MLKing it for all it's worth

Warning: this post deals with race. It may offend you. If it does, read it again and try to find a flaw in my reasoning. Please feel free to comment if you find one.

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Yay. School is out for half the students in the country. The mail is not being delivered. MSNBC is fairly drooling as it dishes out the comparisons between Barack Obama and MLK.

Why is this?

I wonder what Dr. King would have to say about kids skipping school on his behalf. I wonder how he'd feel knowing that, on the eve of inauguration, the only part of Obama people feel obliged to comment on is his skin. Sometimes I think Dr. King would rather we simply forget. Not forget the struggle to achieve equal rights for minorities, of course, but simply forget that we have minorities in the first place. What he struggled for was not a nation in which black people have their own television station, subculture, and scholarship funding. What he struggled for was equality. The vision of Dr. King is a nation in which no one cares who is white or black or Asian or Hispanic.

From my perspective (white Christian male, 18, political reactionary, 5'10,"), I would rather our culture simply let racism go. Is it still a problem in some areas? Yes. But it is also a mortally wounded, limping cipher of an ideology, no longer fit to survive in today's America. It will die if we just quit dragging it up.

Consider, for example, the Jena Six incident. For those of you who don't remember (understandably), this little media circus consisted of six black teenagers (all minors about sixteen years old) brutally beating a white classmate. They were subsequently charged, as adults, with attempted murder. The outcry was over how these six felons were being discriminated against because of race. I work in my county's Teen Court as an attorney, and I've never met anyone in an assault case even thirteen years of age who did not understand what they were doing. I have never cared what color their skin was. If handed the facts from the Jena Six case, I'd have proceeded exactly the same way (provided I thought the intent really was to kill) without regard for who was what race. The fallout of the actual incident and media frenzy? Buckling under and reducing the charges. At least one of the involved individuals, as I recall, did not even serve jail time. His primary punishment has been moving schools and staying off the football team.

Now, let's reverse the situation and say the Jena Six had been white and the victim of the assault was black (or Asian or Hispanic). The charges would have been the same plus a hate crime penalty. Minimal outcry would have come from the mainstream media. This apparent double standard has many outraged and probably set race relations back further than the whole "3/5s" thing in the Constitution.

I just say it's time we start really treating people equally. Eliminate hate crime penalties (show me a violent crime that does not involve hate). Offer everyone the same scholarship options. And quit commenting on someone's race as a factor in anything. I think this is far closer to Martin Luther King, Jr's. dream. Perfect equality requires that we stop thinking about it so much. A person's skin is God's paint job. Nothing more, nothing less.