“I have a dream.” These are just five small words but they make up one of the most recognizable and important sentences of the twentieth century.
A resounding call for a discrimination-free America; a bold statement of hope from a young minister named Martin Luther King.
And today, almost 50 years after the march on Washington, and in the midst of Black History Month, it is seemingly a dream fulfilled.
Last year, America, a country built on the backs of African slaves, inaugurated its first black president.
Mere decades ago, Barack Obama would have most likely been banished to the back of the bus for the colour of his skin. Now he sits in the Oval Office of the White House; a black man at the head of the Free World.
The recently crowned Miss America, Caressa Cameron, is a black college student from Virginia, the same state where Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, lived during the Civil War; a state where Cameron’s ancestors would have been considered more akin to beasts of burden than the embodiment of female beauty in America.
Here in Canada, the Governor-General, who fulfills one of the highest posts in our government, is Michaelle Jean, a black woman born in Haiti.
So maybe King’s dream is a dream no longer. Maybe now it is reality. Maybe the black community of North America is finally free at last.
But maybe not.
According to the National Urban League, a civil rights organization representing black Americans, discrimination against the black community is not an old stain on the fabric of American history. Rather, it continues to be an unfortunate reality.
In its State of Black America 2009 report, the NUL found that black Americans are twice as likely as whites to be unemployed, three times more likely to live in poverty and more than six times as likely to be incarcerated.
The report also stated that blacks receive worse health care and education than whites.
The Ku Klux Klan still has active chapters in 38 of the 51 states, according to the Southern Poverty Law Centre. And more than 40,000 hate crimes against blacks have been reported to the FBI in the past decade alone, making them the highest-targeted group for racially motivated violence in America.
According to a study done by the American Bureau of Justice Statistics, hate crimes against blacks, which are notoriously underreported, are actually 15 times higher than the number listed by the FBI.
If the study is correct, black Americans have been targeted violently more than 600,000 times since the year 2000.
Almost 150 years after the abolition of slavery, a little under a century since lynchings stopped being a regular occurrence in the South, and decades past the end of legal segregation, a culture of extreme discrimination still faces black Americans.
“It’s endemic,” says Dr. Dorothy Williams, a Montreal historian who specializes in black history. “Racism, even if we think it’s gone, will always be a fact of life in North America.”
The biggest sign of hopeful change was America’s unlikely election of Barack Obama. But even he has been a victim of racial prejudice, with his first year in office plagued by a slew of racially off-kilter comments.
“He doesn’t like white people . . . This guy is a racist,” said political commentator Glenn Beck on his radio show after Obama defended a black university professor who was arrested by white police officers for breaking into his own house after locking himself out.
Even former president Bill Clinton, often seen as being sympathetic to the black community, hasn’t shown himself to be free of prejudice.
“A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee,” Clinton allegedly told Senator Edward Kennedy, according to the book Game Change. “His candidacy is the biggest fairy tale I have ever seen.”
Obama ran on a platform of hope and change, but in reality, racial attitudes haven’t shifted.
“If racism, discrimination and inequality didn’t still exist, wouldn’t that be lovely,” says Rosemary Sadlier, president of the Ontario Black History Society.
“But they do, and they continue to inhibit the potential of the black community.”
And although it likes to see itself as the most tolerant of the tolerant, Canada is only a little more colorblind than its southern neighbour.
According to Statistics Canada, unemployment and lower wages are more common in the black community and black children are more likely to live in poverty than white children,
The Canadian Ethnic Diversity Survey found that more than 32 per cent of blacks in Canada feel they have often faced discrimination within the past five years, compared with 20 per cent among other visible minorities.
“It’s an everyday thing for a black man in Canada to face some element of racism,” says Gary Pieters, a vice-principal for the Toronto District School Board and a volunteer with the Urban Alliance on Race Relations.
“There’s racial profiling, it’s sometimes hard to get hired, and there’s a lot of discrimination.”
“The black community needs an even playing field.”
But until our white-dominated society figures out how to give it one, Dr. King’s dream will remain just that – a dream.
A dream deferred.