Honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.

Okay, so I wimped out on participating in Denver's annual MLK Day Marade ("march" + "parade," because there's still work to be done, but there's much to celebrate as well). In my defense, it was 12 degrees (Fahrenheit) and snowing when I would have had to leave in the morning. I know, civil rights and freedom shouldn't be fair-weather activities.

At any rate, I've enjoyed reading and hearing the various sermons, speeches, and letters of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., being shared and talked about this weekend. In particular, Sarah Vowell has a nice column in the New York Times that includes this snippet:

Here’s what Dr. King got out of the Sermon on the Mount. On Nov. 17, 1957, in Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the “loving your enemies” sermon this way: “So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all of my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you: ‘I love you. I would rather die than hate you.’ ”

Go ahead and re-read that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”

Her main point, contrasting MLK with President Ronald Reagan, is a bit lost on me since I didn't live in the States during Reagan's time in office (plus I was a kid, and not very politically aware), but I found her description of herself as a "culturally Christian atheist" intriguing.

I am also intrigued by how little attention race gets in the media these days - direct attention, anyway, and within the limited "mainstream" media that I choose to tune in to. (A recent report on NPR noted how little mention there has been of race in the presidential campaigns, which I find an interesting contrast to the many ways in which Senator Clinton's gender is subtly - and sometimes not-so-subtly - brought into play. Of course, this could well be my own bias in noticing media bias.) Maybe I'm just not paying attention, but my impression is that white people think we've come a long way and we're doing well in terms of racial/ethnic equality in the U.S., and it's not an issue any more. Conversations I've had with people of color, and the xenophobic overtones of the current immigration debate, suggest that this is a case of denial. And denial, of course, is a common symptom of white privilege, which has the luxury of ignorance wrapped in a cloak of invisibility to those who are advantaged by having pale skin and speaking English in one of several accepted regional (US) dialects, not with the inflections of someone who learned a different language first.

Disorganized rambling aside, I hope that more and more people will look to Dr. King's legacy of nonviolent action for justice and social change as they consider how our nation can continue to grow as a community and as a leader in the world. That's worth a day off to think about.