On The Day We Celebrate King's Birthday, What Would He Think of Racial America Today?

Since the Rev. Martin Luther King's actual birthday last week (born January 15th, 1929), I find myself wondering what the man who became this nation's most famed civil rights activist and left us with passionate legacies such as his "I Have A Dream" speech would think about the state of this nation had he not been gunned down in April 1968, just two months before Bobby Kennedy who just might have won the 1968 presidential race.

It was no secret to King that he was watched, recorded, and routinely villified by everyone from an FBI where J. Edgar Hoover was still in charge and treating the agency like his personal vengeance machine to a media that, at "best", did not want to infuriate paying white audiences by denouncing claims that King was only "in it" for himself. And, taken from us still so young, we can only guess what MLK really felt were the chances to fully break the color barriers and recreate an America that did not divide itself by race, color, creed, or religion.

In my musings, I can't seem to escape the conclusion that Dr. King would be profoundly disappointed that a fight for which he gave his life, although things HAVE changed, has really not resolved itself in the four decades since his assassination. We pretend race is no longer the big controversy it once was, yet we let our law inforcement organizations engage in racial profiling, let courts pretend crimes committed by people of color really ARE deserving of harsher punishment than those committed by whiter people with money. We sit back, albeit uncomfortably, while pundits have just moved the angry stereotyping of blacks to those we label "law breaking illegal immigrants" to whom we attach some of the same awful rhetoric: lazy, welfare cheats, people who "deliberately" grow large families to qualify them for additional public assistance and people who demand special treatment to get into good schools and jobs rather than "work as hard as whites" do.

I also believe Dr. King would be just about as incensed as many of us are that people insist "Obama isn't black enough", that he's the first black candidate for president (forgetting Frederick Douglass, Carol Mosely Braun, Shirley Chisholm, and yes, even Jesse Jackson to name a few), and that he can "only win IF" other people of color just "blindly" vote for him to promote their own race (like whites haven't done this).

While I would dearly love to think that MLK would have more reasons to be dutifully proud of "how far we've come" than not, this is the kind of wishful thinking we usually only allow white Southern Christian candidates and would be no more true coming from King than it does from them. At the same time, I can't help but think about how many - including a few of the tighty righty GOP presidential contenders out there today - griped when it was enacted and continue to resent it that King's birthday was made into a national holiday.

Votes That Don't Count

If you think that just hoping the 2008 presidential election will bring about fair and accurate voting results - and the novelty that the person the actual majority of voters cast ballots for actually will become president, something we did not do in 2000 and 2004 which handed us the fascist regime of Bush & Cheney - you've been supplementing your diet with Konservative Koolaid. Stand up and reverse this foolish and felonious delay for verified voting reform!

And while you're at it, take a gander at this sickening development:

A federal court ruling in June that forces voters to register by party could return Mississippi to the days of racially polarized politics, as many white Democrats warn that thousands of white voters will now opt definitively for the Republican Party.

Republican-leaning voters in Mississippi have long been able to cross party lines in primaries, voting for centrist Democrats in state and local races while staying loyal to Republican candidates in national races. But political experts here say that by limiting these voters — almost all of whom are white — to Republican primaries, the ruling will push centrist Democratic candidates to the other party, simply in order to survive.

An Aside: "But He Didn't Look Black!"

The Times' obit article on Steve Gilliard I referenced earlier has a bit near the bottom that I was rather surprised to read: specifically, that almost no one knew he was black/African American.

Uh, I've been working online since '87, long before the Internet was available to almost everyone, and even before the subscription-only online services (then CompuServe, AOL which started its life as an Apple service, GEnie, Delphi, and Prodigy) became big deals. Although others seem to engage in the practice, I don't think I've ever been able to distinguish caucasian v. negroid v. Asian, etc. in text alone.

What I have seen - but thankfully, I've usually successfully avoided - is that people can make such assumptions about others online that, once they actually meet someone face-to-face, they seem to suffer culture shock.

I've always seen online as the great equalizer (except that many poorer or less technology-minded people often miss out) in which you can work and play very effectively without getting hung up by issues of race, ability vs. "dis"ability, gender, creed, sexual orientation, religion, along with a host of others. In these twenty some years, I've met some truly extraordinary people who, without I believe any exception (oops, wait, there was ONE ---eeeeeh!) have never disappointed me once I got to meet them.

Today, we're incredibly fortunate with the great diversity of people who blog or otherwise maintance a regular Web-based presence. What was so extraordinary about Steve isn't that he was black (anymore than I would like to be remembered as only caucasian/WASP), but his commitment to dessimination of important information to the public.

Elsewhere, someone took the politically correct route by calling Steve a "person of color". Yes, he was a person of color, but I believe that to call him a person of conscience is far more apt.