How discouraging to read in the Anchorage Daily News this morning that Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was a “rallying cry for black Americans and a classic of world oratory.”
Really? Is that all? Just for black people? Just oratory?
I thought it was for everybody.
A few years ago I listened to a talk by writer Rudolfo Anaya that woke me up to the tyranny of prejudice on both ends of our political spectrum.
Anaya, a Hispanic man born in New Mexico in 1937 who never spoke or read or wrote English until he went to school, has written a roomful of beautiful books—novels, children’s books, non-fiction, anthologies, poetry, and plays.
He said the great civil-war era poet Walt Whitman made him want to be a writer and gave him his first generous understanding of America—its endless varieties and its inclusiveness.
In school in the American southwest and then often throughout his career, Anaya was discouraged to be told that Whitman belonged to a different America than he did, because Whitman was a white man of one of America’s founding generations. For Anaya’s voice to be authentic, literary gatekeepers of the right and the left told him, he’d have to leave Whitman behind. Whitman did not belong to him.
Listening to Anaya, I realized I had the same problem. The America inside me is so very much Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. Never mind that they are “white-headed men from the east coast,” and I will never be anything but one out of three of those things.
I claim their voices—the celebration of America’s clamor and trade, the silence of a forest profound with mortality, the bodies on our many battlefields, the road not taken—because I am a human being, and I can take the experiences of others in my country into my treasure trove.
Are we a country where only Native Americans can learn from Native Americans, only women can speak for women? That is the tyranny of the “politically correct.”
Separate is never equal. Do we wish to be parallel Americas, with fortifications raised around each ethnicity and each gender and each geography so that no one, no experience, no wisdom can get out or in?
We should be suspicious of reparations and special accommodations made on purely racial grounds—as voices on the right suggest—because of their power to trade past injustice for a present injustice that will fester in us and our children. But there’s a wall on the left, too, that doesn’t let us walk with each other, speak for each other, express the pain and wonder of coming to understand each other. We should not erase history, or cease to acknowledge that terrible things have happened, or allow ourselves to give up on the striving toward “justice for all” which we mouth each time we turn to the flag. All these things belong to all of us.