Geov Parrish | We Could Each Be Dr. King
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A Dream Dismantled [
We Could Each Be Dr. King
By Geov Parrish
Working for Change
Friday 13 January 2006
Real story of Dr. King could inspire action; instead, we hear feel-good whitewash.
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King, the man, was, along with Mohandas Gandhi, one of the two most internationally revered symbols of nonviolence in the 20th century. He spent his too-brief adult life defying authority and convention, citing a higher moral authority, and gave hope and inspiration for the liberation of people of color on six continents. MLK Day, the holiday, has devolved into the Mississippi Burning of third Mondays. What started out as gratitude, that they made a movie about it, gradually becomes revulsion at how new generations of Euro-Americans mislearn the story.
King is not a legend because he believed in diversity trainings and civic ceremonies, or because he had a nice dream. He is remembered because he took serious risks and, as the Quakers say, spoke truth to power. King is also remembered because, among a number of brave and committed civil rights leaders and activists, he had a flair for self-promotion, a style that also appealed to white liberals, and the extraordinary social strength of the black Southern churches behind him. And because he died before he had a chance to be widely believed a relic or buffoon.
What little history TV will give us in the next few days is at least as much about forgetting as about remembering, as much about self-congratulatory patriotism that King was American as self-examination that American racism made him necessary and that government, at every level, sought to destroy him. We hear "I have a dream"; we don't hear his powerful indictments of poverty, the Vietnam War, and the military-industrial complex. We see Bull Connor in Birmingham; we don't see arrests for fighting segregated housing in Chicago, or the years of beatings and busts before he won the Nobel Peace Prize. We don't hear about the mainstream American contempt at the time for King, even after that Peace Prize, nor the FBI harassment or his reputation among conservatives as a Commie dupe.
We don't see retrospectives on King's linkage of civil rights with Third World liberation. We forget that he died in Memphis lending support for a union (the garbage workers' strike), while organizing a multi-racial Poor Peoples' Campaign that demanded affordable housing and decent-paying jobs as basic civil rights transcending skin color. We forget that many of King's fellow leaders weren't nearly so polite. Cities were burning. We remember Selma instead.
And we forget that of those many dreams King had, only one - equal access for non-whites - is significantly realized today. A half-century after the Montgomery bus boycott catapulted a 26-year-old King into prominence, even that is only partly achieved. Blacks are being systematically disenfranchised in our presidential elections, and affirmative action and school desegregation are all but dead. Urban school districts across the country these days are as segregated and unequal as ever, and the imminent confirmation of Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court likely heralds a new era where employers and landlords can discriminate with near-impunity.
But an even bigger problem, as a generation dies off and the historical memory fades, is that Dr. King has become an icon, not a historical figure (distorted or otherwise). History requires context; icons don't. The racism King challenged four and five decades ago in Georgia and Alabama was also dominant throughout the country. Here in Seattle, few whites know that history: the housing and school segregation, laws barring Asians from owning land (overturned only in the '60s), the marches downtown from predominantly black Garfield High School, police harassment of both radical and mainstream black activists, the still-unsolved assassination of a local NAACP leader.
Every city in America has such histories. We don't know the stories of the people, many still with us, who led those struggles. And we rarely acknowledge that the overt racism of Montgomery 1955 is no longer so overt, but still part of America 2006. It shows up in our geography, in our jails, in our schools, in our voting booths, in our shelters and food banks, in our economy, and in the very earnest and extremely white activist groups that often carry the banner on these issues.
If our cities were serious about his legacy, Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. would run through downtowns, and there would be MLK Elementary Schools in the suburbs. Instead, in just about every big city in the U.S., school districts and city councils put King back in the ghetto, along with both the legions of people who worked with him and the many more who've taken up his work since.
Opponents of affirmative action and racial equality can claim King's mantle and "if he were alive today" approval only because in 2006, pop culture's MLK has no politics. And, for that matter, no faith. For white America, King's soft-focus image often reinforces white supremacism. "See? We're not so bad. We honor him now. Why don't those black people just get over it, anyway? We did."
All that is a lie. Dr. King's vision is today as urgent as ever. While Jim Crow and the cruelties of overt segregation are now largely unimaginable, much remains to be done. And for those who carry King's banner, the challenges of apathy and official hostility remain the same: the FBI and NSA spying on peace groups, listening to phone calls, monitoring e-mails. An administration - voted for by almost no African-Americans - that reviles nonviolence and labels its critics as treasonous (rather than as communist dupes). And the moral outrage of Americans, that made King's work so politically effective? We don't do that any more. We can torture thousands of mostly innocent Iraqis and Afghans, in plain sight, and nobody is held accountable. It'd take a whole lot more than Bull Connor's police dogs to make the news today.
