WPCNR THE BIG EXTRA. News & Comment by John F. Bailey. January 18, 2010: I wrote this column in 2004. It still stands relevant today, Monday morning at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in White Plains, the man, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. will be remembered. His birthday was last week. I am not that familiar with Dr. King’s life, but I do know that he, like other great men of America who have their days, Dr. King’s name stands for a value that America holds dear.
George Washington stands for honesty.
Abraham Lincoln for freedom
Columbus for discovery,
Dr. King’s name stands for Opportunity.
When I think of Dr. King, I think of the Selma marches, I think of Birmingham, I think of Little Rock, Arkansas, where he lead the African-American community in demonstrations asking for the right of equal opportunity in America: a seat on a bus wherever they chose; a restaurant or hotel of their choice; the right to apply for a job without being turned down because you were black. Blatant in-your-face-discrimination was publicized by Dr. King and America was shown it was not right.
It took fearlessness to do that. Who today has that fearlessness that Dr. King and his followers showed all of America?
Today, subtle discrimination denying equal opportunity, denying education, exploiting the poor and guaranteeing less opportunity are the evils that Dr. King, had he lived, would be attacking today.
When I write those sentences I just wrote, it seems incomprehensible to me that someone would deny another person that. When you think about it, it is an awful situation to think about. In the 42 years since Dr. King was murdered, the nation has come a long way in breaking down the visible barriers of racism based on creed and the color of one’s skin — and now, today, the language one speaks and where they are from. The education establishment continues to favor the English-speaking, the wealthied, and the well-situated.
Today the barriers to Equal Opportunity are more subtle and just as effective.
Barriers still exist: in the classroom. There is reluctance to deliver quality education to the black and Hispanic populations in America today.
The only reason there is a concentrated effort to do so are the state achievement tests which showed the shame of our education programs for minorities.
On the other hand, there is the perception elsewhere that because your name and skin color are different, you automatically need help and are slow-tracked into remedial classes; the inclusion of the slower (read minority) children in one corner of a classroom so you can deal with the “problem children” all at once; the notion that it is all right to use millions of dollars meant for rebuilding poor performing schools with better buildings, better teachers, but is used to create educational bureaucracies for the politically connected instead.
In the last ten years the products of this subtle unequal educational opportunity have been well documented and given a name: The Achievement Gap. The educational establishment invests millions in studies to find solutions to it and they have learned a lot about it. It takes more School District heads to stand up and say like Dr. King, “we simply are not going to educate half the population any more.”
The lagging of minority youth is blamed on the home and family breakdown. Well then you have to bring more attention to the family unit and those youngsters’ home environment, putting the education in there. It’s expensive but if you want to solve the Achievement Gap you have to do that.
The argument that you have to speak English in the schools and learn through English is racial superiority. Of course you have to learn to speak English, but really, Bilingual education is how we English-speakers learn another language. Port Chester has achieved this — and WPCNR pointed this out to the White Plains School Board years ago. Why is this new?
Every new teacher being hired in the White Plains School District should be bilingual. And how about a new position in the Superintendent’s cabinet: an educator in charge of bilingual education and academic performance, just for starters.
Why not have teachers educate children in their own language with English simultaneously? It is proven to work in Port Chester and New Rochelle. It is time to stop the subtle prejudice that we do not want non-English speaking children in our towns and schools because they are too hard to educate and will cost us money to do that. They are children, you simply cannot throw them away because they do not speak English.
This discrimination Dr. Martin Luther King would find hard to take.
He would bristle at lowering standards for minorities, because he would see right through that argument, saying: when are you going to raise the standards for my people because you don’t have to work any harder at educating them, if you do not raise your expectations for them.
I think Dr. King would look around today and appreciate how Blacks and Whites, Hispanics and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Muslims and other races mingle together in today’s America.
I think he’d observe we are all becoming more appreciative and respectful of each other. But, I do not think he would like today’s buzz word :”diversity” and our smugness about our diversity.
