Cameron Turner: Martin Luther King Day is a Time for Honesty

According to “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson, black people were happy in the Jim Crow south. Paula Deen told a New York Times interviewer that white southerners treated African-Americans “like family” during the dark days of segregation. Conservative activists in Texas and Tennessee pushed to downplay slavery (and the fact that many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves) in textbooks. Arizona outlawed ethnic studies classes in schools and colleges. In 2010, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell issued a proclamation that praised Confederate soldiers as freedom fighters and omitted references to slavery as a factor in the Civil War.

These recent, high-profile attempts to rewrite history by ignoring the brutal, racist facts of our nation’s past are reminders of why a holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is so desperately needed in the United States. Our nation has come a long way, but that progress cannot scrub away the horrors of history. As Dr. King stated so eloquently:

“America is essentially a dream. It is a dream of a land where men of all races, of all nationalities and of all creeds can live together as brothers… And yet, ever since the Founding Fathers of our nation dreamed this dream America has been… a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided. On the one hand she has proudly professed the noble principles, and on the other hand she has proudly practiced, or she has sadly practiced the very opposite of those principles. Indeed, slavery and segregation have always been strange paradoxes in a nation founded on the principle that all men are created equal!”

We do a disservice to ourselves when we pretend that the racism, xenophobia, religious intolerance, sexism and other awful “–isms” that defined the U.S. for much of its history weren’t really that bad. They were that bad. In many instances, they were actually worse than our selective study of history reveals. Only by facing these facts can we move forward as a nation.

In order to move forward, Americans must not only be honest about our history of racial, ethnic and gender oppression we must look honestly at our past and current limitations on economic opportunity. Martin Luther King’s focus on poverty and income inequality are particularly relevant in today’s climate of declining income, longterm unemployment, outsourcing of jobs, widespread home foreclosures and increased dependency on food assistance by families and children.

Dr. King was firm in his belief that the federal government had the responsibility to combat poverty. In his 1967 essay “Where Do We Go From Here?” Dr. King stated that “we are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Martin Luther King Day affords us an opportunity to confront the terrible truths of our past in order to celebrate the progress we have made, to reevaluate our current practices and to recommit to the ongoing cause of making American truly a “Land of Opportunity” where the motto “Liberty and Justice For All” is a tangible reality for all of our nation’s people.

Thank you for listening. I’m Cameron Turner and that’s my two cents.