Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

On the way home from gymnastics and ballet today, I forced the kids to listen to MLK Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech, which was broadcast in its entirety on NPR. Yes, I know -- a three year old and a five year old aren't exactly the target audience that NPR was going for, but I was both emotionally and academically struck by the broadcast.

As a person who's written a fair bit on race and religion, and whose grad school education also focused on this, I was experiencing a certain amount of dissonance as I thought over the covert racist structures that are repeatedly duplicated and reinvented within American culture, yet I was also struck by the strides made, the fact that Annemarie and Cole (and undoubtedly, Micah with them) have friends of all colors and backgrounds and they think nothing of it. This was so unlike my childhood, which happened in a place that a sociologist friend tells me is one of the whitest free-standing (ie, not a suburb of a larger, more racially diverse city) cities in America.

Was it this dissonance, this concern for the hiddenness of racial structures everywhere, the awareness of my absolutely racist experiences as a child, that caused me to discuss the topic of racism with my children in the car? Annemarie was at first absolutely uninterested in the topic, and kept going on and on about how i had forgotten to pick up Craisins at the store. Cole, who is learning that winning my favor has much to do with patronizing my rants, reassured me that I should go on, because he was listening.

So between the Craisins and Cole, I talked about who MLK was, why he was dead, what he believed in. Cole chimed in that the bad king Herod had killed him; I was struck by so much there, but said little except that I couldn't remember the name of the man who had killed him, but I was fairly certain it wasn't Herod.

At this point, we were silent for just a moment, just at the same moment that MLK spoke that he had a dream that little black children and little white children might hold hands some day. And I thought of how we had just left the gym where Annemarie and her friend Maggie, an African American, had just been holding hands during a rousing rendition of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" as they giggled almost uncontrollably, attempting to shake each others' heads off. That, after all, is how you warm up in preparation for gymnastics.

So I mentioned that to Annemarie -- that MLK had had a dream that she was now a part of. She stopped talking about dried fruit for a second, confused -- what had she been a part of? I explained that she and Maggie together was a sign of something good. She then told me that she guessed it had never occurred to her that Maggie was different in any way that would matter (she didn't say it lke that, of course, but that was the gist). Of course, she knew that her skin was different than Maggie's, but why would that make a difference?

I love how children's questions interrogate so much.