Remembrance and Reflection Campus ceremony honors Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Author: H.K. Merriman

The 10th annual Remembrance and Reflection ceremony in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. on Jan. 21 shared a message of simultaneous hope and struggle. Artist-in-Residence Dr. Francois Clemmons, who founded the honorary celebration, led the Middlebury College Spiritual Choir in traditional spirituals that engaged not only the singers onstage, but also the entirety of a filled Mead Chapel. Members from nearly every social, racial and lifestyle group were present and united in the songs of harmony and triumph. Community members young and old stood on stage and swayed and sang and clapped in perfect unison in a coming-together that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been proud of.

After this optimistic musical introduction and resulting spiritual high, George and Martha Kellner Professor of South Asian History and Trinity College Director of International Studies Vijay Prashad took the pulpit to preach a less idealistic message. Prashad, who has written 11 books on politics and racial tensions including "Karma of Brown Folk" and "Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity," addressed what he saw as the problems with "multiculturalism," particularly within university settings. Colleges, he said, are admitting more black students and are happy to include them in photos, but are not working to make "the broad cultural change required for a deep diversity."

"Multiculturalism allows the entry of other cultures into the curriculum, but they are taught as separate, different and inferior," Prashad explained.

He noted that universities often favor theological and seemingly less-educated explanations of a culture's thinking in order to uphold modernity and high intelligence as a privilege and characteristic exclusive to the West. One example of this stereotyping is that the Hindu Brahman explanation is most frequently taught to represent the Indian worldview, when that is not the most common conception held by Indians.

Prashad also addressed the related problems of the concepts of color-blindness and the "model minority." Color-blindness, he explained, is the insistence of solely judging people on the basis of merit. This then leads to the misconception of the existence of a model minority or a specific culture that repeatedly produces people with exceptional merits. Prashad's Indian heritage he described, is thought to be a model minority in the Unted States. In the eyes of Americans, all Indians are highly educated professionals, but there are many uneducated, non-professionals in India, he said. Prashad attributed this misconception to the government's misguided efforts to improve diversity.

"State selection stands in for natural selection," he explained. "[The misconception of Indians] has everything to do with immigration and nothing to do with genes."

Prashad suggested that Americans should embrace polyculturalism instead of multiculturalism, color-blindness and the model minority. With a playful yet serious tone, Prashad postulated that 1980s hip-hop pioneered and developed polyculturalism.

"It's not where you're from," he said. "It's where you're at." Prashad elaborated, "They did not believe that cultures were spacially sealed. The artists borrowed liberally from cultures around them."

Noting how Martin Luther King, Jr. studied and referenced "Bhagavad-Gita," a Hindu religious text written in response to Buddhism, Prashad then suggested that King anticipated the importance of polyculturalism and applied it to his work.

At the end of his talk, Prashad offered a few pragmatic solutions to the problems that he had illuminated. The advice was directed at the College and included instituting a campus clean-up force to help lower the level of impunity, mapping the geography of fear on campus to discover who feels unsafe where and why and encouraging the Career Services Office to promote social justice jobs as legitimate careers.

"You don't know what you are capable of until you try. Let the King in you awake," Prashad proclaimed in benediction.

The program concluded with more songs led by Clemmons and the Spiritual Choir, including "This Little Light of Mine," during which the audience again rose to their feet.

During a silent moment in the Chapel before the applause following the choir's rendition of "The Storm is Passing Over," a child in the back yelled a triumphant "Yay!" This joy as a result of the promise of improvement for people of different races, genders and sexualities echoed throughout Mead as the ceremony closed, notwithstanding the cultural challenges Prashad highlighted.