Are we there yet?

This week we are celebrating the 50^th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.  In that speech MLK Jr. spoke of a promised land of racial equality.  After more than 70 years of civil rights struggle and fifty years since the speech, the question “are we there yet?” is on many people’s mind.  The recent ruling by the Supreme Court on the Voting Rights Act seems to make the assertion that we have already been there for a while now.  The Supreme Court seems to say that the protections that have been written into our laws since the sixties, with the passing of the landmark Civil Rights Legislation and the Voting Rights Act, are less relevant anymore because our society has evolved and we have turned the page on the ugliness of the days of segregation.  In essence, the Supreme Court is making the statement that we are “there”.  So where are we? 

The Preacher in his speech fifty years back spoke of how the nation has defaulted on its promissory note of equality for all people.  He spoke eloquently of his dream of a society in which one day his four black children would hold hands with white children and walk the streets of Mississippi.  And he spoke of his dream of a society that will one day judge its citizens by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.  This speech was the seminal point in our march towards a society which could turn the page on its ugly history of racism and discrimination.  Many of us have a definition of “there”, as the society that Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed about.

By the definitions espoused by MLK Jr., and for many minorities in our society, we have indeed arrived there.  We have to look no further than the White House for proof.  The President, a black man, ran against two white opponents in consecutive elections and was elected by the country by overwhelming majority.  The country judged the man by the content of his character and the strength of his vision and not by the color of his skin and made the determination that he was the better man.  If MLK Jr. was alive today, he would be pleased with seeing a person of color sitting in the Oval Office.  While the black President is one powerful symbol of the progress we have made, it is not just an isolated symbol of progress.  We have today, many blacks and other minorities in several important positions of power and influence holding elected offices, leading major corporations and so on.  The richest woman in the television world and all of entertainment is a black woman, who gets recognized the world over by just her first name Oprah.  There cannot be a bigger symbol of economic progress that some in the black community have made in the last fifty years.

But still we are all not certain that we have arrived “there”.  Many of us still believe that there is work to be done and the struggle that was started more than fifty years ago has to be continuous and ongoing.  The doubters are justified in their feeling.  Not too long ago, a black teenager was murdered in Florida only because of the color of his skin and he looked suspicious because of that.  The nation erupted into a soul searching exercise of what it meant, whether the murder harkened us back to the days of 1955 when Emmitt Till was murdered in a back alley in Mississippi because of the color of his skin.  The fact that an isolated murder in the streets of Florida could evoke such emotions is proof that we are not comfortable that we have put the past of our racial history behind us.    Our feeling of inequality of the races is backed by several other stats – high rates of incarceration of young black men and women; high rate of single family households in the black community; national income averages among the black population that is lower than other racial groups; infant mortality rates among black population that is higher than other groups.  The bleak stats can go on for multiple pages.  The fact that one ethnic group is at such a disproportionate disadvantage has to be because of a reason.  And it is natural to say that it is because of racism and bigotry in our society and because we haven’t arrived at a place where the playing field is level. One cannot blame anybody for such skepticism.

There is a disproportionate percentage of the black population that is at a disadvantage today.  It is not because there is still widespread institutional racism.  It is because there haven’t been adequate well executed policies that ensured that the black community was given the lift that it needed.  The black community was in an incredibly deep hole when the country’s collective conscience recognized the injustice and inequality perpetrated on them.  We have to recognize that the hole was being dug for two hundred prior years.  We needed all the heavy lifting we could by passing of laws with enough teeth, framing of policies with long term effects, commitment of resources lasting multiple generations, and flawless execution across multiple administrations to ensure that segments of population that was deep down in the hole were given the buoyancy needed to get the lift and take off.  In the last several decades, we have waned in our support for economic policies that will provide the necessary economic lift.  And consequently large segments of the black community are trapped in the endless cycle of unemployment, poverty and crime.

The answer to the question “Are we there yet?” is not that straightforward anymore.  Clearly the train left the station five decades back.  Many bogies have already arrived “there” and the President, Oprah and the countless black men and black women in various strata of society are shining examples of the successful journey.  But several bogies of the train also got unhitched along the way.  And these bogies are mired in the tracks of unemployment, poverty, violence and incarceration and for them the economic deprivation of today is no different than the social deprivation of fifty years back and their destination looks beyond reach.