King's dream not yet fulfilled

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Tweet I'll be the first to admit it: I'm a white girl from northern Michigan.

I grew up in one of the whitest suburbs of Detroit.

In high school, I could count the number of people who didn't look like me on one hand. My first real experience with diversity wasn't until I started at MSU three years ago. Suddenly, there were so many different people — people from all over the world, with different backgrounds and experiences than I had.

And it was amazing.

Growing up, I learned about Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, but it wasn't until I was older that I really understood what it means.

King led a struggle to ensure equality for all people, regardless of the color of their skin or the origin of their last name.

He fought, no matter what the cost, to end discrimination. The efforts of King and other civil rights leaders helped bring about several landmark federal rulings — namely Brown v. Board of Education of 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Pretty powerful stuff.

So that's why it bothers me knowing we still deal with issues of discrimination today, more than 40 years after King's legendary "I Have a Dream" speech. Have we made any progress since 1963? Certainly. Mandated segregation is a thing of the past, and people of all races and ethnicities have made strides in education and achievement.

But if we want to be the sort of colorblind society King dreamt about, we have to live in a world where affirmative action isn't needed. Where women and people of other races and ethnicities are paid equally and afforded the same opportunities as white men.

Segregation may not be required by law anymore, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Now people segregate themselves. One only needs to look at Metro Detroit to see it. Decades ago, white people fled the city, in fear of the black residents moving in from the South for better opportunities. Now, Detroit is 82 percent black, according to 2000 U.S. Census data, and most of its suburbs are white.

Why?

Racism might not be as explicit today as it was in King's day, but the racism we have today is the silent kind, the hushed kind, the kind that people keep discreet and under the rug so that no one has to know. And that's the worst kind of all because it's not really gone — it just festers inside a person until it explodes.

In July, actor Mel Gibson was stopped for drunken driving in Malibu, Calif., and made anti-Semitic remarks to the police officer. In November, former "Seinfeld" funnyman Michael Richards spewed a string of expletives and racial slurs at two black men in the back of a comedy club in Los Angeles. While both men apologized for their actions, saying that they are not racist, their remarks didn't come out of nowhere.

Clearly, we're not quite there yet.

Clearly, we have a long way to go.

It can't be OK to live in a society where inequality and racism are tolerated. When instances like these happen, we should be so uncomfortable that we have to step up and say something. We need to learn more about different groups of people so that we no longer perpetuate harmful stereotypes. And most of all, we have to be willing to open our minds to new people and ideas.

Then, King's colorblind society might become a reality and not just a dream.

Lindsay VanHulle is the State News special sections editor. Reach her at vanhull3@msu.edu.

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