50 years in from the delivery of Brother Martin’s historic Dream and we’re still trying to get it right. Everybody claims they know how Brother Martin would feel if he could only see us today, that he would shake his head and declaim “No, not there yet. But we have made important strides.”
But can we agree on why we’re not there yet?
Brother Martin - the singular Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. - dreamt aloud of a Table of Brotherhood, where men, women, boys and girls of all cultures sit as equals. But in society at large that’s about as close to being true as Donald Trump is to being charismatic. Here’s the most shocking part: liberals are just as culpable as conservatives in keeping the Dream at a far remove.... if not moreso, since they pretend the opposite.
Imagine this social snapshot at your dinner table. You’re White as rice, surrounded by your friends and colleagues, all having a delightful time. Then one of them says it: that wonderful word that polarizes society. The one we can’t write or speak in mixed company without presuming we’re all 5-year-olds incapable of spelling. This causes uproarious laughter from a third of your guests, who give in kind. Though you blush crimson, you and the other two-thirds are highly entertained. Then a daring soul among you decides to join in the fun and utilize the word himself - that’s right, a white guy, your buddy, who cracks a grin and offers a “nigger please!” - invoking brotherhood in a clear effort to join the fray. But this brings the same people who laughed at the same jokes two seconds earlier to turn on the hapless loner with bitter invective. Kind and fraternal, to mean and spiteful in two seconds flat. You then join the chorus, and ask him to leave your table.
Charming.
How did we get to be so patronizing towards other cultures? Tell me what me this has to do with equality and unbiased brotherhood. Tell me why there are huge sections of this country who bask in this patronizing sycophancy. No wonder there are so many Blacks and Latinos who join the Republican party. Those who do have cahones the size of Texas, ‘cause both parties are disgraceful when it comes to those mislabeled “race” issues. But if the Democrats think someone should be a member of their club and that someone elects not to join, the Dems close ranks and ostracize, belittle and condemn. Can’t a brother get a break?
Just today CNN.com ran a homepage story on the use of the dreaded “N-word” - with video. We all hear the word in our minds when the media describes it, or worse, when they bleep it out, knowing full well we can’t censor our own thoughts. We laugh at the routines by the “right” comedians who use the word and who knows? You all probably rap along to the word when you’re driving alone in your cars. Every act of alleged bigotry is captured in detail, with the bleeps and asterisks dutifully applied by our watchdog media. Grown adults, even professional pundits and politicians, are saying “the N-word” instead of the word itself. .... and euphemizing any word that anyone can find offensive. We’re allowed to say and write and listen to these words as long as they’re bleeped out in some form, but we all know what these words are! In the 21st century, this is what passes for professional, mature behavior.
This political theater is misleading. My friends and family, and the musicians I follow, are of all colors and some reside in hardscrabble neighborhoods. Where are all these liberal champions when I go visiting there? When I attend the annual West Oak Lane Festival, why can I count the White folks in attendance on my fingers? There are hoards of brow-beaters who cry foul when anyone dares to step out of line, but they won’t step outside their lilly-white comfort zones. Those comfort zones are filled with diverse populations who have allowed themselves to be assimilated into the larger Anglo-European-based American culture. If you don’t fit into that zone, they’ll champion you in the media. But believe me, they won’t give you any face time. They won’t come to visit.
The inconsistency is astounding. The hypocrisy is stupefying.
We should have blown the whistle on the fiction of “race” long ago. There is no “race” except the human one; pick up a book on anthropology and you’ll see. Race and borders are political constructs, designed to separate us from them. Our self-appointed moral guardians are exactly what they purport not to be. Concerned not so much with human rights as they are with the larger target of political statements, which offers higher dividends.
Used to be America was the physical bully in this world, that our mighty might made right. But now we are sanctimonious to beat the band. Now we bully with our bully pulpit, claiming the moral high ground again and again.
Take Fox’s new sitcom Dads, torn asunder for alleged racism, yet they use the same jokes found in Family Guy, The Simpsons (who always do it first) and Community. Legions of professional critics who feel it’s not enough to simply review a show, declare that “racism” is okay only when it’s animated, or spoken by Chevy Chase. Could you imagine using that same argument at work? “Sure boss, I know what he said sounded like he was dissing your daughter’s sexual habits, but c’mon - he’s a cartoon” Critics even condemned Dad’s writers for giving a Latina maid an “offensive accent” - obviously, they know no Latinas. I wonder how Rosie Perez and Sofia Vergara will react when they learn they’re nothing but backwood, minstrel hicks..... What about the actors in these shows? Are they collaborators or just plain stoopid? Maybe our moral guardians think the actors are hapless victims. Cue the chaste white man running to their rescue.....
Patronizing, belittling, horrid behavior. And we commemorate this as a tribute to Doctor King?
We lampoon Germans and French and Russians and their “offensive accents” on stage and screen; why isn’t that wrong? Why do the critics who decry Dads laugh at French jokes? And tell me what’s wrong with laughter, for God’s sake? Don’t we know the difference between mean-spirited and whimsical? There is real racism in this world! How dare we waste resources and feelings by bullying genteel people into submission?
Remember when John Lennon lamented how the powers-that-be keep us “doped on religion and sex and TV,” in his song Working Class Hero? So what’s changed? Seems to me we’re still getting worked up over nothing. Those with power manipulate us until we are one with them, thinking that we have changed them when in reality they have changed us. Substitute “morality, violence, sex and TV” in that line - society’s latest indispensable balms (don’t worry, it fits the rhythm) - and well, you do remember the words that come next, don’t you? We have become what we had rallied against.
This is not why we marched. I was born a year after Brother Martin enunciated his Dream, but I’ve been busy ever since. And I am friends with many who were in Washington that day. So I can tell you this: this is not what we fought for. We struggled for equality, for the right to address each other as persons sharing the same soil, the same neighborhood, the same country and planet. We fought to meet eye-to-eye, to clasp hands with mutual respect. I should know how to do this because my own family lines are blurred: African, North American and European - or Black, Red and White. I’m a child of the world, a living template of eastern United States citizenry, so I do know: We are equal. As my Cherokee side makes clear: we are Si-da-ne-lv-hi. Family. One.
As Dr. King testified our job is to create a new reality, devoid of the manipulations. I’m still waiting for us to pay heed. We have achieved much in the last 50 years: more opportunity at work and at play and in the arts, in housing and banking and relationships. I dated interracially in the 70s and I remember well the icy stares, the lack of service at restaurants. In many ways, we have overcome. But until we can see each other as equals and not political bullet points, the truth is we have turned our backs on Brother Martin and indulged in yet another of the American stereotypes the rest of the world is keenly tuned into: our collective short attention span.
We must celebrate all that we are, and can be. We must learn to not only laugh at ourselves but at the grand, multi-hued fabric of society. We must be aware and courageous enough to dialogue, to embrace our differences and similarities. Profound change is yet to happen. It takes much more work, mountains of courage and diligence. I know we are capable of getting there. But we must be honest about what has gone before and what still needs to be done.
If you want to be a hero, then just follow me: Be color blinded, but culturally minded. Only then can you claim ownership of stoking the Dream.
