MLK

Martin Luther King Day is one of my favorites, I think because many people don't like it. I remember when Gov. Meacham of Arizona rescinded the holiday in 1987 and took a super sized beating, culminating in a class A bitch slapping at the hands of Ted Koppel. Never challenge Ted's fact checking, that should be tattooed on the flabby butt cheeks of everyone who appears on his show.

At work today one of my cohorts mentioned in a rather offhand way that MLK Day should somehow be a little more special to me, seeing as how it's really a civil rights holiday. Pissed me off a little bit, but rather than go into that I mentioned that Martin Luther King represented rights for blacks, not Indians or Latinos. I'm phrasing badly, but I don't by any stretch mean to imply that he was not seeking equal treatment for everyone, just that there was not One Big Civil Rights Movement in the '60's, there were several which were attempting to achieve separate goals.

Whites in this country (or the dominant culture, whatever's more reverse-PC for you) have treated blacks and Indians in completely different ways. The goal towards blacks was always to exclude, keep them separate. The goal in regards to Indians was to force us to assimilate and become whites (that is, when the goal was not genocide). Vine Deloria characterized it as the difference between being viewed as domestic animals which must be kept outside vs. wild animals which must be tamed. In terms of civil rights movements, blacks were seeking equal status, while we were seeking to be left the hell alone.

I'm not really going anywhere with this, except to point out that minorities are not all the same and should not be treated as such.