Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream. That dream is still far from being achieved. Despite what Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts says in that the country has changed, the fact of the matter remains that racism and inequality has not left the building.
Race and the propaganda of hate that comes with it is still the elephant in the room that needs to be deflated and taken out.
Just look at what has transpired with President Obama, our nation’s first black commander-in-chief. Last time I checked President Obama is the only President on record that has ever had to show his papers to prove he is in fact a legal citizen of the United States.
Name me one other president that has had to do that? What Tea Party members and those on the far right did was conduct their own public stop-and-frisk witch hunt to embarrass and degrade President Obama to the status that of a kitchen servant.
The Republican Party’s rejection and attempt to block the President’s signature healthcare law from going into implementation is just another form of nullification.
As much as America has evolved, human behavior doesn’t always change with the way of the world. It is 2013, yet African Americans are still receiving back-of-the-bus treatment when it comes to employment, education and housing opportunities. America still hasn’t fully embraced immigrants that are continuing to pour in resources and work into the nation’s economy in pursuit of the American dream.
Black and brown boys are still failing to graduate from high school at an rate that is absurd for a country with a population of over 300 million. The American Dream failed Trayvon Martin. Didn’t he have the right to walk home in peace after buying a bag of skittles and a can of iced tea?
The deadly consequences that befelled Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman and his killer’s subsequent acquittal of second-degree murder and manslaughter chargers, shows us that 50 years hasn’t been enough of time to erase the shadows of an American judicial system that historically hasn’t been kind to African Americans.
Black people today had to think that we might as well have been back in the days of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers with Martin’s killer going free. So much for this country’s progress, Justice Roberts.
Fifty years later, black boys like Trayvon Martin are still the object of hate and prejudicial motives, targets of intimidation and threatening behavior simply because of their black skin.
The dream that Dr. King and others fought for we are still fighting today. America hasn’t come that far from the days of waterhoses and police dogs reigning terror on young black people standing up for their civil rights. Those days come back to haunt when you have a professional football player like Riley Cooper goes out publicly and calls out ‘every N…. here” and receives a slap on the wrist fine and gives us a fake apology.
For minorities, particularly African Americans, it’s been hard to believe in the American Dream when the right to vote continues to be a stiff-arm test. King, Andrew Young, Thurgood Marshall, Julian Bond, John Lewis, Rev. Ralph Abernathy and thousands of other civil rights activists laid their lives on the line just to get the Voting Rights Act passed.
Fifty years after Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” poll tests, literary tests, have been replaced by state-by-state legislation to try to block people from voting. What’s going on in North Carolina and Texas today are perfect examples of this.
It didn’t help when the U.S. Supreme Court voted to strip key components of the Voting Rights Act, leaving states with racist agendas to block voting power from people of color. The land of the free has become the land of the privilege, power and those in control. This country will never really change unless it confronts its racist past in order to move into the future the right way.
The reason race continues to rear its ugly head is because the country refuses to acknowledge this problem. Paula Deen, Riley Cooper, Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman, the Supreme Court’s ruling on Voting Rights Act and Affirmative Action…see a pattern? But there are a lot more issues Americans have to deal with. There’s gender inequity. There’s age and disability discrimination going on. Education discrepancies remain.
King fought the good fight. He changed the course of America. But at the end of the day, as much as we’ve come forward, the dream is still quite far from being actually realized.
Dennis has covered and written about politics, crime, race, sports, and entertainment. Dennis currently covers the NFL, MLB, NBA, NCAA, and Olympic sports. Dennis is the editor of News4usonline.com and serves as the publisher of the Compton Bulletin newspaper. He earned a journalism degree from Howard University. Email Dennis at dfreeman@news4usonline.com
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