Watermark: MLK Day

I wanted to write, yesterday, about Martin Luther King, Jr. It was a day to celebrate his birthday, his life, and his dream -- but what took over my memory was the day in April that he was killed. That day, forty years ago, came back to me, with all its rage and despair. I was nineteen. I remember wanting to destroy ... something. I wanted to throw the television at the wall, but I wanted to know what was happening.

At that age -- so young -- I really understood only the surface (or perhaps the root?) of King's vision. For me, then, it was so simple. I was still child enough to want -- to expect -- the world to be fair. Just that, only that. Fairness. Justice.

It would be many years later that I began to understand the subtleties of racism, including my own; that assumption that white (and male, and heterosexual) is normal, and all else is subordinate. I did have a breakthrough of sorts in my mid-twenties, when I realized that being black is no guarantee against narrow-mindedness, sexism, and general idiocy. Oh, yeah, that's right -- we're all human.

Yes, things have changed. I see my young friends grow into different assumptions, different expectations. I remember the first time I saw a black and a white singer performing, together, a love duet. Though I was quite young, and no longer remember who the performers were (was the man black, and the woman white, or vice versa?) I do remember that almost physical shock, that knowing this was something important; something bigger than a love song.

My young friends don't look twice at interracial couples. They don't have to stop and realize, when asked out by someone unlike them, that the only reason they would have to say no is exactly that difference. They seem to feel nothing in particular about voting in a presidential election with a black or a woman candidate -- I mean, nothing in particular beyond a certain academic interest in the possibility of making history.

It's not that, for me. For me, it's some combination of victory and despair. Look how far we've come!

And -- look how far we have to go. The crevasse between rich and poor grows wider and wider. We live in a country wandering -- being led -- away from our values, the values Martin Luther King represented and fought for. We live in a country that leaves its poor black citizens on rooftops for days, and then forgets.

It was so much simpler when I was nineteen. Things were right, or wrong, and that was all there was to it. I didn't realize that right, and wrong, are all mixed up in me. And in others. I didn't know that forty years later I still would not know whether to celebrate, or despair.