Rescue Me If I'm Wrong
As usual, the King holiday left me speechless. Or more exactly, wordless. Far too much has already been said about the man, which doesn't mean his legacy has been laid to rest or agreed upon--that's why we all continue to talk about King and to haggle over what he meant, and to whom.
It's a stroke of cosmic good timing that the King's birthday provides an annual launch into Black History Month, which means that for most of January and February America is suffused with a certain tension that always attends public examinations about the legacy of King and the state of black people more than 40 years after his death. To wit: Chris Mathews of MSNBC recently went down to Texas Southern University to have one of these conversations with a mostly black audience, and the tension about the ongoing lack of racial equity, Obama notwithstanding, was immediate and palpable--and Mathews is sympathetic. Paradoxically, Obama has increased the tension because he doesn't represent, as most people like to think, the end of black history. What he does represent is complex truth about both the encouraging successes and the enduring limits of racial progress that most Americans are just not equipped to handle. That's not his fault. Mostly.
With all of the above in mind, I spent this past Saturday doing something I'm certain King would have approved of: going to the first public meeting held by a nascent enterprise called the Black Workers Center (full disclosure: I'm on the planning committee). One of the troubling racial statistics overshadowed by Obama but made clear by the recession/depression is the dreadful state of black employment and the urgent need to do something about it. The worst hit are black males who are ex-felons, but the pain is radiating all the way up the economic and educational ladder. In other words, blacks with few skills and a record are going nowhere, but the famous middle class is losing its way, too. It's like Dr. King said, none of us can be free until all of us are free. At this point I'd settle for 50 percent.
One of the big ideas behind Saturday's meeting is that blacks are all in this work crisis together, an idea that frankly hasn't enjoyed much currency since the days of King and his ill-fated Poor People's Campaign. Black cohesion is an idea whose time has returned, just in time for the era of Obama. Some might call a Black Workers Center retro. I call it justice that starts--as it always must--at home.
This image was taken by flickr user webmacster87(flickr). It was used under the Creative Commons License.