The saddest loss in the modern narrative of Dr. King's career is the story of who he was: a man without wealth, without elected office, who managed as a single individual to change the world simply through the strength of his moral convictions. His power came from his faith, and his willingness to act on what he knew to be right. That story could inspire many millions to similar action - if only it were told. We could each be Dr. King.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., nonviolent martyr to reconciliation and justice, has become a Hallmark Card, a warm, fuzzy, feel-good invocation of neighborliness, a file photo for sneakers or soda commercials, a reprieve for post-holiday shoppers, an excuse for a three-day weekend, a cardboard cutout used for photo ops by dissembling Cabinet members and ungrateful Supreme Court justices. Be sure to check out the Three-Day-Only White Sale at WalMart. Always lower prices. Always.
King deserves better. We all do.
A Dream Dismantled
By Kathryn Casa
The Vermont Guardian
Friday 13 January 2006
Self-styled rule changes could blinder US Civil Rights Commission.
Hurricane Katrina stripped the cheap veneer from the notion that racism is a thing of the past, yet in its wake the venerable U.S. Commission on Civil Rights stands poised to eviscerate the advisory panels that act as its eyes and ears in the states.
The Republican-dominated commission, once described as the "conscience of the nation," is not threatening to eliminate itself. Instead, rule changes would remove the advisory status of some of the country's top civil rights activists and could lead to fewer minority members on the 51 state advisory committees (SACs).
"With the proposed SAC membership rule changes, the commission majority is well on its way to dragging 'the eyes and ears of the commission' into its hermetically sealed ideological chamber," wrote New Hampshire SAC Chairman Andrew Stewart in comments on the proposed change. "This will only guarantee that the commission will be increasingly isolated from the populations it was created to protect."
Although the rule change process is nearing its end, staff members in Washington told the Vermont Guardian they did not know how many SAC members nationwide would be eliminated, as that information is still being collected.
However, the Guardian has learned that in the nine-state western region alone, 78 of the 125 SAC members, including all nine chairmen, would be termed out by the rule changes.
Vermont is one of only 13 states with an active advisory committee and a current charter. But under the proposed rules, two-thirds of the state's 14-member committee, including longtime civil rights activist and former Gov. Phil Hoff, two former state attorneys general, and respected African American activist John Tucker, would be termed out.
Traditionally, the SACs have kept tabs on what's happening in the states, advising the national commission and writing reports on everything from racism in schools to disparities in health care to voting rights, the very issue out of which the commission grew under President Eisenhower in 1957.
The commission, in turn, reports to Congress and the president. While the SACs and the commission itself have only advisory powers, the work of the panels' hearings and studies is directly reflected in federal Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. The last report issued by the Vermont SAC, in 2003, documented the pervasiveness of racism in the state's public schools and led to anti-harassment legislation. But, without a budget to meet and follow up on these findings, more work has been left untouched.
At the state level, "we don't have a large budget, but we get things done sometimes because members know governors and members of congressional delegations on a personal level," said one regional staff member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
But proposed federal changes in SAC membership - including 10-year term limits and elimination of the requirement that the committees must reflect the ethnic, racial, and religious communities within each state - threaten to eliminate those contacts and institutional memories as the SACs lose some of the nation's oldest and staunchest advocates of civil rights.
"The main issue in terms of the changes is to eliminate those who have been involved with civil rights for any length of time," said Earl Mitchell, the Oklahoma Sate University biochemistry professor who chairs the Oklahoma committee and has served since 1968. "Those who have been involved with civil rights have a very clear concern about what the issues are."
A Question of Diversity
In a 2003 column for Yes! magazine entitled "Visualize a Fair Election in 2004," journalists Greg Palast and Ina Howard observed, "Most of us have become lazy about civil rights. But the old lions of the '60s marches have remained vigilant. The road they have traveled is long and the sacrifices too many to let down their guard."
Mitchell, who is 67, says he would happily see younger committee members pick up the civil rights mantle, but at the same time, he dislikes being pushed out, especially when there is so much work to be done, and he feels that he still has much to offer.
The proposed rule changes seek to encourage a "broadly diverse" membership, drawing volunteers "knowledgeable of the state's governmental machinery and public service sector" and those from "influential sectors."
Currently, each SAC must have a minority composition of no less than 40 percent and no more than 65 percent. Commission Staff Director Kenneth Marcus told the Nashua [NH] Telegraph in June that that constitutes an unfair cap in many regions.
"What is clear is that in the current commission majority's civil rights hall of mirrors, the term 'diversity' has come to be code for ideological control of the SAC research and investigative process and of the resulting reports," wrote Stewart in comments broadly endorsed by his colleagues around the country, including Vermont's SAC chairman, Eric Sakai.
