[Mb-civic] The dream and its enemies - James Carroll - Boston Globe
Op-Ed
William Swiggard
swiggard at comcast.net
Mon Jan 16 04:42:58 PST 2006
The dream and its enemies
By James Carroll | January 16, 2006 | The Boston Globe
AT THE Richmond Theater on King Street in Alexandria, Va., I was
cheerfully ushered into American complacency. ''Colored people" could go
to the movies there, but they had to sit in the balcony.
Segregation so defined the social order that a white child like me was
as unlikely to question it as he was to ask about the color of the sky.
If I did ask, I was certainly told, ''It's the way things are." Later
someone explained to me that Fats Domino's ''My Blue Heaven" referred to
the segregated mezzanines of movie houses, and when I hear that rocking
lyric even now, I feel a cold blast of shame. If it had been up to me,
or the people I knew, would America have changed?
This nation honors Martin Luther King Jr. today because of what he
forced on it. Recognitions that followed his challenge have taken on the
character of rock-solid truth. Segregation by race is deeply wrong, and
the institutions of government that supported it were indefensible.
King's work freed whites as well as blacks from the prison of an inhuman
perception, but, in fact, few white people ever came to see things as he
did.
The outright racism of white supremacists was only one of his enemies;
almost equally infuriating to King was the complacency of the vast
majority of Americans that allowed inequality to thrive.
That is the point of my memory of the Richmond theater, where I first
learned the power of, ''It's the way things are." Segregation in public
accommodations was no outrage to me, and even once I began to grasp its
injustice, I was simply incapable of feeling the insult as blacks did.
The complacency of whites consisted in that distance from the
transcending personal affront that blacks experienced every day.
Eventually, people like me were conscripted into the civil rights
movement, and we were privileged to regard King as our leader, too. We
rejoiced at the passage of laws that began to dismantle structures of
discrimination.
But even then, King stood apart. As rage against legal barriers to
equality drove him in the beginning, rage against unjust economic
systems, and inbred cultural attitudes, moved him in his later years.
The great Washington demonstration for Civil Rights where King spoke in
1963 became, by 1968, the Poor Peoples March on Washington. At the
first, King answered the question ''When will you be satisfied?" by
calling for voting rights, the end of police brutality, and the removal
of ''whites only" signs.
National complacency on such questions fell away, and a legal revolution
occurred. But in preparing for the second demonstration nearly five
years later, King called for nothing less than changes in the economic
and social orders.
King would not be satisfied until reform had gone beyond the public
reach of the law to the ways Americans made ''private" decisions about
how they earned a living, what they did with their money, where they
chose to live, whom they sought out as friends, what they wanted from love.
In truth, race was a defining line in all those realms, too, and if it
was not confronted as such there, King knew, his dream would not be
realized.
In honoring King today, America knows full well how far short the nation
still falls of the vision he articulated. In the year that he died, a
federal commission convened to examine the roots of urban riots declared
that the United States was, in fact, two societies, separated by race.
Nearly forty years later, that remains true, and it did not take
Hurricane Katrina to show it. The effective segregation of schools is as
stark as ever. Incarceration rates of African-American males are
astronomical. Gunplay in cities overwhelmingly targets young people of
color. An institutional triage writes off huge proportions of poor black
youth. Among middle and upper classes, social interaction between the
races is rare. Even as ''race" has been recognized as an artificial
social construct at the service of a dominant class, it remains as much
a marker of identity as ever.
Today we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr., but what would he say if he
were here to accept the honor? In 1963, he decried all that had not
happened in the hundred years since the end of slavery. It is nearly
half that time again. Now, aiming the flamethrower of his rhetoric, King
would surely scorch the complacency of a nation that still accommodates
such injustice because, well, ''It's the way things are."
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/16/the_dream_and_its_enemies/
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