Martin Luther King's Legacy

 

I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

January 15, 2022 is Martin Luther King’s 93rd birthday.  It is remarkable that in recent history we have replaced Abraham Lincoln’s birthday and George Washington’s birthday on our calendar with celebration of President’s Day and a celebration of a civil rights leader.  As the holidays we celebrate change very infrequently, this signifies that MLK is extremely important to America.   

I am interested in how our view of race is evolving.  When my daughter is 85 years old in the year 2100, how will our country think?  I am also asking myself what Martin Luther King has to say to us as individual Americans celebrating his holiday outside of a civil rights or social justice context. 

There are three questions I would like us to ponder.

1)      What does history and biology and law tell us about race? 

2)      What are contemporary minority voices telling us?

3)      Is there specific advice Martin Luther King offers all of us?

Race is a fraught topic.  I have emotional responses when a relative brings up the subject of race in passing.  Why is it necessary for an aunt to tell me that Beetle Bailey was replaced in the comics page by Curtis, which she points out is a strip with Black characters?  I am less interested in the loss of Beetle Bailey than suspicious about the motivation of an 80 year old bringing up the race of new comics characters.  Race is a topic that sets off alarms inside me.

Today, I report what I have learned and am discovering relating to the three questions I asked you to ponder.

1)      First, What does history and biology and law tell us about race?

I look to Will and Ariel Duran for their analysis of race and history:

I look to Stephen J. Gould for his analysis of race and biology.

I look to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for the law as it pertains to race. We shall not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

All men are created equal, women too.  We grow up knowing this, intellectually, anyway.  I want to make this point first.  Regardless of race, we are all humans, all the same, some of us with different traditions.  I’m providing reference material to make a scholarly case for getting beyond racism. (1)   Experts have spoken.  I think it is important to make this point first.

2)      Next, what are contemporary minority voices telling us?

I’m a father now and I read to my child.  Books get recommended to me by Red Balloon bookstore.  I often find myself reading books to my child that represent diverse views and positive role models.  (2) Let me summarize a few of these minority authors:

a)       Coretta Scott King award winning author, Renee Watson, wrote “Ways to Make Sunshine” about a Black girl who moves to a smaller house and wants to fit in with relatively wealthy popular White girls.  The girl is named Ryan, which translates to king, and signifies leadership.  Grandma is a beautician who once per year straightens Ryan’s hair for Easter.  Ryan gets invited to a pool party and is teased that she is afraid of the water.  So, Ryan jumps in and her hair immediately curls to its natural state.  Ryan learns from her mistakes and tries hard to be leader.  All can relate to her.  This is a really well written book.

b)      Susan Tan wrote Cilla Lee Jenkins, Future Author Extraordinaire.  The Cilla character is a fun and imaginative little girl.   We learn about her schoolmates and her grandparents and her favorite Chinese food.  We learn that her mother’s parents and father’s parents are not in any photographs together.  This gets rectified once her little sister, The Blob, is born.  This is another great book, not preachy in the least.

 

Why did Susan Tan write these stories?  As a young child, a teacher had the class divide themselves up by identity.  The Asians sat on one side of the room and the White kids sat on the other side.  Susan sat midway between the two groups.  The teacher got upset by this nonconformism and called her parents.  The parents told the teacher that their child was a “Susan.”  An unnecessarily divisive teacher inspired Susan Tan to write the Cilla Lee-Jenkins series of books with relatable and entertaining stories about a mixed-race child. 

 

c)       Kelly Yang wrote “Front Desk”.  This is a series of books about Mia, who attends middle school.  She experiences harsh conditions and racism.   Her family of Chinese immigrants works at a motel.  Mia works at the motel, too and calls herself the manager.  Her school aged friend, Lupe, a Mexican immigrant, faces possible deportation as California laws are in flux.   This is another book with positive role models, but far more political as the main character starts petitions, fundraises, writes letters to the editor and gets herself on the news toward achieving social action for her friends, family and community.

These three authors show us that the majority of life’s challenges are very similar for all of us. 

Kelly Yang’s books go a step farther by addressing more blatant forms of racism and delving into activism, letting us know how to make change.

We regularly get ourselves in trouble when we address the subject of race.  I served on Union Park District Council.  What minority populations want was often the subject of our discussion.  Often times, some of us in the white majority would argue about what minority populations wanted.  We’d even sometime argue with the minority representation at our meetings about what they want! 

The reality is that we are all the same.  Saint Paul Councilmember, Dai Thao, a Hmong immigrant, communicates that the different races and cultures in Ward 1 want the same types of things for the same types of reasons. 

What are contemporary minority voices telling you?

3)      Finally, Let's see if there is there specific advice Martin Luther King offers all of us?

I found a speech King made to an audience of middle schoolers October 26, 1967.  What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?  Though there are many references to race by the civil rights leader, this is a message to all of us, geared more to the youngest among us.  It has a standard three point Toastmaster’s format:

1)      We must have significance and worth

I want to suggest some of the things that should begin your life’s blueprint. Number one in your life’s blueprint, should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your worth and your own somebodiness. Don’t allow anybody to make you fell that you’re nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ultimate significance.

2)      Determine your field of endeavor 

Be a bush if you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you can’t be a sun, be a star. For it isn’t by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.

3)      Set out to do such a good job that the living the dead or the unborn couldn’t do it any better.

If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can’t be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be the best little shrub on the side of the hill.

Is there other specific advice Martin Luther King offers us all?  If you watch Youtube videos of a King speech, I suggest you will find it an inspired use of your time!

