"Who is this person she’s talking about?" I asked myself.  

The laptop she had opened to view there was a picture of former President Ronald Reagan. But surely she could not be speaking about him. I had an incredulous look on my face. She began to look at me as if I was from another planet.

She started telling me about all of Reagan’s great accomplishments: How he was The Great Communicator. How he ended the Cold War. Freed the Hostages in Iran.  Brought the nation out of a recession.

I broke in and said, please, stop telling me about my history. You weren’t even born when Reagan was president, at most, just a baby.

And seemingly, I thought silently, Yale failed to teach you very much about our recent history, at least from the perspective of poor and working class people.

She looked at me in shock and said you must not know your history. I then informed her I lived it and it wasn’t pretty.

What I recall, I explained, was 18 percent unemployment nation wide, which translated to 30 percent unemployment in Black, poor whites, and Hispanic populations.

I was one of the few black women with a decent job walking in a mall in Toledo, Ohio, and probably the only black at the mall able to buy anything.  

Reagan busted the Air Traffic Controllers Union, which sent all unions on a downward spiral.

He traded bomb and weapons to Iran for the hostages. He started the HOT WAR in Iraq and Iran and lied about it.  

Ollie North was shot down and told the hearing committee the true reason he was flying over Iraq.

Then there was the Reagan-backed counter-insurgency against Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

Without exaggeration Reagan's policies resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Central American peasants.

Let's not forget that Reagan "constructively engaged" South African apartheid and snubbed and mocked Bishop Tutu when he explained the harm done to South African blacks because of US support of South African racism.

I recall we begged and protested and marched around Washington for Martin Luther King’s birthday to be a national holiday.

Prior to Reagan giving in to our protest, he stated  that racism did not exist in the United States anymore. There is no need to bring up old history, he argued, for everybody is equal now.

When crack cocaine hit the urban area of the nation and a whole generation was addicted to crack, the national response was to say JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS.

 The outcome is a generation of grownup crack babies in prison or mentally unable to deal with their surroundings.

Well I guess I know some of my history, sister. Yale, it seems, taught you very little from a black and working class perspective. Reagan's economic policies, his VOODOO ECONOMICS, were a blight on black progress.  

The sister looked at me and couldn’t close her mouth.

I knew then I was probably standing next to a future Connie Rice or, maybe, an Edith Sampson.

Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911-2004)