Students honor Martin Luther King
Freedom is not something that is given freely by oppressors, Raymond L. Scott during the Martin Luther King Candlelight Vigil Thursday in the TSC.
Scott said he feels some things have improved since the Civil Rights Movement and some have not, one such instance of the situation not improving is going from calling African Americans colored people to calling them people of color.
“People of color doesn’t just include African Americans,” Scott said. “People of color means anyone who has some darker pigment in their skin, who are now classified as people of color which just takes us back to the gap.”
Scott said he feels race and the inequality can be very hard to discuss because people have either been hurt by discrimination or benefited from it.
“To talk about race and to talk about discrimination takes courage,” Scott said. “For most people that have experienced oppression there are a lot of highly negative feelings associated with those experiences. It also takes a lot of courage because a lot of people have benefited from the legacy’s of discrimination.”
Scott said he believes one of the reasons race has become so hard to talk about is because the whole legacy of America was built on oppression from the beginning.
“It was brought about initially by the conquest of Native Americans, it was brought about by the conquest of bringing over slaves from Africa, it was brought about by the conquest of bringing over Chinese to build our railroads, it was brought about my indentured servants that were brought over, it has been a country which has operated from a model that says if you are not apart of a specific group then you do not get access to things.”
Scott said this kind of oppression is not just something that has been done in the past but is something that is also currently being done.
“With Iraq and the other wars what we have simply created is another us versus them,” Scott said. We lump them all together into one group saying they are somehow different from us. We then feel the need to control them. We then posses people’s lands and then get access to their resources.”
Scott said he feels like it is the job of teachers to help tear down these invisible borders that people have created.
“As teachers or border crossers as I like to call them we need to cross those artificial borders that we put in place,” Scott said. “If you say that males are better than or greater than females, let’s cross that boundary. It is by crossing those boundaries that you get to find out more about that person who has been crafted in usually in very stereotypical type terms. You don’t get to know the true person because they have already been characterized.”
Scott said he feels King meant to include everybody in his crusade.
“If you look at Dr. King’s agenda initially he started working with African-Americans but it ended much broader than that,” Scott said. “The bottom line is we have to live together and we have to relate to one another.”
-debrajoy.h@aggiemail.usu.edu