[Mb-civic] The dream and its enemies - James Carroll - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  The dream and its enemies

By James Carroll  |  January 16, 2006  |   The Boston Globe

AT THE Richmond Theater on King Street in Alexandria, Va., I was 
cheerfully ushered into American complacency. ''Colored people" could go 
to the movies there, but they had to sit in the balcony.

Segregation so defined the social order that a white child like me was 
as unlikely to question it as he was to ask about the color of the sky. 
If I did ask, I was certainly told, ''It's the way things are." Later 
someone explained to me that Fats Domino's ''My Blue Heaven" referred to 
the segregated mezzanines of movie houses, and when I hear that rocking 
lyric even now, I feel a cold blast of shame. If it had been up to me, 
or the people I knew, would America have changed?

This nation honors Martin Luther King Jr. today because of what he 
forced on it. Recognitions that followed his challenge have taken on the 
character of rock-solid truth. Segregation by race is deeply wrong, and 
the institutions of government that supported it were indefensible. 
King's work freed whites as well as blacks from the prison of an inhuman 
perception, but, in fact, few white people ever came to see things as he 
did.

The outright racism of white supremacists was only one of his enemies; 
almost equally infuriating to King was the complacency of the vast 
majority of Americans that allowed inequality to thrive.

That is the point of my memory of the Richmond theater, where I first 
learned the power of, ''It's the way things are." Segregation in public 
accommodations was no outrage to me, and even once I began to grasp its 
injustice, I was simply incapable of feeling the insult as blacks did. 
The complacency of whites consisted in that distance from the 
transcending personal affront that blacks experienced every day. 
Eventually, people like me were conscripted into the civil rights 
movement, and we were privileged to regard King as our leader, too. We 
rejoiced at the passage of laws that began to dismantle structures of 
discrimination.

But even then, King stood apart. As rage against legal barriers to 
equality drove him in the beginning, rage against unjust economic 
systems, and inbred cultural attitudes, moved him in his later years. 
The great Washington demonstration for Civil Rights where King spoke in 
1963 became, by 1968, the Poor Peoples March on Washington. At the 
first, King answered the question ''When will you be satisfied?" by 
calling for voting rights, the end of police brutality, and the removal 
of ''whites only" signs.

National complacency on such questions fell away, and a legal revolution 
occurred. But in preparing for the second demonstration nearly five 
years later, King called for nothing less than changes in the economic 
and social orders.

King would not be satisfied until reform had gone beyond the public 
reach of the law to the ways Americans made ''private" decisions about 
how they earned a living, what they did with their money, where they 
chose to live, whom they sought out as friends, what they wanted from love.

In truth, race was a defining line in all those realms, too, and if it 
was not confronted as such there, King knew, his dream would not be 
realized.

In honoring King today, America knows full well how far short the nation 
still falls of the vision he articulated. In the year that he died, a 
federal commission convened to examine the roots of urban riots declared 
that the United States was, in fact, two societies, separated by race. 
Nearly forty years later, that remains true, and it did not take 
Hurricane Katrina to show it. The effective segregation of schools is as 
stark as ever. Incarceration rates of African-American males are 
astronomical. Gunplay in cities overwhelmingly targets young people of 
color. An institutional triage writes off huge proportions of poor black 
youth. Among middle and upper classes, social interaction between the 
races is rare. Even as ''race" has been recognized as an artificial 
social construct at the service of a dominant class, it remains as much 
a marker of identity as ever.

Today we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr., but what would he say if he 
were here to accept the honor? In 1963, he decried all that had not 
happened in the hundred years since the end of slavery. It is nearly 
half that time again. Now, aiming the flamethrower of his rhetoric, King 
would surely scorch the complacency of a nation that still accommodates 
such injustice because, well, ''It's the way things are."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/16/the_dream_and_its_enemies/
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