I remember my elementary school classroom being brought to the library to watch “The Boy King,” a TV drama about young Martin Luther King, Jr. This was most likely in the years between the enacting of the federal holiday to celebrate MLK day and its observance in my home state.
The drama’s simple narrative of a young King encountering racism as a child and being moved to fight against segregation was well crafted for its young audience. It is also, however, a narrative that makes racism a question of personal attitudes and ignores the complex structural problems that intersect with racism to limit the potential of many people today.
After helping to secure the legislative gains in the form of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, King increasingly turned his attention to those fundamental structural problems of housing, education, and health care that continue to plague American society now more than forty years after his assassination.
About three years ago, I was flipping through the channels on French television and came across a documentary on King and the Civil Rights Movement. Amidst the usual footage of civil rights marches and speeches, the video included footage from one of his speeches that struck me as decidedly different from the image of King presented to American audiences. In that speech, King states that the problems of poverty and unemployment in urban areas cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.
Today, as the problems commonly associated with the inner-city have become more generalized throughout society, perhaps a space has been opened for us to contemplate the musings of a more mature King. No matter what one makes of the goals and aims of the Occupy Wall Street protests that erupted this past fall, they were undeniably successful in turning attention to the most important fact of the last thirty years of American life, the enormous growth in income inequality.
As we consider King’s legacy, it seems to me that there is no more urgent question before us than deciding whether “Where do we go from here” is the path towards greater inequality or towards a system that serves the needs and interests of more than a privileged few.
Cedric Tolliver, Ph.D, is an assistant professor of English and may be reached at [email protected].
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers" – F.A. Hayek
Or a populace of generous spirit.
a claim for equality of material position? what does that mean?
sounds like verbose arrogance – like something a typical professor would say.
equality can be met by a generous populace, like mike said, but more importantly by an enlightened populace that realizes people aren't so different that some deserve to starve while some eat shaved gold on their 100$ dessert, and that much of the potential of our population is squandered because of huge gaps in opportunity/wealth.
i see smart people living in poor situations and ignorant people teaching classrooms a lot, and it's not because they are inferior somehow – it's because they were unfortunate and a broken system of socially unconscious capitalism doesn't support them and is reinforced by those who it has worked for (the rich) – who concentrate power and totally distort/destroy our democracy/country while externalizing social costs such as feeding/sheltering surplus labor, environmental damage, etc.
you should check out this article about why Finland's education system is among the best in the world – because they focus on equality of opportunity for students – there are no private schools. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/…
it would be great if some of you opinion writers could learn about education so maybe you could talk about things that pertain to the school since this is a school paper and your political analysis and often shallow insights just aren't going to compete with the prestigious and well informed professionals.
why not have an opinion about UH and maybe you can have an impact from the greater proximity and greater interest to readers. how can you always be so critical for the government's extreme levels of bureaucracy and overlook UH's insane amount of admins who don't seem to do much of anything and get paid huge amounts?
sorry for the length of this comment/rant, but i've been holding back because i couldn't comment because i was a writer (like you are, but i guess the rules don't apply to you like they did to me) last semester.