Reflections on Today

Last fall, The Christian Science Monitor featured race as the cover story to their September 18, 2010 issue. I had planned to talk about it back then but decided to wait until Dr. King's day today. The entire article is fantastic and it's worth a long, soaking read. Central to the piece are seven lessons that we all need to heed.

Lesson 1: Recognize how far we've come

Compare the images of the early 60s to where we are now with the first black mayor elected to Philadelphia, MS. That's quite an achievement and there is no doubt that Dr. King would be amazed.

Lesson 2: Talk about race like a Southerner

From the article...

Contrast the quick national judgment of Sherrod (who was eventually offered reinstatement, but declined) with a recent experience David Hooker, a black community-builder, had visiting Oxford, Miss., another iconic civil rights town steeped in Confederate history. Mr. Hooker, who lives in Atlanta and teaches at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va., stepped into the Ajax bar to order some food. A white Mississippian sitting at the bar said to no one in particular, but within Hooker's earshot, "I remember when they didn't let niggers in here."

Recounting the episode, Hooker says he replied, "That was crazy, wasn't it? I remember that, too."

Hooker adds: "He kind of looked at me, like, 'What do you mean? You're not going to be offended?' "

The two ended up having a 45-minute chat that spanned the election of Obama, the Ole Miss football team, and hopes for their kids.

This is how to handle situations like this: find common ground. Just beautiful...

Lesson 3: Leverage 'friendship potential'

Pettigrew says that the at times juvenile "he said, she said" tenor of the race debate in America can be attributed to a simple fact: Much of the rest of America has missed out on both forced and voluntary race reconciliation in the South. That process, Pettigrew says, has been driven by the growing class equality in the region, which has raised what he calls "friendship potential" in the public sphere.

This has to do more with ignorance and a decidedly condescending attitude that many white liberal northerners have about blacks in the south. We talked a great deal about this in that Beyond Diversity seminar I attended. It's dys-consciousness...I don't know what I don't know.

Lesson 4: Blacks love Southern opportunity

This lesson will certainly please the libertarians who post here.

"What's changed in the South is that people increasingly tolerate the individual," says Mr. Griffin, explaining his decision to return and invest in the town where riot police once turned back black civil rights marchers after they crossed the Edmund Pettus bridge on their way to Montgomery. "If there's prejudice today, it's more of a class thing than a racial thing."

Essentially, there are opportunities in the south that aren't available in the north because of a new found tolerance. This would go in hand with Lesson #1...recognizing how far we have come. Far, indeed, with blacks being core to many Southern businesses.

Lesson 5: Don't stereotype whites

"People think the only [ones] negatively impacted by Jim Crow's official and unofficial policies were African-Americans in the South," says Hooker. "But [prejudice] was taught by violence and coercion – deeply wounding ways of enforcing an unnatural behavior. Over time, that's as painful for the people who have had to maintain the system as it is for the people who were intentionally marginalized.

Agreed. There is an entire unrecognized group of victims here just like Hooker. It's hard to see them at times but that would come with contact, communication, and friendship.

Lesson 6: Segregation by any other name...

A group of historians – including Mr. Sokol and the University of Michigan's Matt Lassiter – are revisiting how the North and South diverged after the Civil War. One of Mr. Lassiter's findings is that Northern segregation happened largely by the same kind of government decrees that enshrined segregation in the South.

I agree completely. This would be one of Loewen's Lies. The north had just as much complicity in the south's institutionalized slavery.

Lesson 7: Keep moving forward

The hard one. I asked the leader of Beyond Diversity how I should tolerant of intolerance and her answer was, "You just have to recognize it as their truth. Say to them 'That's your truth' and I respect it.'" Easier said than done. I'd have to say that I've done a poor job of it thus far.

But articles like this give me a great deal of hope. Dr. King's legacy is on display for all to see in the year 2010.

We are going forward because of his life and his sacrifice.