Many people working for justice today stand on
the shoulders of Martin Luther King, Jr., but I believe King's vision
of justice is often gravely limited and misunderstood. Too many
people thought then, and continue to think, that King's statements
regarding justice were only about race and the African-American
community. We fail to see how King's vision of inclusion and community
is far wider that we might have once imagined.
For King, justice was more than a racial issue, more
than a legal or moral issue. Justice was a human issue. And this
was evident in King's passionate concern about a wide range of concerns:
"The revolution for human rights is opening up unhealthy areas
in American life and permitting a new and wholesome healing to take
place," King once told a racially-mixed audience. "Eventually
the civil rights movement will have contributed infinitely more
to the nation than the eradication of racial injustice."
Moral leadership played a profound role in the justice
work that King did. He argued that true moral leadership must involve
itself in the situations of all who are damned, disinherited, disrespected,
and dispossessed, and moral leadership must be part of a participatory
government that is feverishly working to dismantle the existing
discriminatory laws that truncate full participation in the fight
to advance democracy. And surely part of our job in keeping King's
dream alive is also to work to dismantle discriminatory laws and
dehumanizing structures.
But if King were among us today, he would say that
it is not enough just to look outside ourselves to see the places
where society is broken. It is not enough to talk about institutions
and workplaces that fracture and separate people based on race,
religion, gender, and sexual orientation. We must also look at the
ways that we ourselves manifest these bigotries, how we are the
very ones who uphold and are part of these institutions and workplaces.
Often, we find that these institutions and workplaces
are broken, dysfunctional, and wounded in the very same ways that
we are. The structures we have created are mirrors not of who we
want to be, but of who we really are.
King would remind each of us that we cannot heal the
world if we have not healed ourselves. So perhaps the greatest task,
and the most difficult work we must do in light of King's teachings,
is to heal ourselves. And this work must be done in relationship
with our justice work in the world.
In The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
said that the world breaks us all, but some of us grow strong in
those broken places. King’s teachings invite us to grow
strong in our broken places - not only to mend the sin-sick world
in which we live, but also to mend the sin-sick world that we carry
around within us. And we can only do that if we are willing to look
both inward and outward, healing ourselves of the bigotry, biases,
and the demons that chip away at our efforts to work toward justice
in this world. And our differences have been used to divide us instead
of unite us, so consequently we reside in a society were human brokenness,
human isolation and human betrayal are played out everyday.
I know that the struggle against racism that
King talked about is only legitimate if I am also fighting anti-Semitism,
homophobia, sexism, classism - not only out in the world but
also in myself. Otherwise, I am creating an ongoing cycle of abuse
that goes on unexamined and unaccounted for.
We are foolish if we think we can heal the world and
not ourselves. And we delude ourselves if we think that King was
only talking about the woundedness of institutional racism, and
not the personal wounds we all carry as human beings.
Ironically, our culture of woundedness and victimization
has bonded us together in brokenness. The sharing of worlds to depict
and honor our pain has created a new language of intimacy, a bonding
ritual that allows us to talk across and among our pains. In exploring
our common wounds, we sometimes feel more able to find the trust
and the understanding that eludes us as "healthy" people.
When we bond in these unhealthy ways we miss opportunities
in ourselves for moral leadership, and to work collaboratively with
others to effect change in seemingly small ways that eventually lead
to big outcomes.
Both Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. were leaders
in the Montgomery bus boycott in challenging Alabama’s Jim
Crow laws. Both were working together for a desired outcome,
and they could not have done it without each other.
Had Rosa Parks not sat down by refusing her seat to
a white man that day on the bus in December 1955, King could not
have stood up, which catapulted the civil rights movement.
Each
year, I mark the Martin Luther King holiday by reexamining myself
in light of King’s teachings. And in so doing, I try to uncover
not only the ways in which the world breaks me, but also how it
breaks other people that keeps us fractured instead of united
toward a common goal - a multicultural democracy.
I believe that when we use our gifts in the service
of others as King has taught us, we then shift the paradigm of personal
brokenness to personal healing. We also shift the paradigm of
looking for moral leadership from outside of ourselves to within
ourselves; thus, realizing we are not only the agents of change
in society, but also the moral leader we have been looking for.
Our job, therefore, in keeping King's dream alive
is to remember that our longing for social justice is also inextricably
tied to our longing for personal healing.
The Rev. Irene Monroe teaches religion at
the Center Associate of Multicultural & Spiritual Programming
at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, MA. She can be reached at
[email protected]. |