^{On some positions a coward has asked the question is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right. – Martin Luther King Jr., November 1967}

A few days ago, coincidentally on Martin Luther King Jr.’s real birthday, I was at a gathering of middling size where I only knew two people. While I sipped my club soda and nearly nodded off listening to someone buzz on and on about football, a conversation cluster within eavesdropping distance took up the subject of reservation casinos. I live in California and four Indian gaming referenda will appear on the ballot February 5, so a discussion of the topic was not a surprise. I’ve always had an (apparently inborn) ability to tune into conversations across a room while blocking out those in front of me, and my interest was piqued because whoever was explaining the gaming proposals seemed to know quite a bit about the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that led to these measures being put before the voters. Then I heard it. Somebody said, “It’s the redskins’ revenge.”

For the first time, I looked over that way, and all five people in the group were gently laughing or smiling or nodding assent.

I don’t think he meant it maliciously. Quite possibly he even thought he was being supportive. It’s doubtful he would have said “nigger” or “wetback” or “chink,” since there were African Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos in the room. But no obvious Indians. Because I don’t wear feathers, mocassins or a loincloth and can pass for white, he apparently felt unconstrained in making what I’m sure he thought was a harmless little joke. Maybe even a pro-Indian joke. I could have walked over and explained how infuriating what he had said was, how hurtful it was that everybody seemed to have enjoyed what he said. But it gets so bloody tiring dealing with the reactions. Not just the accusations of “political correctness,” the rolled eyes or the  “Aren’t you being too sensitive?” charges, inevitably delivered with a smile. But also the downward glances, the stammering, or even the apologies that so often greet an objection: “Oh, I’m sorry. I know that you  … uh… Native Americans object to that.”

As if it’s okay to deploy a slur when no member of the slurred ethnicity is around to be insulted? As if racism only matters to people of color? As if every one of us is not harmed to the core by such talk about any ethnicity and should object to it?

This incident – I can recount a dozen others I’ve witnessed in the 21st Century – made me ponder a great deal the theme I’ve heard so much of recently, on-line and off, that race and racism have been transcended in America. That we no longer need to talk about these matters because, well, because talking about them only engenders bad feelings about something that is fixed except in a few backward locales by people who will be dead soon anyway. That, 45 years after the summer day Reverend King made that soaring speech on the Washington Mall, his dream is wholly achieved.

Nobody can deny that tremendous progress has been made. Progress that is a testament both to the message of universal legal equality in the nation’s founding document and two centuries of fierce and costly struggle by people of color and their white allies to transform that message into reality. A testament to people’s willingness to change themselves, to surrender their prejudices and fears, to recognize injustice and do something about it, even to give up their lives if that’s what it takes. That progress cannot be sneered at. It reflects an America and Americans of all colors at their best.

Racism nonetheless remains a chronic influence in our lives. Yet many white people say they don’t want to talk about race. They say they’re sick of talking about it. That stuff is all in the past, they say, and wonder aloud why we can’t talk about something else. I think what most are really saying is that they don’t want to listen to talk about race.  

It was six years ago, January 11, 2002. Shackled, handcuffed, goggled and hooded, the men came shuffling off the big gray C-141 Starlifter cargo jet that had sped them from Afghanistan to the southeastern coast of Cuba, to Guantánamo Bay. Only 20 arrived that first day, but, eventually, some 800 prisoners wound up behind the razor wire at Camp X-Ray, Camp Delta, Camp Iguana, Camp Echo. They included gnarled old men with no teeth whose beards their captors had forcibly shaved. And boys too young for whiskers.

Designated “unlawful enemy combatants,” they were delivered to a bit of land permanently pried from Cuba a century earlier specifically because the Cheney-Bush administration wanted them held beyond the rule of law, confined incommunicado in a jurisdictionless no-man’s land and subject to the whims of a single person, the president of the United States of America. Out of reach of the Geneva Conventions, of the U.S. Constitution, of civilization itself, they were held in a military prison perched on the stolen land of a country that this same irony-challenged president would soon list as part of his “axis of evil.”

More than four years would pass before Washington officially made 558 of the prisoners’ names public. Not a single one was innocent, the camp boss, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, would tell ABC News in 2006.  

OK. I know this is a political site, not Facebook or MySpace, and that, given the state of the world, there are certainly more important things for me to be using my share of pixels than talking about my family. But tonight I can’t help myself. My first grandchild has arrived. If you haven’t already guessed, that’s her to the left.

She was born by c-section on December 17 in Manchester, England, and weighed in at 7 pounds, 1 ounce. Her name is Mariam Ahmed al-Musaud al-Hashim. Mariam is the name of her mother’s mother, and also of her father’s other wife. (Yes, my stepson’s father-in-law is a polygamist.)

This is a Diary that in one form or another has run at Daily Kos for the past three years. A number of people have asked me to post it again, and I thought my friends at docudharma might also be interested. This is a heavily edited version of last’s year’s piece:

I forced myself to watch the History Channel’s Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower last weekend. I don’t feel as if I totally wasted my time. Including performances and interviews of some Wampanoags, descendants of the indigenes who saw the Puritans make landfall 387 years ago, made the program a good deal more palatable than it might have been.

I would have preferred a bit more about how one reason the Pilgrims were “persecuted” in England and Holland was because of their efforts to get everyone to comply with their own crabbed view of religion. Something they also did here in America. Not dissimilar from what some modern day others would like to do now. But what an improvement the program was over past efforts.