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Still Striving for King's Dream
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| by Barbara R. Arnwine
(TEWire) - After celebrating the remarkable life and legacy of civil rights icon and leader Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the 82nd anniversary of his birth and the 25th anniversary of the national holiday in his honor, it is essential to recognize that our nation continues to grapple with the influence and role of race in our society. It is also a time to honor his dream by practicing what he preached and conducting individual and collective efforts to realize that for which he tirelessly advocated.
The King birthday holiday should always be a “day on and not a day off”, a day of reflection and not shopping. As the King Center states, a time to “Remember! Celebrate! Act!”
Dr. King lit the torch and blazed the path and we ALL must continue to keep the fire burning toward the goal of equality for all, especially through the pursuit of economic justice. Everyone of us has a role to play in making a difference.
If Dr. King were with us today, he undoubtedly would be amazed at our astonishing social progress. He would be proud of our more diverse workplaces, our ability to learn and eat together and our cross-cultural sharing. He would exhale at the 44 African-American members of Congress, prominent CEOs and the first Black U.S. President.
Dr. King would be dumbstruck, however, by continuing racial discrimination, the high rate of African-American unemployment and mass incarceration, the educational achievement gap, the deterioration of African American community mores, our abandonment of federal anti-poverty imperatives, the lack of health care, and U.S. involvement in torture.
And yet a post-racial, more just society is within sight, but can only be realized by addressing societal inequities, halting the trading of grievances and dismantling the casual reliance on stereotypes of each other. A new America will prosper with determination, programmatic action and personal responsibility for promoting racial understanding.
We must combat gratuitous racism. Extracting from then Sen. Barack Obama’s bold speech on race, we need to acknowledge that nearly everyone has a relative, friend, acquaintance or co-worker who utters racist or sexist statements that make us cringe. Yet, the majority of the time we just ignore them or walk away not understanding that the expression of these attitudes is what a cough is to a virus—it spreads hatred and reinforces the cycle of racial grievance.
We must find the personal courage to tell people that what they have uttered is hurtful and unworthy of them. You may not be able to stop the ire of one’s thoughts in their head, but you can alter some behavior.
We also need to ask the questions when we are in a non-integrated setting, “Where are the Black, Latino, Asian, Native American, white or female faces? What can we do to change this?” We are, after all, interdependent. The persistence of racial denial continues to permeate our society. This is yet another indication of our inability to place ourselves in someone else’s shoes.
Sunday mornings remain the most segregated hour in America as we attend largely one-race churches. Why can’t we reverse this by holding National Days of Religious Visitation on the weekends before and following the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday in the spirit of his legacy?
If Dr. King were with us today, I venture to think he would have remained active, marching on the frontlines with undocumented immigrants, condemning another senseless war, challenging the church to focus on the have-nots in society, urging all of us to reach for a higher moral ground of racial understanding and reminding us to step above and beyond our own self-interests to embrace a broad vision of commonality and brotherhood. For as he noted in a speech in St. Louis, Missouri in 1964, “We must learn to live together as brothers, or perish together as fools."
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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - Preacher Prophet
By Julianne Malveaux
(TEWire) - The swirl around commemorating and celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday always fascinates me. The mainstream media quickly goes to his most famous quote, “I have a dream that one day people will be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.” It’s a powerful quote, but equally powerful, and delivered in the same speech, are the words, “We have come to the nation’s capital to cash a check. . . .a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.” If people said, “cash the check” as frequently as they say “I have a dream”, we might have a different mindset about the economic status of African American people.
I have claimed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as an economist because of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, “I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, peace and freedom for their spirits.” Because economists deal with issues of distribution, I have claimed that this is a baseline economic statement that places Dr. King in the economists’ Hall of Fame. Yet if one reads his speech, the Drum Major Instinct, delivered on February 4, 1968, just 2 months before his death, one would claim him as both a psychologist and prophet as well.
In the Drum Major speech, Dr. King deconstructs human nature, our need to be in front, to keep up with the Joneses’, to claim the best to the detriment of the rest. He scolds sororities and fraternities, even as he acknowledges himself as a fraternity man. He scolds over spenders for the folly they engage in when they use their money to chase material goods for status, instead of chasing meaning. He says the race problem may come out of the drum major instinct, the need for some to feel superior, thereby making others feel inferior. And he says if he will be a drum major for anything, if he will be superior in anything, he will be a drum major for justice.
Hidden inside the drum major speech are a couple of prophetic paragraphs. He says, “There are nations caught up in the drum major instinct. “I must be first.” “I must be supreme”. “Our nation must rule the world”. And I am sad to say this nation in which we live is the supreme culprit.” He goes on to say, “God didn’t call America to do what she is doing in the world now. . . We’ve committed more war crimes than almost any nation n the world.. . .And we won’t stop it because of our pride and arrogance as a nation.” He spoke these words in 1968. Do they resonate now?
Prophecy. “God has a way of even putting nations in their place.. . .If you don’t stop your reckless course, I’ll rise up and break the backbone of your power. And that can happen to America. Every now and then I go back and read Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And when I come and look at America, I say to myself, the parallels are frightening. And we have perverted the drum major instinct.”
Dr. King said this in 1968, long before China started kicking the United States in the behind economically. He said this in 1968, long before we fell back in world educational achievement. Once we led the world in the proportion of our population that had either AA or BA degrees. Now we rank 10th, an amazing decline for a nation that claims to lead the world. President Obama would like us to regain our preeminence, and we have the resources, but not the will, to do so. To quote Dr. King, “God has a way of putting nations in their place.”
