Lest we forget.

I have a surname that ends in a vowel but, I can always change my name. I can go and anglicize it, shorten it, or take another name entirely.

Why?

Mainly, because people can (and do) make assumptions about me based around my surname.

It does make a difference.

I know it. But, whatever difference it has made, it hasn’t impacted me much. It’s not like I carry around a big sign or wear a t-shirt with my name prominently displayed on it. I can escape the prejudice inherent in my surname, I am fortunate in I don’t have features clearly putting me into any specific ethnic group or excluding me from the dominant one in this country.

What prompts me to speak about this topic?

Today is a federal holiday - some people taking more notice of it than others. and admittedly, I never placed much import on MLK day but, I was reading something Christopher Priest wrote and it gave me a reason to rethink the significance of the day:

If white people overcame centuries of violent repression, I guarantee you there'd not only BE a day to commemorate that struggle, but that the entire country would shut down to observe it.

And while Priest’s observations on the holiday provided me with some food for thought, reading of his own experiences was a reminder of just how different life can be based solely on skin color:

I was the office mascot. The little black kid. The co-key operator for the Xerox machine (with John Romita, Jr., who enthusiastically relinquished the top slot to me). My how liberal we are. Jim, go grab this, “In a jig.” Staffers, some still in the biz, used to come by and rub my head “for good luck.” One staffer kept little jigaboo figurines on his desk: warped, offensive little gnomes in white face eating watermelon. Denys Cowan stole one off of this guy’s desk and gave it to me as a Christmas present. I keep it on my desk here to remind me some of these people still work there.

Oh sure, our country today is a politically correct society but bigotry and prejudice are still very much a part of some people’s daily lives. I can’t begin to fathom what it is like to be black in America and I have to remind myself there are still serious problems where the issue of race is concerned. When I wrote about my friend Kevin three years ago, it was perhaps the closest I could come to identifying with the issue because it affected somebody who was very important to me, a good friend, a nice person, who felt this weight burdening them, this inescapable reminder which would confront them when they least expected it.

As Kevin described it he had a goal (which he did in fact achieve) which was to make it to the age of 35 without winding up dead or in jail. When I think about it now it makes me really, really sad. Not that Kevin made his goal for which I am infinitely happy but, that our society is such, it made it really clear to him there was only so much he could expect.

Sometimes, I think a lot of what happens in our society today is based around the class of economics. Capitalism in it’s purest form as a way of perpetuating discrimination. If capitalism works, there have to be winners and losers, no? This past year was a reminder of just what is going on in our country - when Americans could be abandoned the way they were in New Orleans after Katrina.

It wasn’t just the abandonment, which was horrible in and of itself, it was more that it was an indictment of our country. Yes, pull back the curtain behind all the go-go economic success, the booming stock market and you come to realize there is some real poverty still out there in this nation. If we were back in the seventies, now is the time I would loudly proclaim, “WE CAN PUT AN AMERICAN ON THE MOON SO WHY CAN’T WE END POVERTY IN THIS COUNTRY?!?!”

Somehow those goals have been left behind us. We, as a nation are prepared to get wrapped up in the sloganeering of a media driven society. A society where, “No child is left behind” or where we conduct a “War on Evildoers” but, all these slogans lack true substance.

Anyway, I digress.

Priest was right on the money about the holiday, it should be more important to everyone than it is. How can a nation which is supposed to have its precepts based upon the concepts of freedom and liberty treat any such holiday in a diminutive fashion? In doing so, doesn’t it diminish us all?

I think things are better for people in the country today than they were when I was young (in terms of race relations and prejudice) but, they still have a very, very long way to go. I don’t know if a day will come in my lifetime where people stop defining themselves according to the color of their skin - hell, over the last decade and a half there has been more proof to me that people want to focus more on what differentiates them than what brings them together. I imagine though that was the intent behind the holiday to begin with, simply put honoring the birth of a man who embodied hope, hope for a better world. That’s something we all should take note of and respect.