He would say that’s nice, but let’s keep our eye on the prize, to borrow the wonderful motto of the White Plains Department of Public Safety, let us treat all with integrity, professionalism, respect, and to that add opportunity.
Now, let’s think how Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would handle the present illegal housing situation in White Plains.
I believe Dr. Martin Luther King would take organizations in this town that circulate lists of rooming houses (without inspecting them for overcrowding), and call them out, if he were in White Plains today. He’d stand up there tomorrow morning and read list of homes and distribute it personally to the Mayor and say — clean up this disgrace.
Dr. King was not only politically incorrect, but politically uncooperative.
He’d bring the unsafely housed with him to breakfast tomorrow morning and introduce them all around to the rich and the powerful and the well-connected and show them the people whom they are treating like cruel political pawns by our leaders on the county and the city level – all over this county — just so political contributers are protected.
He’d ask each to tell their stories at his breakfast. He’d prey for compassion from us the wealthy, the powerful and the decent, and the respectable to have compassion for the weak, the misdirected, the addicted and disturbed, and the mortgage-ravaged.
He’d bring the foreclosees and those forced out of their homes and ask those on the dais and the tables — how could you not help them out?
He’d ask White Plains leaders to accept the responsibility of leadership and by reaching out personally to the homeless to provide them meals and, perhaps jobs during the day, to welcome them in to White Plains somehow. To help them make a new start in White Plains in a firehouse, a church, or a vacant hospital. To challenge businesses to weave these persons into the fabric of the downtown, instead of telling them they are not welcome.
He’d challenge us to step up our humanity, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did when no one else would 39 years ago.
He’d shame the two governments, county and city, for not treating the immigrants, the foreclosees, the homeless with simple human respect and adhering to the constitution, which prohibits you from being jailed for no reason – a policy incredulously being pushed by politicians who should read the constitution just once to reset their minds.
He’d ask White Plains to rise up and forgive the persons with the prison records who have done their time, and find jobs for them and through forgiveness, and respect for them, melt away the homeless persons’ suspicions and resentments, alleged by our “leaders.”
And about our gangs: Dr. Martin Luther King would go out to the streets of Yonkers, Mount Vernon, Port Chester, New Rochelle, Peekskill – the cities where gang activity has been reported – and speak to them about where they are going. It is difficult to say Dr. King would say to the gang members of our area.
But, I assure you he’d be in their midst confronting this problem and admitting it exists.
As we honor Dr. Martin Luther King Monday. Ask ourselves what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would think of the way we have treated the less fortunate? What he would think about how we have “reached out?” Would he approve of the way we are working with our youth, our Hispanic population, about how dollars are being used to make unsafe housing safe and why it cannot be policed better, about how dollars are being spent in school districts whether on educating people or creating buildings or stadiums; how dollars are being spent by organizations supposedly helping the afflicted, and how they are really doing, and what are they doing with the dollars.
He’d excoriate the variable and below prime mortages now being foreclosed as a new form of financial redlining invented by the financial establishment to exploit. He’d ridicule the efforts of the government to “save” billion dollar financial institutions while allowing homeowners to lose their houses.
Would Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. approve?
He’d remind us that Jesus Christ chose to minister to the “hardcore” of his time. He went into their midst. He healed them and made them fishers of men.
The way to honor Dr. King tomorrow and at the “celebrated” holiday next week is to honor the afflicted, help the troubled with dignity, not humiliate them, not shun them, not “throw them out.”
The way Dr. King would view our world today?
He’d observe that “we need work.”
That the lynchings and the shutting of school doors are gone, but the attitudes remain.
And he’d point that out with that his long finger pointing right at us.
He’d say, “I still have a dream.”
And he’d be pointing his finger at the double-standard of justice for the minority youth and the well-to-do wealthy person that will exist today.
He’d be calling upon all to keep our eyes on the prize and not on the power, the prestige, and the people who would steer us away from what needs to be done.