Yes, we all want to be part of something, that which is popular. That’s the drum major instinct. But what are we drum majors for? Oppression? False superiority? Or are we, like Dr. King, drum majors for justice?
Given what happened in 1968, Dr. King was spot on in predicting our nation’s denouement. We are in a downward spiral and our direction won’t change until we embrace the concepts of social and economic justice that Dr. King so effectively preached.
Julianne Malveaux is President of Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina. Her latest book, Surviving and Thriving: 365 Facts in Black Economic History, can be obtained from www.lastwordprod.com. The book was recently nominated for an NAACP Image Award.
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There's More to Life Than the Crisis of the Moment
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| by Dr. E. Faye Williams
(TEWire) - So much has happened in the past few weeks that we have been reeling with shock much of thetime. It has been a whirlwind of the bad and the ugly. Yet, there has been some good in the midst of it all. Most of us are praying that the good will prevail and go beyond a response to the crisis of the moment.
We witnessed the crisis in Tucson. We then saw the heroic efforts of Daniel Hernandez risking his life to help save Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords from further harm. We saw a city in mourning transformed in Tucson when President Barack Obama stopped everything to go and offer a measure of comfort to the city and to our nation. We saw a young Congresswoman shot down while doing good for her constituents in one city. In another city, we saw Malia Cohen, a 33-year-old young Black woman sworn in as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. This was her first time ever running for higher office. She says she relied heavily on her deep faith and she was victorious. (You can catch an archived interview with her on my radio program Celebrating Truth at www.artistfirst.com.)
For whatever reason, House Speaker John Boehner did not choose to attend the service for the comfort of the victims in Tucson. On the other hand, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Minority Whip James Clyburn, Attorney General Eric Holder, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Senators John McCain and John Kyl, and so many others did find the time to be there.
Although Speaker Boehner does not want to hear about gun control of any type, Congressman Peter King and others offered their versions of sensible gun control to Congress.
Sarah Palin continues trying to transfer blame for her charged words about reloading, placing Democrats in the cross hairs of guns (including Congresswoman Giffords) and talking phony accented tough talk. On the other hand, even Glen Beck and certain FOX News personnel found the wisdom to say something positive about the President’s message of comfort.
Governor Haley Barbour suspended the sentences of the Scott sisters in Mississippi. His act was a mixed blessing. The sisters should never have been sentenced to such harsh terms. There is a need for the Department of Justice to investigate why the men who committed the robbery were out of prison in two years and the two women would have still been incarcerated if the State had not considered the care of one sister’s medical care to be too costly for the State.
While the release of the sisters was not based upon any moral or humanitarian grounds, we are pleased the sisters were released. That is a good thing, and we should not need a crisis to say good things or to make good things happen. We should not need a crisis to lower our voices sometime or to back away from conflict where, in the end, nobody wins anything. We should not need a crisis to re-think our harsh words or to find common ground for resolving everyday problems.
There is more to life than the crisis of the moment. Must we always have a crisis to perform a good deed for someone or say a kind word about a neighbor, a co-worker—or even to or about someone who is not on our list of favorite people? It is a long shot, but it would be great to wake up a year from now and see that we are still finding the good and praising it wherever we see it or whoever is saying or doing it.
Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq. is National Chair of the National Congress of Black Women, Inc. http://www.nationalcongressbw.org or 202/678-6788.
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Bill Daley and Gene Sperling Have Done it Before
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(TEWire) - It is now apparent that President Obama was doing a lot more than eating shaved ice and playing golf during his Hawaiian holiday vacation. Almost immediately upon his return to the White House, the president announced the appointments of William M. Daley as Chief of Staff and Gene Sperling as Director of the National Economic Council.
Both men bring a combination of successful presidential advisory experience and business know-how to their new jobs. It is an encouraging sign that as the President focuses relentlessly on his stated goal of creating jobs and turning our economy around, he is enlisting the help of two of the most influential architects of the Clinton economic boom years. William M. Daley, the brother of six-term Chicago Mayor, Richard Daley, served as President Clinton’s Commerce Secretary from 1997-2000, and later ran Al Gore’s presidential campaign.
He has also been a practicing lawyer, bank president, top business executive and political fund raiser. It is no secret that Daley’s business interests have sometimes been at odds with the President’s more progressive agenda, but it is also true that Daley is a job creator who knows how to get things done. Upon his appointment the President said, “Few Americans can boast the breadth of experience that Bill brings to this job. He’s led major corporations; he possesses a deep understanding of how jobs are created.”
New Economic Council Director Gene Sperling makes a return to the West Wing, where he held the same title in the Clinton Administration. Along with former Treasury Secretaries, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, Sperling is credited with developing policies that led to the creation of 22 million new jobs during the eight years of the Clinton presidency.
Unemployment for African-Americans fell from 14.2 percent in 1992 to 7.3 percent in October 2000, the lowest rate on record. Unemployment for Hispanics fell from 11.8 percent in October 1992 to 5.0 percent in October 2000, also the lowest rate on record. A Yale Law School graduate, Sperling was most recently a senior counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
He was one of the Obama Administration’s chief negotiators in the recently passed tax cut deal and has served as economic advisor to both Hillary Clinton and former New York governor, Mario Cuomo. Sperling is also a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign relations where he has promoted the education of girls in developing countries.
President Obama said, "One of the main reasons why I chose Gene is because he has done this work before. After serving in the nineties with President Clinton, he helped turn deficits into surpluses and helped cement the years of prosperity and progress of American families". In picking William Daley and Gene Sperling to fill these key positions, President Obama is demonstrating a commitment to measureable results. We look forward to working with Bill and Gene as we continue the push to bring jobs and prosperity back to our communities.
Marc Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League. |
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