Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 14, 1995 TAG: 9510170004
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Their ambivalence is understandable.
To be sure, the as-advertised themes are well worth supporting: A new commitment to family and community. The importance of personal responsibility. Self-help. Self-pride.
Men of all races need to make more meaningful commitments to their wives, their children, their communities. Black men in particular, if the statistics tell a story, are as a category disproportionately more likely to abandon their families and their self-respect.
Among black men in their 20s, according to a study released this week, one in three is in jail, paroled or on probation. That's a terrible statistic.
Most Americans, whatever their skin color, understand that black neighborhoods continue to be hardest hit by violent crime, by drug abuse, by joblessness, by poverty, and that black children disproportionately suffer the consequences of these ills - in many cases associated with fatherless families.
Responsibility for reversing such disastrous cultural trends is not blacks' alone.
The Million Man March is being compared by some to Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous ``I have a dream'' march on Washington in 1963. Would that it turn out that way: an event inspiring unprecedented commitment to the dream of integration and a color-blind society.
Unlike King's march, though, Monday's will be exclusive and segregated, billed for black men only.
Worse, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who is no Martin Luther King Jr., is the event's principal organizer. Though he has for years preached a strong message that African Americans should become more self-reliant, he also has preached hate: hate of Jews, of homosexuals, of Catholics, of women, of whites.
Bigoted, scapegoating, separatist comments have helped him exploit - and made him a symbol of - the racial polarization so visibly and sadly evident following the O.J. Simpson verdict.
That polarization must be resisted, not nurtured. Many blacks, as well as whites, fear with reason that Monday's high-profile event for black men only in Washington could heighten tensions.
At this point, nobody knows. We can only hope its lasting legacy will be as positive as its stated intentions.
One thing we do know: To support that hope, all Americans, especially white Americans, ought to focus not so much on Farrakhan, as on the marchers and their motives.
A good follow-up to the Million Man March, suggested by Washington Post columnist David Broder and properly excluding Farrakhan, might be a series of nationally televised dialogues and town-hall conversations on race relations, convened by President Clinton.
In any event, mutual understanding requires effort. Whatever the outcome of the march, white and black have to look across the gulf separating them and see real people, people much like themselves, or the gulf will become an impassable ocean.
by CNB