The Dream Fulfilled Essay Contest

Being one who more or less likes to write, I had to try my hand at the essay contest being held at SJRCC. I don't know if my entry is what they were expecting, but here it is.

Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream of equality, true equality, for his people. Now, some forty years after Dr. King’s dream struck the spark that ignited a people’s passion for freedom and equality, we have an African-American president: Barack Obama. Has his election fulfilled Dr. King’s ultimate dream of true equality for all? While it is most certainly a giant step in that direction, I must submit that it has not. I do not believe that there is true equality yet, and maybe never will be, at least not in our lifetimes.
The reason I believe this way is simple: as painful as it might be to admit, we are all still racist to some degree. I don’t mean the cruel, hate-filled connotations that one usually associates with the word, such as Klan members in their white sheets, or Black Panthers rebelling against whitey (although unfortunately, remnants of these out-of-date philosophies still hang on), I mean the way we look at and refer to ourselves in the most fundamental manner. We tend to classify ourselves by and be proud of our heritage, whether we are Black, White, Asian, Native American or whatever, which is fine in and of itself, but we don’t see a man standing in front of us, we see a black man, a white man, a red man. Even though we are well on our way to judging a man not by the color of his skin, but by his accomplishments and his character, we still see the skin. We are still in a stage where we remind ourselves that it is the first African-American coach to win the Super Bowl; the first African-American man to lead the Republican Party; the first African-American President of the United States. We still rely on affirmative action programs to project the image of equality for not only African-Americans, but for other minorities and women as well, even though the programs are not meritocratic in nature. We live in a politically correct, hyphenated society. We are still at a point where we put our ancestral heritage above our nationality, and the hyphens not only divide the terms with which we describe ourselves, they also divide us as Americans. In the war for racial equality, we still live in a new, nervous cease fire.
I recently read an essay by a man named Eric Liu titled “A Chinaman’s Chance.” In it he said, “Growing up, when other kids would ask whether I was Chinese or Korean or Japanese, I would reply, a little petulantly, ‘American.’” That one sentence sums up the attitude I’m talking about. We are one people and one nation and should learn better to behave as such. Am I proud to be an English-Irish-German-Native American-American? Of course! But I am even prouder to be just a plain old unhyphenated American. I think Dr. King would have liked it that way.