I AM THE FORCE

Happy Martin Luther King Day. I think it's a great reminder of the evil in our not-so-distant past, and our transformative progress over the last 40 years. Negroes were classified and treated as second class citizens. And in many places, treated as much less than citizens, with no right to vote or sometimes even to live. The history books show that it was acceptable in much of white society to treat black people as less than human. Happily, that is no longer true today.

I was fortunate to have parents that taught me that people were people, regardless of ethnicity or background. My parents were by no means groundbreakers. Just good people with a basic understanding of fairness and right and wrong. The Norwegian and German-Americans of Wisconsin were not much involved in Dr, King's campaign, but I like to think that good people like my parents played a vital role nevertheless. I don't know if they heard Dr. King's "I have a dream" speech, but I do know that they taught me to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

I AM A MAN. What a message to have to deliver. How evil and wrong it was for people to deny others their basic humanity. How wrong it is to treat people as a race rather than as an individual. How offensive to categorize people like livestock based on countries of origin or skin color.

I attended a presentation recently where the speaker was encouraging the audience to respect and nurture children's ethnicity. They should be proud to be black or hispanic or asian, and we should all make sure to celebrate that categorization of humanity. But I didn't like what I was hearing, and it made me better understand how far we still have to go. The argument that "we as a group, are as good as you as a group," has obscured the true goal of equality. Are these children? Or are they black children, hispanic children, or asian children?

When we put a kid or a stranger on the street into a category, we have diminished and defined them in ways that have little or nothing to do with who they actually are. I think a kid is a kid, and a man is a man. Our heritage and background is significant, but it should not be our defining characteristic. When people think of me, do they define me by my Norwegian-American background? Hardly. Should they? Of course not.

We are all human equally. Some people do good, other people do bad. But it's not your skin color that does it. Maybe it's time to stop emphasizing the categorization of humans, into aggrieved and separate subcategories. Dr. King dreamed of a day when his children would be judged by the content of their character. I think it's time that more humans on every side of the existing divides recommit to that dream and erase those lines of separation. The modern forces of separation and racial categorization will keep demanding something from the "other." But I believe we'd make more progress by recognizing that there is no "other" and we are all of the same family.

"All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distort the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I-it" relationship for an "I-thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and awful. Paul Tillich said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression 'of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?"
Martin Luther King, Jr.