down, because racial theory, which is what evolution primarliy was when it entered the country, came in through the universities. They would have their little charts, and it would show the ape, and the gorilla, and the black guy - "
Interviewer:"And then the white guy-"
"Yeah, and with a few other guys in between and no women at all. They had no role in evolution at all, you know." [Both laugh]
She makes another observation along these lines, a bit later:"The racial hierarchy was very much reinforced from reactionary movements in Europe, which were also aristocratic movements, nostalgia for aristocracy."
My thoughts are low. We have had nothing, really, in the way of dedicated work to cure any of the current ills of our country, that can compare with those Abolitionisits of the 19th century. And as Robinson also said,"You still can't find any women in those little charts." We're out on one of those icebegs, and it's about to flip over.