Martin luther King’s ideal is work in progress
It was 50 years ago on August 28 that Martin luther King made the iconic “I have a dream” speech. Since then, a lot has changed in the US. Racial discrimination is no longer as rampant, ‘Afro-Asians’ and ‘Afro-Americans’ rub shoulders with White citizens of the country and are placed in important positions of power. President Barack Obama is as scintillating an example as any of that. Only years ago, nobody would have imagined that a Black could occupy the White House. The President, therefore, has every reason to boast that King would have been “amazed in many ways about the progress that we've made”. In the past five decades, Governments and the people in the US have worked to convert King's dream into a reality. Yet, for all the hard work that they have put and the impressive legislations that they have endorsed to strengthen the concept of equality among human beings, glitches have remained; and so have the fault-lines. There may not be official segregation on the basis of skin colour either at workplaces or at residential colonies, but the unfortunate fact is that many people continue to harbour strong prejudices and that gets reflected in the way they behave or formulate their opinions. Take the Trayvon Martin case, which has rekindled a fierce debate in the US about how socially egalitarian society really is. Martin was stalked and shot dead by a neighbourhood watch, George Zimmerman, who said he had responded in self-defence. He went on trial and was exonerated by a local court only a few weeks ago. While the judges rebuffed the charge that Zimmerman had acted out of racial spite, his acquittal raised a storm and the accusation that a Black in Zimmerman's place would not have got such generous treatment from the court. While there is no evidence that the court was prejudiced, the doubt has stuck. Mr Obama even empathised with Martin's fate and said the boy “could have been me 35 years ago”.
It would not have made King proud to know that people of Asian origin are still targeted by hate-mongers in his beloved country. He would have hanged his head in shame over the killings and physical assaults by radicals who still live in a self-constructed world of racial superiority that looks down on people who do not match their idea of mankind. He would not have been pleased to notice how over-zealous some Government servants are in conducting a campaign of racial profiling, humiliating people from across the world, especially from Muslim countries, at US airports. let alone a Shah Rukh Khan, even a world-renowned figure such as former Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam gets frisked and doubly frisked after he is asked to de-board a flight — simply because he happens to have a ‘suspect' name. Every time such things happen, the Americans are quick to apologise, but that changes nothing on the ground. Sadly, discriminations also flourish in Mahatma Gandhi’s country.