My confession for MLK day.
It was the 1960's, and I was just a little boy growing up in the Midwest. The area I lived in, and the school I attended, were overwhelmingly white. There were only three black kids in the entire elementary school. One of them, Mike, was one of my best friends.
Mike and I did all the things you would expect of little boys. In the sweltering Midwest summers we would strip off our shirts and play with the garden hose to cool off. We would ride our bikes together, zooming down the hills pretending to be fighter pilots, or astronauts. We climbed trees, played cowboys and indians, and on cool summer evenings we were always up for a game of kick-the-can.
One afternoon Mike, myself, and a group of other neighborhood kids were playing in the trees near our home. We were calling each other names, flexing our vocabulary of cuss-words, not really comprehending the true meaning of those words, but I'm sure we thought it made us sound grown up. The sounds of words like "shit-for-brains", "son-of-a-bitch", and "fucker" reverberated through the trees, interspersed with the hilarious laughter that only kids can make.
Then it happened. To this day I don't even remember the name Mike had called me. But I do remember that as I laughed and took the insult, I shot back at him with, "Yeah? Well you're a nigger". I meant no real malice by it, it was just another of the words I had heard the grown-ups use.
It was as if I had kicked him in the gut. The other kids were continuing to laugh and call each other names, unaware that anything had happened. But Mike and I were frozen in time, staring at each other. He was trying to be strong, but I could see the tears welling up in his eyes. I just stood there with a dumbfounded look on my face, trying to figure out what, exactly, was so wrong. Mike couldn't keep up his brave facade any longer, as a tear rolled down his cheek he turned and ran home.
I didn't really understand why, but I knew that I had hurt him deeply. I had called him names before, once I even hit him too hard while we were playing and made him cry. But this was something different. This was much, much worse. I felt horrible.
I won't go into all the details of what happened next. Suffice it to say that both Mike and I had good parents that handled the situation with the appropriate amount of compassion, understanding, and discipline. We also had an excellent elementary school teacher that got involved and helped me to understand the horrible way our history had treated people like Mike, and how we continued to treat them.
I think that over the years I have come to have a better understanding of what transpired that day in the woods. It wasn't really the word that had caused Mike to cry. It was the idea that, even if only subconciously, I still saw him as "different" than the rest of us, solely because of the color of his skin. To this day I will not stand idly by when I hear people talking in a bigoted way. But neither will I lash out and start calling them names. I always try to help them understand how much damage thier careless words can bring. You see, through his pain, Mike had given me a great gift that day. The gift of understanding.
So today is MLK day. It is the day we should remember the great struggles of the Civil Rights movement, and the history that made that movement necessary. We must also remember that this is an ongoing struggle, we still have a long way to go, no matter what the politicians and the polls may say.
But more importantly, we must remember that Civil Rights isn't just about laws written in books in some statehouse or on capitol hill. It is a struggle of ideas. A struggle that each and every one of us must live every day. We need to recognize in ourselves that we have a natural "tribal" instinct that draws us to people that look, talk, act, and think like us. We need to fight these primitive instincts and use our capacity for knowledge and compassion to embrace all of humanity. As Gandhi said, "We must become the change we wish to see in the world".
By the way, Mike and I eventually shook and made up. We continued to be friends. He never really held it against me. We continued to play baseball in the summer and have snowball fights in the winter. But it was never exactly the way it was before. Something indefinable had been lost between us.
Perhaps it was our innocence.