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January 13, 2006
Red Alert
by Soren Wuerth

As Unequal As Ever

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letters from Birmingham Jail.”

     “Why is it called a hate crime when someone beats up a nigger but not when a white guy gets beat up?” a teacher asked me the other night.

     I tried to stifle my disbelief and to calm the anger welling in me. I told myself he was trying to provoke me, the lone “liberal” in the school.

     “It’s called a hate crime no matter what color a person’s skin,” I said.

     “Yeah, but, white guys are always getting beat up in black neighborhoods. There are some places you can’t go!” he said.

     “You are assuming, first of all, that society treats everyone equally,” I replied, “but blacks, as a race, are more frequently the victims of all attacks. Growing up African American means, for example, that you have a one-in-four likelihood of becoming incarcerated.”

     I made an excuse and headed for the door.

     “I taught in this school in the Lower 48 and black kids always scored lower on tests. They were in the same school, with the same teachers, but, for some reason, they just scored lower,” he said.

     I slipped into my coat and left.

     It was a week before Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday when these racist remarks rained on me; vicious barbed needles that don’t ever come out. I had just read again about those folks in Mississippi, whose homes are now being razed for new development, who are living eight-to-a-room in motels outside New Orleans and wondering, as they cash their $60 FEMA checks, why America has so forgotten them.

     “Whenever you segregate a minority you inevitably discriminate against that minority. That’s the issue,” Dr. King said.

     America is as segregated as ever—segregated school systems, segregated by income, segregated Native communities, and so segregated still that there are people today who can grow up, go to college, and become teachers within a confined white enclave of privilege, ignorant to injustice, naive to inequality.

     Dear Martin, I’m sorry to say “machines and computers, profit motives and property rights” are still “considered more important than people” and militarism, materialism and racism have not waned since a gunman took your life, but have increased. Worse, yet, your message has been diluted. You are commonly remembered by most Americans for having a utopian dream; and not for the real disease that you discovered lurking, a toxin, in bowels of purple mountain majesty—inequality.

     And we are as unequal as ever.

     “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring,” you said at the Riverside Church in 1967.

     We have restructured nothing.

     Martin, we need you more than ever. We need someone to lead us into the teeth, once again, of the oppressor, who has grown more savage, more hideous, more pervasive, more popular, and more cunning; someone to lead us nonviolently past the phalanx of the security apparatus, into the heart of our capitals, into the wicked pulse of power.

     “Stand UP!” you thundered.

     So, what are we going to do?








Soren Wuerth is perhaps Alaska's best known community activist. He resides in an undisclosed location in rural Alaska and can be reached at soren@insurgent49.com.
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in-sur-gent (in sur'jent), n. 1. a member of a group which revolts against the policies of its leadership.