Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr. 40 Years Later

Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated 40 years ago today, on April 4, 1968. He was in Memphis, TN, at the Lorraine Motel, where he had come in support of striking garbage collectors in search of basic economic parity.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was a leader on a par with Gandhi, a man of deep faith, great courage, and magnificent hope for the promise of the Constitution of the United States of America.

The greatest honor we can pay him is to work as he did to bring that promise to fruition. Let us begin with renewed hope and determination, with eyes wide open, brains in gear, courage bolted to the task, and our hearts full of love for those whom life hasn't blessed as richly.

Our blessings were given to share.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

I woke this morning thinking how wonderful it is to be in Arizona celebrating the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., and how remote Evan Meacham seems in the context of African American people. Among other enlightened acts (not), Meacham called African Americans "pickaninnies," referred to his political foes as "just a band of homosexuals and dissident Democrats," once asked for a list of all gay state employees, and actually rescinded the state holiday on MLK,Jr. Day. It was later reinstated and he was impeached for criminal fraud. Prince of a fellow, eh?

Later, I attended an MLK. Jr., honors award breakfast hosted by Tempe to acknowledge the work of community diversity activists. My dear friend, the Rev. Trina Zelle, received this year's award in the "individual adult" category for her work with Arizona Interfaith Justice on behalf of workers and immigrants. It was good to be in a huge crowd of people of all faiths, classes, races, ethnicities, sexes, orientations, all there to honor one of the contemporary world's great giants, good to take time to remember his life and his great work. I remember him well--his work, his life, his senseless assassination. Dr. King changed my world. He made it better.

The keynote speech was delivered by the remarkable and talented Alonzo Jones, Director for Multicultural Student Services at Arizona State University. His speech was a masterful and novel recounting of the life of the man we all know only for a snapshot of his Civil Rights work, and his assassination. He spoke to the youth among us, saying, memorably, that education is not about earning more money. It's preparation for answering an unknown question--a question that will define your life, give it meaning, and may come at a time when you least expect it.

It was a wonderful keynote. In all respects but one. Remarkably, he said not one word about Latinos generally, or about Mexican immigrants specifically, who, today, are facing a degree of segregation as severe, and ruthless, and ignorant, and shameful as anyting the nation experienced in the 1940s or 50s.

Is it segregation? I think so. There aren't separate water fountains everywhere, but in some work sites, there's no water at all for dirt-poor laborers. There aren't rules about who sits where on the bus, but in this city, there may as well be no buses at all. We have too few to do much good.

But I'm not speaking literally. I'm speaking about a kind of apartheid that defines a people by race and class, ignores that people's desperation in tallying up its "crimes," and entraps and deports its parents while imprisoning their children here in Halliburton-made, for-profit prisons. It's the kind that sakes out Catholic churches in Hispanic neighborhoods--that would be Sherrif Joe and his thugs--just to remind the people that they can be rounded up even if they have lived here for 6 generations. It's the kind that pays the people a fraction of what it actually takes to live, and sometimes doesn't even pay them at all. It's the kind that drives them underground, in terror and despair, after having sent advertisers to their hometowns to lure them here--illegally.

In any other context, we'd call that "entrapment" and the "crime" would either be written off entirely or judged with considerable leniency. But because their skins are brown, and they're poor, and desperate, and unskilled, and without recourse, we don't have to follow rules of justice or even rules of common decency. This is no way to honor Dr. King. This is not what he died for, and not what he taught us by his living and by his words of power.

So, on this MLK Day--and I believe Dr. King would approve wholeheartedly--my heart and my thoughts are with my Latino brothers and Latina sisters, and to them I want to say, one day we will transcend tribe, class, race, and nation. One day all people will know that what goes around, come around, and know that peace indeed requires justice. One day there will indeed be "the beloved community." We shall overcome someday.

Jesse Jackson, Jr., Crossed a Dangerous Line

Democrats need to be very careful that the Obama/Clinton competition does not deteriorate into a race v. gender battle, in which we are split into a nasty, bitter, and needless war with potentially enduring consequences.

How could it happen? If either campaign accidentally or intentionally walks onto--or is whispered to have walked onto--that sensitive territory fenced by ugly stereotypes, old wounds will be opended and latent fury will be rekindled, causing a chain-reaction of backlash attacks.

If that happens, the victor will be racists, sexists, and the GOP.

We could be seeing something like that now, nascent still but nonetheless worrisome, in the hyped-up matter of Clinton's tears and the way in which at least one Obama spokesman has chosen to use it.

