I've long enjoyed the "Best American Series" of essays and poetry, published annually by Houghton Mifflin. I recently began "The Best American Essays of the (20th) Century." I've digested an essay a day, and with every year of the last century represented, I've jumped from 1928 to 1941 to 1957 to 1963 thus far.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" representing 1963 is my current favorite, and the most thought-provoking of the few I've read. While I'd read the essay before, one passage in particular often sticks with me, even more so this month:
"I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere in this country.
It's a choice of thought that I've struggled with before, the belief that certain geographic areas are immune, that we live in an equal society, that we don't have issues of race or class or discrimination, that our surroundings are safer and more just than others. It's a mistake made far too often, a belief of separation.
This past spring, I wrote a book about race for my senior thesis. Focusing on the homogenous state of Vermont, which at nearly 96% white, is one of the whitest and most liberal in the nation, I interviewed black and white Vermonters, local and state law enforcement, government officials, civil rights attorneys, veterans of the Civil Rights movement and educators. In the process, I attempted to prove that due to it's homogenous nature, Vermont lacked a civil rights moment and while socially accepting, issues of racial acceptance remain. While geographic regions experience different racial demographics and different experiences with racial inequality, I believe we share a responsibility of awareness relating to the discrimination and racial inequality within the United States.
In a similar light, I've watched the events in Ferguson, Missouri unfold these past two weeks and have thought often of the history of American racism. I heard it in the interviews I conducted while writing the book and I understand it better today: a 400-year history of what whites have done to blacks in America cannot be erased in 50 years.
In this light, I began to think of what's changed in American racial relations in the past 50 years; yet in doing so, immediately noticed the disparity between the amount of legal changes, not the unmeasurable societal changes.
I focused on unconscious racial biases in the book, on how we perceive, react, and act towards those unlike ourselves. In reflection of Ferguson, it appears that racial acceptance in the United States has yet to be achieved. Between media perception of young black men, the socio-economic divide present between black and white and police brutality, we're holding ourselves back as a people and nation from true, progressive change in racial acceptance. The legalities might exist, but full racial acceptance hasn't occurred.
In the meantime, I wonder at the possibility of choosing to not sit idly by, but to choose to travel the extra mile and actively work to understand, recognize, acknowledge and prevent our own unconscious racial biases. Perhaps in doing so, we may positively define the next 50 years of American racial equality.
