[Vision2020] King's Genius Went Beyond Race

[Tom Hansen]

>From today's (January 16, 2006) Spokesman Review with a special thanks to
Leonard Pitts Jr. of the Miami Herald -

 

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King's genius went beyond race 

Leonard Pitts Jr. 

Miami Herald

January 16, 2006

 

The barber leaned close so the white folks couldn't hear.

 

How are you adjusting to the culture shock, he asked. Takes some getting
used to, I replied.

 

We were two black men in a place - the Appalachian foothills where Ohio
abuts West Virginia - that is home to very few people like us. But the
culture shock he spoke of wasn't about race so much as economics. It's a
strange thing he said, still leaning close, to see white people, poor.

 

It is strange, indeed.

 

Not that I didn't know there are white poor. To the contrary, I knew that
while poverty on a percentage basis is far greater among blacks than whites,
there are, in terms of raw numbers, more poor whites than poor anybody. And
this region, where I will be teaching journalism until June, is among the
poorest and whitest in the country.

 

Still, it's one thing to read statistics and quite another to see with your
eyes. But my sojourn here makes seeing inevitable. And I find myself
fascinated by how markers of poverty can be simultaneously so familiar and
yet so unknown: the unmarried teenage dropout soon to be a mother; the
service worker missing teeth; the uneducated woman dying of emphysema,
sneaking a smoke in her hospital bed; the rough man who lives between
scrapes with the law; the young guy buying a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor
before noon. All white.

 

We are so comfortable thinking of people like them as archetypes of black
dysfunction. It's jarring to be reminded that they are in fact archetypes of
dysfunction, period, and that dysfunction, no matter its color, should
trouble us all.

 

Martin Luther King understood this. Which is one of the things we understand
least about him.

 

Today is the 20th King Day. It brings the 20th round of interfaith prayer
breakfasts, recitations of "I Have A Dream," assessments of progress toward
racial equity and the lack thereof. I suspect there won't be much discussion
of white poverty.

 

This is not a surprise. We like our heroes and their heroism simple,
unencumbered by that which doesn't fit neatly into a box. We like our
commemorations simpler still, a self-congratulatory excuse for a three-day
weekend or a used-car sale.

 

But the man who said, "I have a dream" also said, "All life is interrelated"
and came to believe his mission as a moral leader encompassed more than
race. Encompassed, among other things, class.

 

It is instructive to remember that in his last days, King was planning what
he called the Poor People's Campaign, a multiethnic march on Washington to
demand action against poverty. "At Canan's Edge," the final chapter of
Taylor Branch's epic retelling of the civil rights years, recounts a summit
meeting a few weeks before King's assassination. Chicano farm workers,
American Indians from the Plains and white coal miners from Appalachia, sat
with King to explore the revolutionary idea that their peoples might have
causes and grievances in common.

 

Then King went to Memphis. And the idea has not been meaningfully explored
since.

 

Neglect has made it no less tantalizing.

 

Yes, race matters. Most of us know this. But the genius of Martin Luther
King in his final days was to understand that there are paradigms beyond
race and that they matter, too.

 

So today, as we are exhorted to seek paths of racial amity, one hopes we
will also be exhorted to understand, as King did, that conscience has no
color, that race is not destiny, that injustice anywhere threatens justice
everywhere.

 

There are among us children who sleep in hunger, rise in cold, live in
ignorance, and they are of every color and every tribe. We ought not find
their suffering easier to accept because they are not like us. Ought to
realize that the dignity of all is the concern of all.

 

That, too, was Martin's dream.

 

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Take care, Moscow.

 

Tom Hansen

Moscow, Idaho

 

"If not us, who?
If not now, when?"

- Unknown

 

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