We have come a long way here in the U.S. when it comes to race relations. Martin Luther King Jr. avenues are numerous, and King County in Washington went so far as to abandon its namesake William Rufus King, a senator from Alabama, for Martin Luther King Jr. in 2005. Barack Obama won the American presidency in 2008 and retained it in 2012, and we even have a black Republican senator from South Carolina in Tim Scott. Latinos will become a majority in California in 2014. The times are shifting, but commercializing and oversimplifying civil rights icons and their struggles needs to stop.
King should not be commemorated for his actions of yesterday with idleness and selective amnesia today. Nelson Mandela’s memory should not be appropriated by Rick Santorum in his fight against the Affordable Care Act. Ian Bayne, a GOP congressional candidate, should not say, “In December 1955, Rosa Parks took a stand against an unjust societal persecution of black people, and in December 2013, Robertson took a stand against persecution of Christians.”
The misinterpretation of human rights struggles is an affront to the complexity of the issues they fought against – issues that still persist today. While we no longer have public lynchings, Renisha McBride, a black woman, did not expect to be shot in the face when she knocked on the door of a white man in suburban Detroit, seeking help after a car crash. Brisenia Flores, a 9-year-old Latina murdered in Arizona, did not expect to be pleading for her and her father’s life after anti-immigrant fanatics invaded and robbed her home. To paraphrase Lorna Dee Cervantes, I know you don’t believe this. You think this is faddish exaggeration, but it’s easy to ignore me when they are not shooting at you.
Justice is not a gift from the affluent to the less fortunate. Frederick Douglas emphasized that power concedes nothing without demand, and Malcolm X vowed to obtain human rights by any means necessary. Everything King, Malcolm, Douglas, Mandela and Parks carried out and believed in was once despised. Everything we now celebrate about them was once rejected, ridiculed and struck fear into the hearts of those in power.
Airbrushing and erasing the radicalism of those who fought before us is converting centuries of resistance into a day of rest, a brief paragraph in most textbooks and a myth estranged from actuality. We can turn our noses in disgust at the Jim Crow laws of an earlier time, but we cannot turn our head away from stop-and-frisk policies in New York City that disproportionately affect and criminalize the same victims – communities of color.
During the last embers of King’s life, he gave one of his finest speeches in Memphis in support of a sanitation worker’s strike. In that speech, King perfectly captured the fragility of his life, stating, “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”
King and others had a dream. It’s up to us to make it a reality.
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Victor Cuicahua is a freshman majoring in journalism. His column runs biweekly on Tuesdays.