"I think the real impact of this, without a doubt, is that it would make it very difficult to have an active advisory committee," said Sakai. "It's not easy to find volunteers to put the work into participating productively in an advisory committee."
Despite its charter, Vermont's committee has not met since 2003, Sakai said. SACs are not authorized to meet without the presence of a regional staff analyst, but budget cuts and a travel freeze have sharply curtailed the ability of a handful of regional staff members to meet the needs of the state committees.
Marcus, a Bush appointee and former Education Department colleague of commission Chairman Gerald Reynolds, took the helm in mid-2004, promising significant reform after the General Accounting Office cited mismanagement, projects that took years to complete, undocumented spending, and murky policies at the commission.
In March, Marcus told a congressional subcommittee the GAO report was "a wake-up call for this agency that we must implement substantial change and reform in order to meet our fiscal responsibilities and to restore public trust and confidence in us as the 'conscience of the nation' on civil rights."
Targeting a $135,000 deficit in the commission's $9 million budget, which had been unchanged for a decade, the commissioners voted to close two of six regional offices and cut staff. The work was folded into the remaining four offices in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, where the eastern division now has one staff analyst to support 13 states including Vermont and the District of Columbia.
In Vermont, that means SAC plans to investigate the status of the civil rights of immigrants after 9/11, and how race, language, and other barriers affect services for the state's burgeoning immigrant population, have been stymied.
"Our SAC has been basically rendered pretty ineffectual by the fact that we have not been able to meet face to face with our staff analyst, who hasn't been authorized to make a single trip out to Vermont," said Sakai. The SAC members will continue to meet - at their own expense if they have to, Sakai said - "but it's a great disappointment that we have not been able to be as active as we have in the past."
In New Hampshire, Stewart minces no words when it comes to the proposal that could cost him his unpaid position. The motivation behind the changes is "to corral and control the SACs so that they fall into line with the right-wing control of the commission itself, and to exercise ideological control so that the reviews and research that gets done supports the agenda of the anti-civil rights agenda of the controlling cabal in the commission," he said in a telephone interview with the Vermont Guardian.
"This and the other proposed changes are about, and only about, the majority's goal of redefining civil rights and of controlling the information flow from the states in order to create the appearance of support for the majority's effort to narrow the basic civil rights mission," he charges.
A paucity of reports from the state committees since 2000, and a blank SAC meetings calendar on the U.S. commission's website, suggest Stewart may be right.
New Hampshire's is among the 38 committees in the country that are moribund, forbidden to meet or even talk by phone until their charters are renewed.
Marcus has said all charter renewals are on hold until the commission votes on the proposed changes. The comment period closed Dec. 5, but no date has been set for a vote, according to an administrative staff member in Washington.
But Stewart and others say a four-two Republican majority on the commission leaves little doubt as to the outcome.
Marcus did not respond to the Guardian's repeated requests for an interview.
Whither Civil Rights?
Some argue that with adequate laws in place, the Civil Rights Commission has outlived its purpose. In March, conservative columnist George Will put forth that civil rights laws have effectively dismantled the racial caste system once institutionalized in this country, and that racial inequality is now mainly a cultural problem - sometimes proliferated within a race itself - and largely unsolvable by government.
The core function of civil rights laws is to prevent discrimination, Will argued, but "today a - perhaps the - principal discriminator is government, with racial preferences and the rest of the reparations system that flows from the assumption that disparities in social outcomes must be caused by discrimination, and should be remedied by government transfers of wealth."
According to Mitchell, those who think the nation's civil rights problems have been solved are being "intellectually dishonest."
"There are still voting rights problems, behavioral problems, problems with the administration of justice," said Mitchell. "But in many cases those who have not been involved in civil rights may not see the issues.
"I meet people all the time who wonder why we need the Civil Rights Commission. They watch TV and see all these black football players - but they don't face the real world," Mitchell said, pointing to the nation's most recent example: Hurricane Katrina, in which many of New Orleans' wealthiest - and whitest - residents were able to flee the flooding, while thousands of poor residents, many of them black, were left behind.
Others point to voting irregularities during the last two national elections - including evidence that the records of black voters in Florida were purged in 2000 - as evidence of the ongoing need for the commission, whose mandate is to insure that every eligible citizen is able to vote and to have that vote counted.
Commission staff members say it takes about a year for new SAC members to get acclimated. With so many SACs defunct and dramatic changes in membership expected, few believe the committees will be functional in time for the mid-term elections in November.
"If the committees don't have the eyes and ears to monitor something as important as an election, it has a serious impact on civil rights," said Sakai. "What impact the absence of active SACs - the fact that three-quarters of them are not authorized to do business - might have on mid-term elections I couldn't say. But I would rather have those SACs active than not."
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