Martin Luther King Day, 2024, finds the world wracked by war, teeming with refugees fleeing various persecutions, people suffering from deep poverty, while a minority of world’s people live in the wealthy ignorance of privilege. How do we change this? How do those of us who live in the wealthy parts of this weeping world find a way to the truth, to a perspective that does not just blindly defend our privileged status? We have to find ways to listen to those who suffer. We have to hear the stories of the refugees. We have to learn what fills the lives of poor people. We have to listen to people who live on the margins, though they aren’t the margins at all.
At the end of each school year, I try to tell the high school seniors I teach something that will be of use to them. I tell them if they are able, to leave the country for a time, live some place where the language, color, loves, and assumptions are different from those they have raised with. I urge seniors, at some time in their college years, to get out of the U.S. to a place that is not white, not Christian, not filled with power. Only if we listen to those for whom the systems of the world do not work, will we be able to shift the world and its systems in their favor.
Dr. King understood this truth. He saw, especially in the independence movements rising in Africa during the last years of his life, the lessons that might help us. He certainly saw, in the difficult realities of the people of Montgomery, a lesson for the majority white population. If only the majority population knew the suffering of its minority neighbors. If they knew their stories, they might not be so angry, so fearful. But, as he often said of white and Black in America, “we hardly know each other.”
White people need to listen to the experiences of Black people. Straight people need to hear the daily realities of LGBTQ people. Wealthy people need to know that daily challenges of people who are poor. Men need to listen to what life is like for women. You see the pattern. Dr. King knew the transformative potential of this listening, this learning. If we listen to those on, what we think are the margins, it could change everything.
For this Martin Luther King Day, 2024, do we have the courage to identify a group we know nothing about and make it our task to learn from them, firsthand, what their lives are like? It could change us. Then we could change the country, maybe even the world.
Photograph by Marion Trikosko, in the Public Domain. This same photograph was used as the cover for my 2020 poetry collection, Raising King.
Joseph Ross 