This week brings us the first three day weekend of the year, and some thoughts on why this day has been set apart. While I cannot remember a time in my life when I and most of the people around me did not embrace the direction that Dr. King pointed us, I also admit to questioning the wisdom of adding yet another holiday to the calendar. That we should honor this man’s memory and his life’s work is beyond question, but at the time we first started getting the third Monday of January off from work, it spurred the question of whether this man was any more deserving of a “day” for his contributions than many others I could think of. Perhaps it was because it more or less coincided with when two holidays, Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays, got merged into Presidents Day. This shifting of focus from honoring individuals from whom we might learn much in the way of virtue to honoring an office was deeply troubling, un-American if you will. What would GW or AL have thought of it? It also tweaked one of the reflexes that a long life of toil has taught me, that your heroes will disappoint you. We are constantly reminded (most recently and vividly in the book Game Change:..., by Heilemann & Halperin, especially as it pertains to those human bed-lice Mr. & Mrs. Edwards) that there can be vast differences between the persona we meet and the person that has to be lived with. None of this seems to matter, though, as in just a meager few years MLK Day seems to have become as devoid of commemorative substance, and just another excuse for a three day weekend, as, say, Labor Day. Nonetheless, the good Dr. did struggle at a propitious moment to alter the course of History in a more charitable direction, and he left us with words of wisdom and inspiration. So as long as there is an MLK day, we ought to do more than just get a few more things done around the house because its a day off. We should consider the cause of justice and amity for which he gave his life, and ponder what he would make of what we have made of his legacy.
I was just shy of fourteen years old when Dr. King was struck down, and the words I most remember were the ones having to do with the dream that someday men might be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. I was just young enough absorb this without even a tinge of that cynicism that overtakes us as adults. It was possible (though not exactly easy, given the extent to which inter-racial violence was flowing in both directions in those turbulent days) to aspire to seeing this ideal come to pass in our lifetimes. Sadly, this does not seem to have been the case. A certain currency, or power, has accrued to “identity”, especially if that identity has attained the status of “oppressed”. Political advantage can be garnered by polarizing the electorate (swathed in that doublespeak that gives us “diversity”). Sensitivities seem, in some quarters anyway, as acute as ever, as a certain capacity to divine “hatred” and “insensitivity”, to take offense where none was intended and trump it up into psychological advantage, has become something of a high art form. One suspects that in his heart of hearts, this is not what Dr. King had in mind.
This issue of identity has been much on my mind since “America’s first African-American President” became tangible reality. The fact that the man who achieved this distinction is actually of mixed race stirs up the somewhat perennial question, in my fevered little mind anyway, of what makes us who we are. It’s an updated consideration of the age-old “nature versus nurture” debate. I approach this question acknowledging that a genuinely post-racial future was among the more powerful ideals in play during my formative years. Having gotten a degree in psychology and then spent the next forty or so years studying human nature, I understand this matter of identity, in this case racial, to have many components. There is genetic heredity, which determines, albeit variously among individuals, the exterior features by which everyone including strangers might identify us, as well as what we see in the mirror. This might easily trump all the others, but it need not be so. There is also what I call virtual heredity, which amounts to the people who nurture us (or fail to) in our years of early dependency, and from whom we take our earliest and perhaps most formative cues. Similarly, but perhaps not quite as powerful, would be those relational factors that are in place as we enter out into the world (go to school), as we reach that age (more or less coincident with puberty) where we attain capacity for abstract thought, and during that vulnerable time when we “leave the nest” and have a go at finding our place in the world of grown-ups (or hang out in college for the better part of a decade listening to people who never quite grew up). Many would argue that these “environmental” factors, who we take our cues from at various junctures in our formation, are more important than what our DNA would determine. A final factor, one that comes into play where the others are in any kind of conflict, would take the will into account. Individuals are free, indeed encouraged it would seem (insofar as radical autonomy seems to be one of the reigning spirits of the age), to choose identifiers for themselves if there is room for doubt.
Viewed in this light, the reader might be able to discern my thoughts on the matter of our “first African-American President”. A case could be made that he is only 50% of the way there genetically. With the “nurture” factors, the balance most decidedly tips “white”. Indeed, as far as “environment” between the ages of about ten and 25 (the age I was discharged from the Marine Corps), our “first A-A President” is whiter than I am (I certainly interacted with more black people more intimately and intensely than he did.) However, this is little more than the sort of reverie wherein gentleman once went round and round debating “nature v. nurture”. His influences may have been 100% upper-middle class, prep school, etc., but what he saw in the mirror every day and the choice he embraced trump all that. The real question is not about “authenticity” so much as to why “identity” seems so important. We can wish that we could get past all that, to move on where cultural affect lingers on and is mutually celebrated but is less important than “the content of his character”, but it seems that identity as presently defined is just too useful to those whose lives are about grasping and maintaining power.
The other thought I have nurtured respecting Dr. King’s legacy pertains to slavery. His time was about eradicating its legacy in our country, mopping up the residual stains from an age-old injustice whose banishment was a couple of centuries in the making. That era of “Civil Rights” spurred tremendous progress. Having lived in all four corners of the U.S., and for the last five here in Texas (as well as a life's work that included inquisitive visits to all but five or so States), I am convinced that while racism in the sense of our fleshly predisposition to favor those we are familiar with at the expense of “others” will never go away, its malignant, genuinely hateful version is increasingly rare. It can be found by turning over a rock in just about every single Zip Code in the country, though probably more in some of the ones that start with “1” than in most of the ones that start with “7”. In the South, where the tendency to racism mingled with the resentments of having been invaded and then economically exploited by a seemingly foreign power, it can still be found if one looks for it, but the same can be said of Brooklyn and Boston. It’s hard to believe that not so long ago, hatred was the everyday fact of life its been made out to be. Blatant bigotry is seared into memory, but I wonder if it was the rule rather than the exception, if a plurality among those living in past generations were uncomfortable with a manifestly unfair social order but at a loss as to what to do about it.
As we contemplate those who struggled against the residual injustices emanating from the aftermath of institutionalized slavery, we should be reminded that not every ideology looks at slavery as injustice. For most of the Twentieth Century, we struggled against an ideology wherein all but a privileged vanguard might be reduced to the status of slaves to a dubious “greater good”. That struggle ended, to be replaced by a flare-up of a much more enduring competition. Among the things that divide us from our adversaries in what has been an on-again, off-again 1300+ year struggle with this competing belief system is this matter of slavery. We pat ourselves on the back and honor the heros in the struggle to banish it, from William Wilberforce forward, but it has not been banished from the earth. Those whose efforts to export that belief system were halted at Vienna and Lepanto and countless other bloody dirt patches were somewhat more successful in exporting this injustice. For centuries, coastal villages as far north as Ireland were at risk of being de-peopled by raiders who would peddle their wares back home on the southern coast of the Mediterranean. The West was attuned to moral sensibility and eventually, fitfully and even bloodily rejected the grave injustice of slavery. The same cannot be said where Islam is law. Considering how the Dream of which Dr. King spoke in challenging us to a better tomorrow extended to all, we have to wonder what he would make of our apparent indifference to this lingering injustice.
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