Is the Dream alive?

Today naturally is Martin Luther King Jr. day. This is one of the non-holiday holidays. What I mean by that is it is a legal holiday so the worthless (government), the maligned (schoolteachers), and the leeches (bankers) take the day off while everyone else goes to work. See also President's Day, Veterans Day (although on that one the people roaming around with limbs blown off or minds shattered by the cruelties intrinsic in warfare get a nice pretty speech about how much what they did for this country means) and Boxing Day. Oh, wait, that one is only Canadian, eh? Is it a holiday if only 1 state celebrates it?
I think this is an overlooked holiday, not so much because we need another day off but for what it represents as an opportunity to educate people about some very, very important things. Your history books may contain lies, misrepresentations, half truths, and vast realms of silence about some very important things.
I actually have little to say about MLK Jr. Wiser people than I will spout many platitudes about what he did, what he meant to the country, how the Civil Rights situation is today, and so forth. A lot of it will be smarmy feel good drivel that sounds good, makes you feel good, but is devoid of all meaning. I will suffice it to say that from where I sit he was a great man who did some wonderful things. The United States is a better place because of his efforts.
No, my point here is much different. It is about abuse of power, of villanizing people who may not have totally deserved it, of making heroes of people who similarly did not deserve it, and the politics of public memory. It is about the Black Panthers, AIM, The Underground Weathermen, and more. It is about changes that needed to be made in this country, and actions people thought they should make and the ways they sought those changes.
I think the Black Panthers are perhaps the most understood group. Today when you mention the Black Panthers people reminisce about criminals, gangs, angry black men looting and killing, robbing and pillaging. To be fair, some of this went on. But the timing was interesting.
The origins of the lack Panthers were partially defensive in nature. Black people were regularly (did I say "were"? That tense might need changed) targeted at disproportionant levels both of enforcement and violence in enforcement. Things that were not crimes for white folks would get a black person beaten to a pulp. Think Rodney King, only completely unjustified instead of merely mostly unjustified. Note: I am not defending Rodney King. Tearful appeal notwithstanding, he did not appear to be the creme de la creme of society based on his actions, but that still in no way justifies that brutal nightsticking that should have itself resulted in some felony prosecutions. It does, however, illustrate one of my points; the situation is remembered with different realities and heroes than what is accurate or deserved.
The Black Panther would form patrols who then photographed police actions. This led to a reduction in false arrests, harrassment arrests, and other forms of enforcement discrimination. The Panthers also established positive organs for community development...food kitchens, scholastic aid, and similar welfare programs. Why is it that they are taught in schools as nothing but a militant, racist group that killed "whities" and had no redeeming social values?
Study how their leaders were dealt with by the FBI and other governmental agencies. There is a lot of militancy, murder, and destruction in the Panther story, that is not debatable. A careful study shows much of the militancy, murder and destruction was done by government agents. Study how the Chicago branch of the Panthers was demolished. See the pictures of the bloodstained mattress and walls where a sleeping man in pajamas in a house with no firearms in it died in a hail of lead that made the St. Valentines Day Massacre look like a Sunday School picnic. It is a sad story that demonstrates it was not the person the authorities were afraid of...it was his ideas, the crazy thought that people are people and should be dealt with the same regardless of skin color, economic background, education...why does that concept frighten people?
But the impact of the Black Panthers was very wide. Russell Means and Dennis Banks, two of the most important names in AIM (American Indian Movement) have freely admitted their tactics to reduce police-on-Indian violence and discrimination was directly modeled on what the Black Panthers had done. (Note: The Panthers were not the only black Civil Rights group to use the tactics, but they were the one credited by Means, Banks, and company.)
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Bonus feature: The first name of this group was "Concerned Indians of America" until someone pointed out their acronym: CIA. It was promptly changed.
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AIM, like the Panthers, made a lot of mistakes. In their fight to redress wrongs as they perceived them they sometimes went over the line. The takeover of the BIA building was probably justified: the senseless looting and vandalism is harder to justify. Then again, if your land had been taken in treaties of dubious (at best) legitimacy, treaty goods seldom or never arrived and when they did were seldom in promised quantities or qualities, shelter had been promised but not delivered, would you engage in violent reprisals against a building that symbolized everything done to you? It is not a black or white question of right and wrong in many of these cases.
I think one of the most ironic things of this situation is (and my memory is hazy on which one, so forgive me if it was Banks) Russell Means doing a voice part in Disney's Pocohontas, a movie that subtly follows the standard white-Indian hero racism plot.
Watch white-Indian stories: The Indian braves typically (and often justifiably) were angry over something and the stereotype was they would attack the unprepared, overmatched and still somehow innocent and heroic whites. Some Indian Princess (a particularly interesting concept since virtually all tribes had no concept of kingship or any of its trappings) would have fallen in love with a white man (and by extension his culture) and therefore, at great personal risk, set out to warn the villagers or in some other way save them. This could be via warning, teaching them how to live, which generally involved some mystical "natural connection" with nature, or some similar way.
Many people theorize this saving of the whites by the Indian "Princess" had the subtext of legitimizing the white takeover of the lands and the assumption the white society and belief system was therefore validated by extension, thus relegating Indian rights, wishes, and needs to the less important background.
Certain elements are ALWAYS there: the Indians will attack by stealth, thus stigmatizing of the as sneaky and underhanded, the threat is not just death but mutilation by scalping (a practice, interestingly enough, that scholars such as anthropologist Charles Hudson have powerfully argued may have been brought to the Indians by the Spanish) which is somehow more horrifying that merely dying, and the Indians always outnumber the whites.
A study of history shows the reverse, of course. It was in fact the whites who made most of the sneak attacks, although there were some on both sides. Scalping became common on both sides to be sure. And at times both sides made seemingly unprovoked attacks. Neither side was wholely innocent nor was either side totally to blame. What is unconscionable is the portraying of a cultural mythology that makes the Indians always the aggressor and more dangerous of the 2 sides with their only heroes being people who betrayed them to the whites thus legitimizing the conquest of the continent as a defensive action...just as the Mexican War was a defensive war in which the U.S. aquired Califonia, New Mexico, Arizona, etc....just as Rome never fought an offensive war yet managed to expand farther and faster than any empire outside perhaps the Mongolians or Islam. By changing the memory we accept a changed reality.
This might seem far afield but in fact it is right on point. Institutionalizing racism by skewing history, developing a mythology of superiority, racial traits (Indians are noble savages who attack by night and scalp children is one example...and I am willing to bet you recognize this character from popular representations even though he may have never existed in reality), and having a "place" to put people in is exactly what MLK Jr. was fighting.
Racism is not always spraying nasty words on houses and physically beating people. It is being surprised when you see a black family at the opera because "those people" don't like "those types of things". Racism is so much more than that, and while the skinheads and Aryans and so forth are evil and need to be defeated, it is more important to defeat the "hidden racisms" such as believing every Mexican is an illegal immigrant who works in agriculture. How about just getting to know him or her as an individual? When we are able to do that, then the dream will be fulfilled.