LUDIC LOG

Today would be Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 75th birthday. How would he have spend the day, if he hadn't been erased by a pointless assassination in the insane and beautiful year of 1968? Well, if he wasn't dead, he'd at least have been spared the site of George W. Bush, representing that portion of the citizenry who have done all they can to eradicate Dr. King's legacy of civil rights, dotting the 'i' in 'hypocrisy' by laying a wreath on his grave. Maybe he'd listen to a four-hour-long musical celebration of his life and work on National Public Radio and wonder why, with every other black musical artform of the last 100 years represented, they couldn't find a single hip-hop or rap song to play. Or maybe that's just me. Most likely he'd look at the progress that his people have made in the country of his birth, how far the black American has come since he began his lonely work.

I tend to be extremely distrustful of "how far we've come" statements. Aside from the obvious -- that the important thing is never how far we've come, but how far we have to go -- they tend to be made by people who want to argue that we've achieved our goals of racial equality, that the dreams of black America are no longer deferred, that racism isn't really a problem any more (except perhaps for that ever-present and alliterative monstrosity 'reverse racism'). And yet, it is certain that Dr. King would find much to please him in 2004. Most obviously, the Jim Crow laws have been demolished, and separate-but-equal is a phrase from our ugly past. Blacks are no longer impeded from voting, and the language of civil rights are a part of our everyday vocabulary. The model perfect by Martin Luther King, Jr. has been extended to other oppressed minorities, including women and homosexuals. The cultural climate in America has changed inordinately for the better -- naked and open displays of racism are rare, and when they appear, they are almost universally and immediately condemned; flagrant race-prejudice of the type so common in his day is now considered abberational. And, perhaps most importantly of all, Dr. King's famous quote that while the law can not make white men love him, it can keep them from lynching him, was blissfully prescient. The trees of the south are no longer dotted with the fruits of racist slaughter.

So isn't all that worth being happy about? Sure it is. But it would be a lot more worth celebrating if every item I listed above didn't come with an asterisk attached.

Segregation is gone, but with it has come society-wide neglect and inequality. Separate-but-equal may be gone, but in terms of employment, education and living conditions, blacks encounter something far worse today: still separate, but no longer equal. The franchise has been expanded de jure to include all blacks, but the systematic imprisonment of huge percentages of the African-American population and the sort of vile chicanery practiced by the G.O.P. (most recently in, but my no means restricted to, the 2000 presidential election, where intimidation and disinformation directed at black voters may have spelled the difference in who won the White House) means that, de facto, the number of blacks who can vote is still pretty small. While everyone speaks the language of civil rights, it has become a battleground for an unseemly competition between the selfish and the resentful -- and meanwhile, the administration in power raises barely an eyebrow while they engage in an unprecedented assault on the very legal foundations that make all civil rights possible. The extension of human rights has been a godsend for minorities here at home, yes; but wealthy whites -- certainly the most priveleged group in the history of humanity -- engineer a backlash against minorities in the U.S., while America's "best friend" in the middle east practices a form of apartheid precisely comparable to the living conditions of blacks in the pre-civil rights south. Open racism is rare (though by no means vanished), but covert racism is omnipresent. And the corpses of black men no longer swing from southern pines; they lie in ghettos and gutters all over the country, and languish in jails in numbers Dr. King could not have imagined.

I was born half-Arab to a white family in working-class suburbia. There is simply no way that I can possibly imagine the life of an African-American today, let alone in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s day. He was a truly remarkable man, one of my heroes (and I haven't got many) despite a number of philosophical differences with his teachings. Hearing his oratory fills me with powerful emotion as well as engaging me utterly on an intellectual level -- an exceedingly rare trick to pull off. Reading about his determination and bravery, as well as the astonishing courage that Rosa Parks displayed by the simple act of sitting down, literally makes me tear up. And it is because of their incredible sacrifice and persistence that we have come so far -- and that we must continue to go further.

We have had what may be termed legitimate universal civil rights in America for forty years. Forty years. That's nothing. It's an eyeblink, half a lifetime. Forty years we have given ourselves to rectify ten times that many years of institutional racism. You cannot erase the damage done over nearly half a millennium in four decades, and yet there are many voices -- many, if not most, voices of authority -- telling us to give up. We have gone far enough, these voices say, perhaps too far. We must eliminate affirmative action, as if centuries of oppression need not be compensated for. The government should stay out of the race business, they say, arguing that racial justice is a private affair and conveniently ignoring the enormous role that government had in racial injustice. Blacks must take most, if not all, of the responsibility for their current state (a similar argument is made about black Africans in former colonial holdings) -- just as if they are not the product of centuries of ill-treatment, or, even if they were, at the very least they've had forty whole years to get better, so they've got no cause to whine. Racial preferencing is wrong, say these voices, at least when the beneficiary isn't white. And most of all, everything will be made better by the private sector -- this despite the market's rather poor track record of treating the problems of race in the past. These voices patronize and parody legitimate dialogue about racial justice; they celebrate the work of Dr. King by selectively quoting him and completely ignoring his arguments about econimic equality. They find no pressing need to address the issues of income disparity, of widespread disenfranchisement, or of our nation's collective denial of what we did to our blacks, and before them, our Indians; but they think it of vital importance to roll back almost all the progress made in the arena of equality, from college admissions to educational funding. And they chip away at the very basis of freedom under the guise of protecting us.

If we are to truly honor Martin Luther King, Jr., we must be ever-aware of how much their is to do. And we must above all not remain quiet when we see our civil rights being eroded. We must never forsake freedom for safety, a choice which will lead to our losing both. We should shout loudly, to anyone who will listen, when even the slightest suggestion of a return to the bad old days shows up, and never make the mistake that it will always be the Other who suffers and never ourselves. Now is a good time to remember his words from 1967's The Trumpet of Conscience: "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."