For starters, there was no "crying." There was an emotional moment and a break in her voice as she spoke about her love for and concern for the nation, a powerful exercise of control, and a very rapid recovery. One Newsweek reporter who was present at the meeting corroborates that, and also clues us about the kind of media manipulation we can continue to expect:

Even as she spoke, a local television reporter was broadcasting live that Clinton had started crying. Other reporters tried to correct him, even as he was still on the air. No, she didn't cry.

WTF? No mystery here. Many interests would be served by a ceaseless incantion that Hillary is too weak (read "woman") to hold down the Oval Office. Republicans, anti-Clintonites, and sexists of both genders apparently wanted that Muskie moment so badly that they were willing to manufacture it. Then, predictably, a MSM snearfest ensued that even John Edwards stooped to join, full of snipes about her sincerity and her timing, and bristling with insinuations about what showing emotion might mean for a US President at war.

Garden variety smear stuff, offensive and sexist and obnoxious. But when Jesse Jackson, Jr., grabbed the opportunity to imply that Clinton never once cried about Katrina (read "the poor African American people of New Orleans") or the troops (read "the mostly poor non-white kids dying for our country"), it went way past routine media misogyny.

If my own reaction is a microcosm, the potential for angry division is unnerving. Of course, maybe it's just me and we can all go back to snooze mode. In case not, however, I want to deconstruct Jackson's nasty little smear both to explain my anger and, I hope, to show the kind of thing we should be vigilant about and quick to stamp out.

We can skip the part about how Jesse Jackson, Jr. isn't in a position to know when Hillary weeps and why, and the part about how no American politician distinguished him- or herself in the aftermath of Katrina, and the part about how any presidential candidate who had called a press conference to weep before St. Louis Cathdral would have been DOA. Those are dime-a-dozen smears and implied untruths typical of slimeballers.

But Jackson took this a step further. His was a callous, calculated, and obscene effort to politicize a national disaster in order to trash a fellow Democrat and a woman, using Rove-worthy smear tactics: the gender card, innuendo, race-baiting, and putting Clinton in the unwinnable, impossible position of proving a negative. I not only don't want this kind of crap in our party and resent it. I also fear it greatly.

His message, decoded, is that Hillary was lying about her feelings and put them on display jus' like a woman to manipulate the voters (read "male" voters). Translated, she's just one mo' manipulative bitch who's too frigid to care about, let alone weep for, desperate, drowning African Americans and poor kids being blown to bits in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Thanks, hear?

This privileged son of Civil Rights legend, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., hasn't earned the chops to attack Clinton about anything. Unfortunately, by voluntarily putting out a string of sexist stereotypes, he didn't just piss off a lot of women. He enacted live and on national TV the equally divisive, ugly stereotype that African American men despise women. And in the service of what? In order to inject an uncommonly nasty dose of sexist race-baiting into a contest for the presidency? Brilliant, dude.

The likely achievement here is a bunch of infuriated women and a bunch of infuriated African Americans, all jumped up for no good reason--merely on the basis of Jackson's petty little war of choice. (I would expect this kind of thing from Huckabee, but not from someone who knows the Clintons' civil rights record, and not from a fellow Democrat.)

So yeah, Jr. hit a nerve. He and any other Obama handlers who think this is an effective way to fight Clinton need to sit down, shut up, and let the grownups handle this--people with extreme sensitivity to the potential for mutally assured destruction--or they will stir up a whirlwind that the party, the nation, the candidates can't afford to deal with.

God forbid that someone comes out now to retaliate with a comparable slur that pits gender sensitivities against race sensitivities. Unfortunately, that's just the kind of thing a push-caller planted by the GOP would do. We know that this happens. Thsi isn't speculative. Remember the phone campaign in SC that implied that McCain had fathered a Black child? Here's the race-baiting counterpart for Obama: "Would it affect your decision if you knew that Obama is a wife-beater?" Again: that's a hypothetical, utterly untrue. I use it only as an example of a plausible smear campaign that could create a rupture among Democrats along race and gender lines.

I don't need to tell you how that would go down. If such a whisper campaign were laid at Clinton's door, we would inherit a storm of rage that could last a generation whether it came from Clinton's campaign or not. And obviously, there are similar possibilities when the table is turned. If Jackson or anyone else continues in this nasty divide-and-conquer vein, I think we could be in trouble as a party, and potentially lose the election even as we claw each others' eyes out for no reason at all.

I really want you to let me know if you think I'm over the top on this. I want to hear from you, and if you see the potential I see, I'd love to know how you think we can sidestep this kind of mutually assured destruction. Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get us.