January 18, 2005
Look to the Past ::
legal — tagged civil rights, conlaw, legal and politics
9:39 am
So with yesterday being Martin Luther King Day, and his impact being on the minds of most people during this week, I thought I would add my voice to the discussion, and point to a couple of entries on this site that deal with race and social movements.
The first entry I want to call your attention to deals with Trent Lott, the Southern culture of racism, how the rest of us cannot extricate ourselves from the racist elements of our society. Here’s what I said specifcially:
So if we see Lott as coming from a culture that has a longstanding history of racism and social injustice, we begin to see his comments in a much different light. They sprang from a deep-seeded racist mentality that he didn’t even know was there. And while he should be held responsible for what he said, I think that our society needs to be held responsible for its hand in perpetuating that racism. That means that, in some sense, we’re all responsible.
And the second entry is this one in which I quote MLK’s letter from a Birmingham Jail. I thin that quote is particularly important to me since I’ve entered law school. Like many of my fellow law students, I get so wrapped up in the complexities of law and government that I stop asking questions about the fundamental fairness of the system. The benefit of the direct action that Dr. King advocated is that it forces those fundamental questions that I forget about.
