It's Hard to Remember the "Dream" When You're Awake

It's Hard to Remember the "Dream" When You're Awake



-Khalilah Sabra (published by MAS)



No matter what hopes were stirred in America decades ago - no matter what progress evolved from civil rights legislation or where civil leadership sparked the moral will to act to end age-old prejudice and segregation - a different reality is now in place.

As Americans celebrate the principles embodied in a man who was one among several activists and young idealists, a portion of this nation's people will find it difficult to connect the past to the present.




Dr. King is typically known to Americans as a decent but incredibly predictable and rather somber human being, who did a certain amount "good" for his own, adhered at all times to peaceful means, and never became impatient with white people. However, commemorations have historically fallen short of honoring the characteristics that make him genuinely great and worth our respect. One of these facts, for instance, is that King, while peaceful in his tactics and loyal to the principles of Gandhi and Tolstoy, was nonetheless a revolutionary and an unbending man who fought against enormous hostilities and broke unjust laws, spent months in jail to dramatize the limits of conventional efforts carried out under the law, and called on the rest of the nation to find the courage to do the same. He encouraged our citizens to ask what it means to be a "free" or "unfree" person in a nation that revokes freedom to its most marginalized citizens. Biographies generally make reference to this work but then divert us to less actionable items, the part that makes his name important in the history of ideas and renders him an influential moral force in almost every comer of the earth.

Dr. King straightforwardly spoke his mind about the U. S. role in promoting unnecessary and inexcusable destruction in Vietnam and in other parts of Southeast Asia. He frequently expressed his moral outrage at the fact that President Lyndon Johnson lied -first to the nation, then to the entire world - as he spoke of peace while dropping bombs on innocent civilians. King was enraged by this country's toleration of racial inequality and economic injustice and he defied the U.S. government in the most dramatic way he knew. "America," said Dr. King, "is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." He spoke these words on June 4, 1967. Ten months later, a sharpshooter in Memphis would prove his words correct by killing him.




Our leaders would do well, this day and in this time, to share the profound convictions that were honest reflections of the character of Dr. King; not the sanitized version of a prize-winning preacher, but the story of a man who believed that exaggerated politics of identity should not prevent solidarity between people with different experiences; a man whose dream did not envision unhyphenated Americanism. The core of King's noble vision was unity constructed by composing into a harmonious whole the best qualities that each contributing group has to offer.

We pay King homage now but, like so many rebels, King was thoroughly detested by many of his fellow citizens. Once dead, American leaders and critics proclaimed him to be a brilliant peacemaker. It seems to be a rule of thumb in the United States, as in most other nations, that the only acceptable rebel, one whose greatness is most certain and untainted, is a dead one. But what about King's dream? The unrelenting reminders of America's racist past present a serious challenge to the hope that many hold for a nation that has yet to live out its most cherished values - liberty and justice for all - and to those who feel challenged forces in our society, today, who see no reason to regret a pattern of reversion to an older order of accepted bigotry of minorities and even find it possible to ridicule the notion that discrimination has a damaging effect upon the entire nation. Forces that have created the current wave of anti-mosque protests around the country and represent a new threat to the religious freedom of Muslims in America. Forces who hold the religion of 1.5 billion people responsible for the terrible deed of nineteen.




The circumstances surrounding that terrible event were, perhaps, beyond human control but the conduct that followed was within our own power.




Incidents of discrimination and bias aimed at Muslim Americans have been rising since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Anti-Muslim rhetoric, contrived to inflict a biased system of justice - one that manipulates how we think about "those people" who are "not like us."




Islamophobia allows threats that were once secret and unaccepted to be either open and socially acceptable or tolerated; either way, not sufficiently challenged or denounced.




Martin Luther King's Dream has taken an ominous turn as a growing number of political leaders have begun to denounce Muslim Americans who have been loyal and engaged citizens in the U.S. for generations. Now would be a good time for activists of conscience to speak out against anti-Muslim rhetoric and speak up for diversity, equality, religious freedom, and for a dream that has yet to become a reality for some.