Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Mikaela says:
Building off a tragedy -- he was 39! Only 39! He'd only be 77 today! -- I'm trying to make the most of this memorial holiday.

As Maggie reminds us, we're supposed to use tragedy to grow.

So this is probably the first MLK Jr. day that I remember that has me mesmerized with tractor-beam intensity on the amazing phenomena of the layering of cultures in America. On the surface -- white America, with its focus on money and power and consumption. Enveloped within it, cultures without whiteness at the center -- black, Hispanic, Asian, and on and on. Living in the same or neighboring spaces but embuing them with different cultural meanings, using them through different cultural practices, using tactics to distinguish identity and steal power to transmute it to serve other cultures. And grow different sources of power within. The more room these cultures make for themselves in shared spaces, the more mainstream culture will turn from a bastion of whiteness to a truly multicultural society.

I was watching the Kings of Comedy yesterday. Talk about a prescient analysis of race relations! I had the strangest visceral sensation of truly understanding my grandfather's racism. Yes it's irrational and loathesome, but for the first time, I understood that what he fears is what will happen. Black culture is vibrant and beautiful, and it will take room and take power from white culture.

Watching these smart, funny, powerful men, I knew how much my grandfather would fear them and why. They do represent change, which for those currently in power, means a loss. But for the rest of us, it means progress. Evolution. The opportunity for learning. For embracing and celebrating cultures different from our own but with a wealth of information and understanding and prayers and connections that we don't all have access to on our own.

And the truth of it is that white people are at a disadvantage because we do not have the experience of living in multiple cultures simultaneously. People of color live every day sailing through each moment on multiple levels of awareness, a part of the surface reality that privileges whiteness -- still after all these years and so much work and so much death -- while working within and enriching their own cultures. They understand multiple levels of symbolism and multi-level communication. What do most white people know or experience about other cultures? At most, we're tourists, buying our way in. Peeping Toms. Think about how much more people of color understand about white culture than the other way around.

Of course it doesn't have to be this way. And it won't be this way for too much longer. The objective truth is that minorities are fast becoming majorities in America, and power and wealth will not be too far behind. For those of us white liberals who believe in embracing other cultures -- learning through others -- because we are all people at the same time as we have unique and sustainable cultures -- we have the time and opportunity to do our parts to learn about other cultures through experiencing them.

It's one thing to do research the way some anthropologist would -- and how weird is that concept? Whole white institutions constructed to study otherness to keep it academic and foreign -- but as one member of a living culture engaged in another living culture. Not to take it over but to experience it as a simultaneous and equal reality. Isn't that what equality will mean? Shared cultural knowledge. Not necessarily shared cultures, but a world that's truly multicultural. Where all cultures are operating with the same power in the same spaces.

When I think about the places where this happens now -- the spoken word cultural scene, for example -- they are all places of incredible creativity and energy. Perhaps openness to other cultures translates to an openness to knowledge of the world that is beyond our individual understanding. We are all made up of the same particles, aren't we? Love is at the center of all we do no matter what color we are, isn't it?

And wasn't that MLK's message? That to be enlightened was to fight for equality because we are all equal, even though we may come from different cultures. What I understood, thanks to my racist grandfather and five wise Kings, is that it's truly not about skin color; it's about cultural knowledge.

The solution for one is the solution for all in the sense that throwing off the balance makes more room for everyone. "Injustice anywhere threatens injustice everywhere." And vice versa. Making room for one culture anywhere makes room for all cultures everywhere.

The school bell is tolling for me; it's time to learn.