JANUARY 16, 2023 – Of all our national shortcomings, the legacy of our Original Sin remains the most persistent contradiction of our basic stated operating principles; a contradiction with real, hard, extensive, corrosive consequences for all of us. The sine qua non of redemption is acknowledgment, yet many Americans still actively resist hearing, reading or learning about our national ball and chain. Nearly a quarter of the way into the 21st century structural racism remains firmly embedded in our politics, economics and criminal justice. Even explicit racism persists as a rallying standard among right-wing extremists.
On the bright side, this is the day when many Americans pay more than passing respects to the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., the ultimate champion of American democracy. We listen to his Lincolnesque orations and know we’re hearing the words of an emotional genius. A bit of reading (try Taylor Branch’s definitive biography) reveals the man’s extraordinary intellectual, theological and philosophical education—not to mention his unrivaled mental and physical courage.
On every return of this day, I experience conflicting emotions. On the one hand, I’m inspired by King’s life and leadership. On the other hand, I’m discouraged that after over a half century since his assassination, we still have years—generations?—to go before achieving redemption from the Original Sin.
But then in company with so many Americans, on the day after MLK Day, I return to business as usual—my white liberal discomfiture safely displaced by the demands and distractions of my privileged world . . . until . . . the mail delivers another writing assignment turned in by the Black kid I tutor remotely; the seventh grader who attends a resource-limited school struggling to serve the ponderous needs of an underprivileged community eight miles from our white liberal neighborhood and a million miles from our white liberal privilege.
Each assignment arrives with the program director’s note providing an update about the school (violence, chronic truancies, staffing shortages), the instructions for the assignment, and a reminder to give the young writer encouragement. Initially, I assumed the work would be all about organization, grammar, syntax, spelling and punctuation. Silly me. When the first paper arrived, it exposed my gross naïveté. What I’d signed up for unwittingly was a crash course in the startling disparity between the kid’s world and mine.
After words of encouragement, I suggested that the writer could improve his writing simply by reading more. I mentioned online sports news, since the student was “into” sports. On this day, however, it occurs to me, the white liberal, that perhaps the more edifying reading might be excerpts from MLK’s grandiloquent speeches. Who speaks like that anymore? (Just as . . . who quotes Aeschylus extemporaneously as Bobby Kennedy did to a crowd of Black supporters in Indianapolis the evening that King was assassinated in Memphis?)
In lots of ways for lots of reasons, we lost the resonance of Martin Luther King’s voice, as well as his message. Time to bring back the message, at least, and not just on the third Monday of every January but every day of every year until we achieve national redemption.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
