ON this holiday created to honor slain
civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., most of us would
report a positive view of race relations.
We would correctly point to tremendous
advancement in the nearly five decades since King and his
followers braved water cannons, snarling dogs and rocks to
change an entrenched system of racial inequality. The 1964
Civil Rights Act was America's act of contrition, outlawing
racial discrimination in public places, requiring employers to
provide equal employment opportunities and yanking federal
funds from projects that allowed discrimination. Today, we can
say we've come a long way. We should add that we can and ought
to go a lot further.
Efforts to improve how we co-exist in
America's melting pot must be redoubled. Pressing for
diversity and inclusion may appear counterintuitive in 2007,
when people of color appear in the upper echelons of business
and politics.
But racial discrimination remains a stumbling
block, preventing many from fully realizing King's dreams of
opportunity and equal rights. These are not the biases of old.
Laws protect against those. Instead, the new challenge is to
guard against racial biases so subtle and unobvious as to not
lend themselves to immediate and identifiable solutions, such
as a new law or social program.
Public education offers a prime example.
Schools in Seattle with the most resources and experienced
teachers can be found in the largely white and affluent
sections of the city. Schools in the South End where most of
Seattle's minority residents live, are presumed — sometimes
correctly and sometimes incorrectly — to be of lesser quality.
The reality of education funding plays a role,
but the uneven quality in the city schools is also a
reflection of our values. Our values should not fall along
racial lines, but in the matter of public schools, they
unfortunately do.
Attacking the subtleties of racial bias is
less dangerous than the challenges faced in King's day, but no
less important. Journalist Malcolm Gladwell, in his
best-selling book "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without
Thinking," illuminates how subtleties such as our unconscious
attitudes about race tie into opportunities for education,
employment and other basics.
In a section called "Think about Dr. King,"
the author relies on well-known sociological studies to make
the case that how we consciously feel about race, the ideals
that we say we prize, can be diametrically opposite our inner
feelings. And it is those inner feelings that we rely on to
think in the blink of an eye.
No surprise there. We all have public and
private faces. Our chief role as a society was to change overt
horrors, such as forbidding blacks to drink from the same
water fountains as whites. Now we should have a vested
interest in changing how we perceive others.
It is about going beyond a simple commitment
to equality.
In "Blink," Gladwell makes many interesting
social observations but he throws out a challenge that bears
repeating: It requires that you change your life so that you
are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become
comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their
culture; so that when you want to meet, hire, date or talk
with a member of a minority, you aren't betrayed by your
hesitation and discomfort.
This goes multiple ways. Who couldn't stand to
step out of their comfort zone and view others as full human
beings?
Some might accuse this page of preaching to
the choir. This is the 21st year King's birthday has been
observed as a federal holiday. The myriad celebrations reflect
the huge importance we attach to this day. But King's words
would be our answer. Sitting cold and weary in jail, King
penned the famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail" as a prescient
urge to push forward on matters of race. Just when we think
there is nothing left to accomplish or that now is not the
time to do it, King reminds us that good intentions take us
only so far, action must follow.
Shallow understanding from people of goodwill
is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people
of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than
outright rejection.
We all can use a nudge forward. King's holiday
performs that task.
Contact me at chelsea@purepolitics.com
Just For Women
King