e. magill's Intrigue |
| Back |
Neo-segregation: How Martin Luther King’s Dream has Festered a New DivisivenessOn August 28, 1963, fifteen years before I was born, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. and told the world of his dream for the future, a future in which his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” [1]. Today, as the nation celebrates the birth and life of this heroic fallen leader, I find myself believing that his beautiful dream, while much closer to becoming a reality than it was in the days of forced segregration and open racism, is still not a reality.Racism, as a governmentally regulated segregation, was abolished, due in large part to King and the Civil Rights Movement. Of course racism still exists in the hearts and minds of bigots and misguided children of hate, but it is, for the most part, greatly frowned upon and subject to ridicule and scorn. However, recent political pushes, from both major political parties in this country, are desperately trying to rethrone a new type of discrimination, through legislation and regulation that is “race-based.” Our current president, in an attempt to fight this neo-segregation, has spoken out against the affirmative action admissions policy of the University of Michigan, where a student is judged on a point system that includes race. The policy grants twenty automatic points to an applicant who maintains a “racial-ethnic minority identification,” but grants only five points to an applicant for personal achievement on a national level. Applicants are granted twenty points for socio-economic disadvantages, but are only granted one point for showing leadership skills on a State level. This admissions policy was called into question by applicants who believed that they were denied admission to the school not because of the content of their character, but because of the color of their skin. Many people choose to believe that, because that color happens to be white, the rules of racial equality do not apply to them. [3] Our president has received an inordinate amount of criticism for his opposition to the university’s admissions policy, and many are quick to label him a racist in the interests of political gain [4, 5, 6]. But Martin Luther King was not talking exclusively to black people, or even just to people in an ethnic minority. He strongly believed in the words of our founding fathers, possibly believing those words even more than the slave-owner who wrote them, that “all men are created equal” [2], and, thus, by the words he invoked in his famous speech, King was speaking to all people. The idea of affirmative action would not be embraced by a man of such noble ideals, even though some surviving members of his family have embraced it. Affirmative action and similar “race-based” initiatives, are, in every sense of the word, racist. In order for true cultural equality to exist in this salad bowl of diverse ethnicities, the courts have to be blind to the color of a person’s skin. King knew that to be true, and his dream was that people would be judged for their actions and not their racial make-up. To claim that this principal only applies to minority people is to perpetuate the myth that people are unequal. Writing affirmative action into the law is a giant leap backwards, forcing government entities to consider a person’s race as a measure of his or her stature. The Civil Rights Movement fought long and hard to take this unfair and indefensible conceit out of the courts, and, now, modern iterations of that same movement want to put the conceit right back in its former place. The opposite end of the spectrum has been working hard as well. Instead of trying to force racism back into the courts, there are people who have decided that race cannot be considered at all, even when that consideration is necessary. I appreciate the idealism of this school of thought, but I do not subscribe to it. More specifically, I am referring to racial profiling, the practice of including a suspect’s race in his or her profile, and the fact that it has been made illegal in most states. There are racists in law enforcement--because there is hatred in all walks of life--and it is wrong for a police officer to stop someone solely because the suspect happens to be of a certain ethnicity or to beat that suspect into submission on the same basis. However, it is equally wrong for a police officer to judge people solely on the basis of height, age, gender, or weight, but all four of these are common on the profiles of suspects, whereas race is forbidden. In a hypothetical scenario, a man robs a gas station. The man is caught on camera, and can clearly be identified as being in his early twenties, about six feet tall, a hundred and eighty pounds, and Hispanic. The area surrounding the gas station is diverse, like most places in America, and there are people of various make-ups walking the streets. A police officer receives information about the suspect, but is not told that he is Hispanic. Instead of having a pool of four or five young Hispanic men who fit the physical description in the area, the officer has to deal with a sample of forty or fifty young men of various ethnicities. This decreases the efficiency of the officer and reduces the chances that he will catch the suspect. Also, if the officer is racist towards blacks, he will be more likely to track down a black suspect than a Hispanic one, and is more likely to ignore the correct suspect in favor of somebody of a different ethnicity who is acting more suspicious. Common sense seems to favor racial profiling as a legitimate exercise. Consider the quota systems of airports today, which leads to events like screeners frisking your grandmother while being forced to ignore the shifty-eyed gentleman from Saudi Arabia. While the Saudi is highly unlikely to be a terrorist, I think he is far more suspect than the old woman. And then there’s the traffic situation in New Jersey. New Jersey traffic cops have been more scrutinized than any other police force in the nation, because convicted and ticketed violators have cried out that the officers are pulling people over strictly on the basis of race (the current outrage actually began with the 1998 shooting of four black men on the turnpike). A comprehensive study was conducted on the New Jersey Turnpike, where people were photographed by radar devices that simultaneously measured their speed. Meticulously analyzed using unbiased methods, the study found that people labeled by independent observers as “black” were far more likely to speed than people labeled under other classifications. In fact, when you look at the numbers, the study seems to indicate that the traffic cops of New Jersey pull over less black people than should be proportionally appropriate. Therefore, if any ethnicity should be outraged by the racial profiling habits of the New Jersey traffic cops, it should be any ethnicity other than black, which is, of course, the only ethnicity, as a whole, that is outraged. [9, 10, 11, 12] My point is that we are still divided, and that the only thing that all races seem to have in common is an eagerness to expose racism, regardless of whether or not it is justified. In politics, being labeled a racist is absolutely devastating and impossible to defend against; look at what happened to Trent Lott. In business, you take a chance every time you terminate a minority employee, because that employee would much rather believe that he or she was terminated because of their race than because of any shortcomings they had as an employee (and juries don’t like siding with anyone who might be racist). Even in public debate, an expert in the holocaust can become silenced very quickly for being a racist, even when that person is trying to expose a Nazi sympathizer in Germany. Underlying everything seems to be a double-standard and a new breed of hatred, where you are allowed to believe whatever you want unless your beliefs are deemed racist, in which case you are outcast. In an effort to promote equality, this country has been trying to force diversity. The two are not in complete opposition to each other, but finding the balance is next to impossible. We can’t live in truly peaceful diversity, because, no matter how hard we try, there will always be hatred and bigotry in the world. We also can’t force equality, because those who don’t wish to conform will lash out; silencing them goes against everything that defines America. It all boils down to that single, self-evident truth: all men (and women) are created equal. Even science agrees that humanity only fluctuates, on a genetic level, within the parameters of a tenth of a percent [18]. Therefore, it is illogical to judge people on the basis of their minute physical differences. Judge and reward people for their actions and their character, but, for God’s sake, don’t treat them any better or worse because of their race. Martin Luther King’s dream is just that, a dream. Perhaps, some day, people will stop forcing race down everybody’s throat. Perhaps, some day, we will look at a person and not judge them by appearance in any way. Perhaps, some day, we will all get along and erase the seeds of hatred and bias. Perhaps, some day, freedom will ring eternal and King’s dream will become a welcome reality. But not today. (this list does not represent the sum total of my research on this subject) -e. magill, 01/20/2003 |
| Copyright ©2003 e. magill. All rights reserved. |