How many of us have asked this question on a long car trip? The answer is usually “Almost” or “Just a few more miles” which, though frustrating, at least acknowledges that the end of the journey is finally in sight. To me, Martin Luther King Day is the perfect time to question where we are on the road to equal rights for everyone in America. It’s easy to become complacent and believe that in the 21st century we are all treated the same in terms of housing, education, employment, as well as in the judicial system. However there are a number of citizens in our country who don’t believe that’s true and who don’t feel that the incident involving Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in Cambridge several summers ago was a freakish occurrence or an honest mistake. Rather the Gates confrontation was a highly publicized pattern of behavior that many African Americans are all too familiar with.
This point was really driven home to me when our local Borders went out of business and I was browsing through the aisles. My eye fell on a book called “12 Angry Men: True Stories of Being A Black Man in America Today”. Purely by chance (probably because I really like the movie 12 Angry Men) I bought it. As I read the stories written by men whose names were both familiar and unfamiliar to me, I found myself both shocked and angered by the words on the page. Each of the first-person accounts bluntly relays what it’s like to be a black male in our country today. Baseball player Joe Morgan talks about being detained at an airport in a major city after being racially profiled. Kent H. talks about what it feels like to be constantly harassed by the police when he’s doing ordinary things like sitting on a park bench talking on his cell phone or having a conversation with a friend in the lobby of his apartment building. Law professor Paul Butler writes with eloquence about what he calls his own “Skip Gates moment” where he was asked to prove that the house he was entering was his. Some of the men chose to seek redress after these incidents; others just chalked them up to “the way things are”. That may be true but it’s not the way things should be.
There’s no denying that a lot has changed for the better since the 1960’s, but there’s still a few miles to go before we arrive at our final destination. So, take a few minutes on this holiday that commemorates a great civil rights leader and think about how you can help make this, not only a day, but a year on rather than a year off.
Tags: Good reads for writers, LinkedIn, Martin Luther King Day, Topics for writers
