As we were having coffee together this morning, my wife asked me, half-facetiously, how I intended to spend Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. She knew I was mostly thinking about the Busoni review I had to knock out before the end of the day. In fact, I’d never given her question any thought before.
The first Martin Luther King, Jr. Day occurred while I was still in pre-school. Only vague memories linger now of coloring exercises featuring Dr. King’s face and of a song about him that we learned (and I’ve since forgotten). These and my elementary school years don’t seem so far away in time, despite the passing of over forty years. Reflecting on it, though, they really were different times.
I recall my second grade teacher, a snow-haired woman, with features like cut glass, and piercing eyes of sapphire behind massive Sally Jessy Raphael-style glasses. To me she was kind; it was because of her that I was moved into a program for gifted children, but she was also of her time in ways that today are less appealing. She was the last teacher I encountered who used corporal punishment. (I well recall the large wooden paddle that she kept hung next to her desk.)
An event I still remember vividly was our first day of second grade. Each student was asked to introduce themselves. At one point, a friend of mine, a girl of mixed parentage got up to speak. Our teacher immediately noticed her appearance and asked about her parents — where were they from? When my friend said that her father was Vietnamese and her mother was white, our teacher’s face quickly turned red. “It’s because of people like your mother and little half-breeds like you that this country lost the war”, presumably in reference to the Vietnam War. My friend, who was probably as confused about what had just happened as the rest of us, simply sobbed.
Decades later, I was out on a date with an Asian girl I’d met online. We were having dinner at a steakhouse and things were going very well. At one point a server arrived and, noticing his faulty English, I began to speak to him in fluent Spanish. Out of my periphery I could see that my date’s demeanor changed. As soon as the server left, she asked me where I’d learn to speak Spanish so well. “What do you mean where I learned?”, I replied. “From my parents — they wouldn’t let me speak anything else at home.” Apparently, this was the wrong answer. “You’re not white?”, she asked me. No, I told her, I’m Hispanic; my parents are from Chile. A frost set in between us. “I thought you were white”, she said before continuing: “I wouldn’t have replied to you if I’d known you weren’t.” A lot of feelings swelled in me at that moment, a lot of things that I was desperate to loose from my mouth. But somehow I maintained my composure and just chuckled. “Oh, I see”, I told her. A few awkward minutes passed. Then I excused myself to go to the men’s room. When I turned the corner, I headed instead back towards the entrance. Our server was standing there with the maître d’. I thanked him, gave him a substantial tip, then told him that I needed to leave, but that my friend would cover the bill for us both. Not my finest moment, but I behaved better than my initial impulses were imploring me to do.
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” As is evident from attacks on his legacy from both sides of the political spectrum, we now have the luxury of being able to take Dr. King’s hope for granted. Despite the differences, resentments, envy, and manipulated polarization, today we largely live together far more peacefully than at any point before in history. We’ve come a long way from a time when the likes of Johnny Otis had to cross state lines in order to find a jurisdiction that would grant a marriage license to an interracial couple. Dr. King may not have lived to see it, and although a lot of it has yet to be fully realized, much of his vision came true after all.
So my Filipina wife and I will quietly celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day — with gratitude for the ordinary joys we enjoy today, which are the result of the struggles of a past for whom such things could only be dreams.