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Are we still a city of “wide streets and narrow minds”?
Just in time for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the issue of continuing racism in Fort Collins has resurfaced. As often happens, when unwanted messages disturb our comfort zone, some of us want to shoot the messenger – in this case, Ken Gordon Jr., former chair of the city’s Human Relations Commission.
Mr. Gordon recently resigned – as did the commission’s vice-chair – to jar the community out of its denial of local racial discrimination, and to protest the deafening silence of most City Council members over the proposed Human Rights Protection Ordinance. For raising these issues, Mr. Gordon has received many e-mails and letters encouraging him to leave town, and Mayor Martinez in essence called him a “quitter.”
Here in the Fort, we like to believe we are beyond racism. After all, our mayor’s named Martinez, the long-time leader of CSU, Albert Yates, is African-American, and we put “Eracism” bumper stickers on our cars. So all is well, right? Wrong.
When white folks don’t see racism, and people of color do, believe the people of color. After all, they’re the ones on the receiving end of the racial slurs, the beatings, the harassment and the discrimination. White skin privilege is so pervasive, and we are so conditioned to it from birth, that we barely notice it. We don’t get stopped by the cops for “driving while black”, being in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time, speaking the wrong language or the hundred other slings and arrows of daily humiliation still visited on communities of color.
Some whites now see themselves as victims of “reverse discrimination,” but ongoing studies don’t support this claim. For example, with two identical resumes differing only in that one features a “white-sounding” and one a “black-sounding” name, the “white” resume gets significantly better results. Studies of mortgage loans and housing sales yield the same results. Sad to say, racism is alive and well in America today.
American history is like a race in which some of the participants were forced to run the first half in chains. After much protest, the race was halted and the chains removed. Clearly, those penalized should be allowed to move up to even the race. But opponents of affirmative action claim that would be unfair since we’re all color-blind now, and we should just resume the contest with everyone in their current places.
People who fought King in life now salute a sanitized version of him in death. They misconstrue his ‘Dream’ speech in which he imagines a day when his children will be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, by pretending that day has already arrived. King championed affirmative action precisely to help us get to such a day.
Towards the end of his life, King broadened his work from promoting civil rights to opposing the Vietnam War and organizing a multi-racial Poor People’s Campaign. He came to realize racial harmony would not be possible without uprooting the related evils of materialism, militarism, and US intervention overseas. That’s why sentiments like these are often left out of tamed, official King celebrations:
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
“We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation…History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate.”
“I do not believe our nation can be a moral leader of justice, equality, and democracy if it is trapped in the role of a self-appointed world policeman.”
So how do we move forward from here? For starters, let’s stop being defensive by denying there is a problem. Let’s pass the Human Right Protection Ordinance so we don’t turn all our cops into Immigration Officers. Let’s listen with open hearts and open minds to our Black, Latino, Asian-American and Native-American brothers and sisters, and see where it leads us.
Mr. Gordon, on behalf of the community, I apologize to you and your family for what you had to go through. Thank you for your good efforts, and best of luck to you.
Eric Fried can be reached at eric@pvgreens.org
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