On Monday, the nation celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day. (Well, Point Park didn’t, but that’s another article for another day.) That day, on the heels of a recent spate of highly-publicized killings of unarmed black men by police officers, people across the country took part in protests.
They protested racist wars, racist police officers, racism built into every structure of American life in a country historically designed to promote white prosperity. They took to the streets and demanded that their voices be heard. It’s something in character with the methods and ideals of Dr. King and an appropriate way to honor his legacy.
Some people disagree.
Some people think, oddly enough, that everyone is equal now, that Dr. King’s work is done. Over and over again on the Internet, in everything from think-pieces to tiny tweets, the ugly sentiment comes up: The black community is complaining. The American dream is available for everyone, if only you work hard.
What’s especially remarkable about this idea is the assumption it makes. It’s a vast one, spanning history and geography. It takes a certain amount of arrogance and a dash of solipsism.
It’s the assumption that the black community, and every member of it who describes how racism has impacted his or her life, is lying.
It takes an impressive lack of empathy and trust in the universality of your own experience to make that assumption, but time and time again, it crops up when discussion marginalized groups. Women are lying about their fear of men. Transgender folk are lying about their gender. Black people are lying about the opportunities available to them.
They’re not.
The University of Pittsburgh’s Center on Race and Social Problems released a report on Pittsburgh’s racial demographics and the disparities within them last week. It contains a wealth of data that shows the differences in education, employment and arrest rates between people who live in the city.
Often, we Northerners think we’re above the problem. Since we fought on the right side in the Civil War, we don’t have the race problems that our Southern counterparts historically have had to deal with.
The Pitt study shows that line of thinking to be a fallacy. “In Pittsburgh, both black juveniles and black adults were arrested at five times the rate of their white counterparts overall,” reported the Post-Gazette.
Additionally, “at some point in their lives, black males have a 32 percent chance of serving time in prison. White males have a 6 percent chance,” the report said.
It’s hard sometimes to step outside your own experiences. It can be challenging to accept that someone else has gone through something different than you and drawn different conclusions about the world.
But it is a vital part of being a human in this world. By granting people different from you their legitimacy and humanity, you restore your own.
There is a lot of work to be done. Honor Dr. King by shouldering some of it.