King Day Celebration
By: Brian Parks
On Monday, January 21st, at 1:26 PM, I received an email in my Inbox “from” President Alice Gast, informing me of the University’s Martin Luther King, Jr. celebrations. Amongst the festivities were a website, the creation of a Council for Equity and Community, and a performance dubbed “Rap Sessions” brought to our attention by Calvin-John Smiley.
The website’s URL is http://www.lehigh.edu/~inking/, enjoying a position next to other administrative websites such as the Registrar’s Office (~inrgs) and the Bursar’s Office (~inburs). In other words, a day is almost as important in the day-to-day functioning as the offices that deal with the financial and academic records of the University’s student body. I’m still waiting for the Columbus Day website.
The Council for Equity and Community “encourages the Lehigh community to move toward a deeper understanding of the world around them, recognizing and promoting activities such as research and scholarship, community service and co-curricular programming,” according to the hurriedly put-together site at http://www.lehigh.edu/~indiv/. An infinitude of points can be made about efforts such as these.
One such argument is the “reverse racism” argument. By singling out members of other races as being different, and thus recognizing that they need to be better included, it implies first that members of other races are different and that they are excluded for that reason. Most of the efforts to reduce this issue focus on the exclusion and create policy intended to specifically include such people, in effect singling them out even more. The real issue is the assumption that members of other races are different. While this is undoubtedly true, there is a distinction that needs to be made between “different” and “inferior.”
The “Rap Sessions” promoted and scheduled by Calvin-John Smiley and coordinated in conjunction with the Office of Multicultural Affairs are an interesting twist on the King Day themes. Traditionally, King Day is intended as a day to remember Martin Luther King, Jr. (in whatever way you choose) for what he did for the African American community in the 1960s. “Rap Sessions,” however, was simply one more performance in a series of several rap artists sponsored by the same group of individuals, departments, and offices, all of which have been funded extensively by the Visiting Lecturers Committee and the President’s Office.
This unorthodox set of festivities in celebration of King brings into consideration what we are really celebrating. There are those of us who look further into King’s history than the short narrative we are given in elementary school and judge his character based on other less-honorable moments in his life and ask why we are told only the “good parts.” The answer is quite simple: Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.
This phenomenon is by no means new. The assassination of John F. Kennedy immediately martyred him. Abraham Lincoln was never intended to become President, but his assassination made him nearly as legendary as George Washington. Even Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian prince whose assassination started World War I, is primarily remembered simply because he was shot.
Thus, is it really necessary to celebrate Martin Luther King Day? He did bring to light the situation African Americans were enduring; he did “have a dream.” He should certainly be remembered, but does a day need to be named in his memory, or is it enough to mention him in his place in American history? After all, we don’t celebrate John F. Kennedy Day or Franz Ferdinand Day.
While the answer to the above question is not very clear-cut, I think we can agree that spending an egregious amount of money on all the events mentioned above, in addition to bringing Jonathan Kozol to campus as the keynote speaker, specifically for a single day in the middle of January, is unnecessary.
