Cascadia Journal

I am too young to have personally seen the work of Martin Luther King, Jr.  In some ways, he changed the way Americans dealt with race relations during his time.  More importantly, he and others like him laid the foundation for us to change our thinking on the subject over generations.  In honor of the holiday marking his birthday, I offer my chronology of how his work has affected my thoughts on racism.

My first recollection of hearing the name Martin Luther King was in April 1968, but not in the way you night think.  I was in kindergarten that year, and usually caught the school bus home at lunchtime.  On this particular day, all of the classes at school were let out at noon that day.  We were told it had something to do with events surrounding Martin Luther King, but at the time, I really did not know the significance of the events.  Simply, he was important enough to warrant half a day off.  In retrospect, the early dismissal was a response to getting us all out of the way of potential harm from civil unrest.

As I grew up in Seattle, then Portland, then Seattle; racism was not at the forefront of my mind.  I understood that some of the people around me had different skin tones.  But, despite the fact that my father was a bigot and a racist, his views did not particularly affect me.  While he did make comments frequently that suggested that those who were not white-skinned were somehow lesser people, he had some wild views on other subjects, too.  So I tended to rely more on my own observations about the folks around me.  Whether we be white or black or something else, we were all people living the same sorts of lives as each other.  I was blissfully ignorant of the depth of racial discrimination around me.

I have Dr. King to thank for the ability to be blissfully ignorant of discrimination as a youngster.  Enough work had been successfully done to that time that the outward signs of discrimination, for example the signs pointing to “black facilities” and “white facilities” were mostly gone by that time.  I was not taught to be a racist (as I had learned to take most everything my father said with a grain of salt), so was unaware that this was something that the predominant culture in America at the time had done.

At age 14 I entered high school in Seattle and was exposed for the first time to a large number of peers who were “not like myself.”  The Seattle School was in it’s third year of a mandatory busing program to integrate the schools.  My racist father thought this was this the worst thing to ever happen.   I was attending the high school that I would have attended anyway, so never had to deal with the cross-town commute.  I attended Roosevelt High, a school where a significant percentage of the families (living in areas like Laurelhurst and Windermere) were much more well to do than our own.  While I had friends of all economic backgrounds, I can say that many more of my friends were in the same lower-middle-class type of family as myself.  My group of friends had as much to do with connecting with those who lived on my street and who’s families did the same activities as anything else.

About one-third of our student population that year lived in the area served by Garfield High.  While there were also some very upper-class families living in the area served by that school, the school was also in an area with a great number of economically disadvantaged families in Seattle.  Since busing was done based upon racial profiles, and since many African-American families living in the area were in a lower economic class than the families in our neighborhood, there were different experiences going on there.

While I did have some friends among those that were bused into the school, the number was lower relative to the total number of kids I regularly hung-out with.  I do not believe that this had anything to do with race, as race really wasn’t something I was thinking about at that time.  The fact still remained that I was more likely to be around the kids that lived in my neighborhood and had done the same things in the same neighborhood that I lived in.  In other words, while we all went to school together, I was closest to the kids who were still in the neighborhood after school.

I remember there was a lot of teaching going on, both in school and in the media, with messages like “all people of all colors are the same” and “we all just need to live together peacefully” and things like that.  Since our parents and teachers had all very recently lived through a period of high racial tension and a life of overt racism, they wanted to ensure that we were the first generation to happily live together.  Since I had never considered racism before, nor had I though to actively discriminate against anyone, it all seemed pretty silly to me.  Tolerance seemed obvious to me, and many of my peers, simply because had been exposed to relatively little intolerance to that point.  We were the first generation being taught that we needed to become tolerant, that really hadn’t lived through widespread overt intolerance.

I had friends of all races in high school.  We intermingled in class with no real issues.  The fact of the matter, though, was that ultimately the kids who I knew the best were the ones that lived in my own neighborhood and walked the same way home from school.  That doesn’t mean that racial integration was a failure.  We needed it at school to learn that there was an issue at all.  Our parents needed it to learn that all families of all races needed to work together.

I remember one incident from early in the ninth grade that illustrates my ignorance of the subject at that time.  I had been chosen by my homeroom to be a class senator on the student council.  (Something about my having come in second place in the race for student body president in middle school the previous year.)  Anyway, one item presented was a poll that we were to take back to our classrooms.  It asked what we thought of the busing program.  I was actually opposed to it at that time, but my reasons were telling.  My comment at the time was that I did not understand why were choosing people and moving them around to integrate them based upon their race.  I went on to suggest that it would be just as valid to choose people based upon their eye color or by their shoe size.

I understand now that those comparisons were silly.  But given the date we were born, and considering the area we lived in, meaning Washington and Oregon, we had just not been as exposed to the same level of racism that we would see if had we lived in Georgia or Alabama.  Martin Luther King had got us to the point where the kids being born actually had to be taught about the existence of racism.

Now that I have grown up, I understand that even as I am approaching my 30-year high school reunion, we still have racism today.  It is truly a non-issue for some people.  But there is still enough of it around that it causes problems for many of the people around me today.  We still have a lot of work to do on eliminating the hidden racism around us — the ones who quietly discriminate based on race even though it is not spoken out loud.  There is still a lot of work that needs to be done.  The work that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his contemporaries did to start us on the path of equality was a wonderful and necessary start to changing our culture for the better.

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