Martin Luther King spoke of civil rights in the time when the very last Black Americans born into slavery were still alive.  He inspired Black Americans, White Americans and the World with his dignity and passion.  We celebrate his birth each January. 

Current books young children read engage and enlighten on the topic of race.  This is how progress is made. 

I wonder how many years it will be before bringing up the race of a comic strip character stops raising our emotions?  My lifetime?  My daughter’s lifetime?  How soon will it be before we are truly colorblind and judge by the content of character?  Who will do the work to accomplish this task?  As we consider this question, we must remind ourselves that it is up to us.

“Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to work to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”

― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

 Reference Material:

                                  1)     Biology, History and Law

RACE AND BIOLOGY

Humans are one species with pervasive cross-breeding among all races.  There are much larger genetic differences within races than between races.  Racists and proponents of eugenics wrongly assume (implicitly) that Darwinism and survival of the fittest are continuous processes-- that homo sapiens evolve from generation to generation.

Instead, the evidence with human evolution shows “punctuated equilibrium”.   Bones of Lucy’s species of 3.4 million years ago (A. afarensis), per hard anatomical evidence of non-change, remained indistinguishable based on measurements over a period of almost a million years.   

Humans are not evolving.  If humans are to evolve, isolation from the main group is required, such as perhaps could happen if a small group of humans moved to a distant planet.

Reference: Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur in A Haystack, 1995

 

RACE AND HISTORY

A Chinese scholar would remind us that his people created the most enduring civilization in history—statesmen, inventors, artists, poets, scientists, philosophers, saints—from 2000 B.C. to our own time.  A Mexican scholar could point to the lordly structures of Mayan, Aztec, and Incan cultures in pre-Columbian America.  A Hindu scholar, while acknowledging “Aryan” infiltration into north India some 1600 years before Christ, would recall that the black Dravidic peoples of south India produced great builders and poets of their own, the temples of Madras, Madura, and Trichinopoly are among the most impressive structures on Earth.  Even more startling is the towering shrine of the Khmers at Angkor Wat.  History is color-blind, and can develop a civilization (in any favorable environment) under almost any skin.

Reference: Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History, pages 18-19, 1968

 

RACE AND LAW

To enforce the constitutional right to vote, to confer jurisdiction upon the district courts of the United States to provide injunctive relief against discrimination in public accommodations, to authorize the attorney General to institute suits to protect constitutional rights in public facilities and public education, to extend the Commission on Civil Rights, to prevent discrimination in federally assisted programs, to establish a Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity, and for other purposes, this Act may be cited as the "Civil Rights Act of 1964.

It shall be an unlawful to discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

 

Reference: US Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

 

2)      DIVERSITY REPRESENTATIONS OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Renee Watson, Ways to Make Sunshine, 2020

Parents need to know that in Ways to Make Sunshine, by Coretta Scott King Award and Newbery Medal winner Renée Watson (Piecing Me Together), 11-year-old Ryan, an African American girl, adjusts to changes in her family life and her last year of middle school. The landlord sold the place where she lives and her dad has lost his job as a postal carrier. The family moves into a smaller house and has to live on a budget, but they make themselves at home there. Ryan still gets to cook with her mom, the extended family still gathers for Easter, and Ryan now lives closer to her friend KiKi. Ryan faces some challenges like getting over her stage fright and bickering with her older brother, Raymond. There's a scene where Ryan is embarrassed when her straightened hair reverts to its natural state while she's at a pool party with White friends.   Sequel: Ways to Grow Love (A Ryan Hart Story, 2)  (2021)

Source: CommonSenseMedia.org

 

Susan Tan, Cilla Lee-Jenkins, Future Author Extraordinaire, 2017

Cilla Lee-Jenkins is 50% Chinese, 50% Caucasian, and 100% destined for literary greatness! In this middle grade novel, she shares stories about a new sibling, being biracial, and her destiny as a future author extraordinaire.

Priscilla "Cilla" Lee-Jenkins is on a tight deadline. Her baby sister is about to be born, and Cilla needs to become a bestselling author before her family forgets all about her. So she writes about what she knows best—herself! And Cilla has a lot to write about: How did she deal with being bald until the age of five? How did she overcome her struggles with reading? How do family traditions with Grandma and Granpa Jenkins differ from family traditions with her Chinese grandparents, Nai Nai and Ye Ye?

Sequels: Cilla Lee-Jenkins: This Book Is a Classic (2018), Cilla Lee-Jenkins: The Epic Story (2019)

Source: Macmillan.com

 

Kelly Yang, Front Desk, 2018

Parents need to know that Kelly Yang's Front Desk is a powerful, moving tale about 10-year-old Mia Tang and her parents, who live and work at the Calivista Motel in California during the early 1990s. The novel, which is the first in a series, is loosely based on the author's experience as an immigrant growing up in America, and she doesn't shy away from tough, real-world topics such as immigration, poverty, racism, fraud, and bullying. Characters arrive at the motel after being beaten up by loan sharks or fleeing an ICE raid. Another character is beaten up by robbers. Insults include "Chinese doughboy," "ugly-nese," "idiot," "moron," "loser," and "Mr. Tightwad." There's also one use each of "bull" and "bastard." Although there are many heartbreaking stories in the book, there are plenty of positive messages for kids about fighting for what's right, treating people with kindness and respect, and never judging someone by the color of their skin.  Sequels:  Three Keys (2020).  Room to Dream (2021).

Source: CommonSenseMedia.org