How Have We Served "The Dream?"

Immediately, I was taken back to my interview 21 years before.

I think I understand what Foxx was trying to say – that Michael Jackson, because of his talent and his success, should be held up as someone in whom the African American community can take pride and consider a hero, of sorts.  And while we can debate the morality of that, in light of the all unproved charges of misconduct with children and, more proven, Jackson's eccentric behavior when it came to his appearance and his habits, it must be admitted that the man was one of the most talented performers, at least of our time, and, although his fortune has dwindled to the point of being in dire debt, there is no doubt he was, at his height, successful to an extent that was amazing.

But no matter what Foxx meant, the intended effect, from what I have gathered from the comments, but heard and read, on different sites, was quite different.

Many of us who went through the upheavals of the 60s like to take a little solace from the perception that we have made, at least, some progress.  Unfortunately, all too often, as I look round, I have to admit that any progress made was, at best, very limited.

". . . it's necessary right now, until we can get to the place where we don't recognize whether a person is Black or White or Asian or Native American."

"When," I immediately asked myself, "is that going to be?"  Here we are, more than 40 years after the signing of the Civil Rights Act outlawing racial discrimination and we are still delineating one group from another based solely on the color of their skins.  "Why?" I asked.

The answer came to me almost as quickly as the question.

The very fact that we "need" racially – or religiously, or sexually, or orientationally, or culturally – defined organizations is the very reason we no longer need them.

If, as the woman quoted above, I listen to or see an entertainer and think of that person as being of a particular race, gender, religion, orientation, or whatever – then I am, at that moment, betraying the very standards I preach and promote.  As long as I separate people into groups of whatever definition, I am segregating, and, because I am segregating, I am discriminating. 

And, with that said, as long as we, as a society, allow the divisions of people by whatever classification we might choose – is there a "Society for Balding, Gaelic Opinion Writers from Ohio?" – then we practice, whether we want to admit it or not, discrimination.  Only when, as my source said 21 years ago, we no longer pay any attention to the things that are different about us, but only to those things that we are as people, can we leave the past behind and declare victory in the struggle against discrimination.

The problem is we all do it.

When the Black Entertainment Network made its debut in the 1980s, many of we liberal movement fighters applauded.  Finally, we said, Black entertainers were going to get the recognition they deserved.  The thought that there might be a closing out of entertainers who were not Black didn't occur to us.  Black people in America had been dumped on for hundreds of years – even before there was a nation – and it was about time they got something of their own, even at the expense of the White people who oppressed them anyway.

One of the cases being closely looked at in the confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotamayor is a case on which she ruled, Ricci v. DeStefano, in which she joined the rest of the three-judge panel, in rejecting a racial discrimination claim by non-Black firefighters for being denied promotion over the apparently less-qualified Black applicants.  There is much made, on every side of the argument, concerning reverse discrimination and the failure (or success) of Affirmative Action initiatives, but one thing that is not said is that in every case, both before and after Affirmative Action, we subjectively set up circumstances which not only promoted, but promulgated, the segmenting of people via their skin color, religion, gender – name the dividing factor as you wish – instead of, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, "by the content of their character."

In that single failure, we have not only betrayed the dream of that great man, but our own as well.  And until we can look at a person from the inside out, we have to admit to ourselves that any "progress" we made as a result of the sixties, is very limited indeed – and very possibly an illusion.

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