It’s been just over 40 years since Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated in Memphis (he was there to support a wildcat strike of the city’s sanitation workers) and it’s impossible to deny that things have changed. At least, some things have changed.
Today, we celebrate the King’s birth. The next day, we inaugurate our first “black” president. I put the word in quotes because it is, of course, a social construct, a mental idea – blackness. Obama’s mother is white, but in this culture – in all cultures with a long history of racism – “one drop” of African blood – usually defined as having one or more ancestors who were fully African in any of the previous three or four generations – has customarily meant a person is considered “black”. That was a legal term used to enforce segregation in most states until the 1960’s, and has been replaced by the “African-America” label for the purposes of affirmative action, which could only function (whatever one thinks of its merits) if it utilizes the same definition that was used during the days of Jim Crow.
But the supposedly scientific classification of races never aligned with the social and legal realities. While the “Caucasian” race ostensibly includes Arab people, Turks, Persians, and East Indians, for example, those folks have never been considered “white” in America. White has always meant European – and even that tent wasn’t very big, with Irish, Italians, and Greeks, among other groups, often being excluded from white privilege.
Truth is, white was whatever the powerful decided it was.
Race is an idea in the mind, and, as importantly, a reflection of social conditions, but it is not, and never has been, a biological reality.
Barack Obama’s ascendency is evidence that race holds far less power over the consciousness of our culture. The young voters that helped Obama catapult to the White House (paint it black, brother, please paint it black!) barely notice skin color. Most find it patently absurd, without even having to think about it, that such a superficial attribute could result in acts of violence, social separation, and hatred. Baby boomers as a group may have been pessimistic about Obama’s chances in what is surely still a “white” dominated society, but Generation X and the Millennials knew better. While light skin is still an advantage in America, and dark skin a risk factor in many arenas (criminal justice, medicine, education, among others), it is no longer, by itself, the guarantee of foul treatment and disenfranchisement it so recently was. And as this nation’s older citizens pass on and a generation raised after the 60’s comes to power, that will become more and more apparent.
And yet…
Martin Luther King’s dream is far from fully realized. While children of all colors and creeds surely do hold hands in America’s school yards and churches and playgrounds, and while our King Day Parade is a beautiful example of the possibilities of human harmony, antagonism and mistrust between different ethnic groups are far from absent; right here in Long Beach, in Los Angeles, in Alabama, in Jena, Louisiana, in Jasper, Texas, and in every American city, bigotry, hostility and fear still often separate the “races,” sometimes lead to violence, and perpetually simmer under the surface, keeping us from fully realizing what King called the “beloved community.”
And of course – though we forget this so often, and thus do his memory a disservice – King’s dream wasn’t just about ending segregation. The final line of what is now one of the most famous speeches in American history ends with a convocation of “that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”
Free – not just from the chains of slavery of segregation, not just from the oppression of law or gun, but more profoundly from a kind of mental slavery, an oppression we enforce on ourselves, all of us believing in an illusion – race, religion, nationality – and all of us acting as if that illusion is more real than our shared humanity, our intrinsic equality, our common desire for love. One man thinks he’s right, and another thinks he’s right; one man claims this land, another claims it as well; one man wants his tribe to win, and another fights to the death for his tribe; what they all have in common is the delusion of separation, the shared agreement that they are fundamentally different.
Talk about “working together.”
It’s a shame we don’t look more deeply at Dr King’s dream. While he is most famous for opposing racial segregation, mainly in the South, his activism came from a deep conviction that the Kingdom of God is possible on Earth. He opposed war – not just the war in Vietnam but all war. He opposed the exploitation inherent in capitalism, and called for a democratic socialism that is still, at least in name, anathema to the majority of Americas who invoke King’s dream in speeches and parades around the country this week. King imagined – dreamed of – a world where war, racism, and exploitation (which he called the interconnected “triple evils”) simply disappeared in the wake of a “revolution of values”.
King saw – like his philosophical ancestors Gandhi and Jesus of Nazareth – that war, racism, exploitation, and all forms of violence are only possible when we believe in the illusion of separation, the lie of inherent difference, the delusions of tribe, nation, and race. King understood that with that illusion in place, every form of evil is possible, and probably inevitable. Yet without that illusion – in the presence of the Truth of our equality, of the inherent worth of every person, and of our essential interconnection – all evil that man commits against man becomes absurd, pointless, impossible.
We are willing to demean, oppress, and kill an enemy – until we recognize he is literally a member of our family, loved by God and deserving of life and liberty.
Either we recognize our shared humanity and stop the endless cycle of hatred and violence, or we continue with the story of Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, white and black, Jew and Palestinian, self and other. It’s all of a piece, and we cannot celebrate Dr King’s life and work if we only celebrate the end of legal segregation in the United States, while ignoring, accepting, or justifying the deeper segregation that begins in the mind and ends in every act of violence of man against man.
King dreamed not just of integrated schools, buses, and lunch counters, but of an integrated Earth, where justice and peace are as present as the sun, moon and stars, every day, everywhere.
We can take a first step by recognizing what the good Reverend envisioned:
“Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time – the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality… I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land… And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid… I still believe that We Shall overcome! “
We’ve got a long way to go.