April is the month in which Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. We are reminded of his heroic efforts in spreading his dreams of a better world, one that promoted more love and acceptance. He, along with several other important figures such as Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks, lived in a time that promoted hatred, racism, segregation, and violent acts against people who were deemed inferior to the white population of America.
The year 1968 was a politically tense and unstable period. Urban riots were taking place in neighborhoods experiencing extreme poverty, crime, and exclusion from their surrounding cities. The blame for the outbursts of violence was primarily put on the black community- it was somehow their fault for the conditions they were being forced to live in. To believe non-white people are responsible for not aiming towards higher education, not having a permanent job, and not living in a clean and safe neighborhood is ignoring the white-supremacist efforts that are still being implemented to push them farther away from society.
No one likes to take responsibility for their privilege. President Lyndon B. Johnson himself wasn’t pleased with the results the commission board presented in the Kerner Report, even though he was the one who had ordered the investigations to take place. Instead of changing policies and the way society is racially structured, we end up in a cycle of ignorance, or rather indifference.
It’s been 50 years since the Kerner Report was released. Segregation is illegal, but racism and discrimination thrive. There is an underlying force to why urban slums are made up of minorities. Proper development in these areas lacks in providing healthy living conditions. Public housing projects such as the 1950’s experiment of Pruitt Igoe only appear to offer better living standards for people who have been exposed to concentrated levels of poverty and crime but instead trap them under the same conditions.
The Kerner Report and Pruitt Igoe are both dated projects. In 2018, racism is something to fear of once again, though one might argue it was never gone to begin with.
Police brutality specifically targets young black men, and incarcerating them is a way to justify taking their rights away. They are shot and killed effortlessly, while white mass murderers are merely placed in handcuffs, protected, and kept alive. We must ask ourselves: how does an unarmed black man like Stephon Clark get shot and killed by police officers, while an armed white man who kills over 17 high school students get safely escorted by police officers?
The injustice and corruption that runs in this world can be enough to turn many bitter. MLK knew fighting darkness with darkness was not the answer. But perhaps worse is meeting darkness with silence.
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
