Revisiting the Dream

When Amy Poehler and Tina Fey delivered their final Golden Globes opening monologue earlier this month, Fey deadpanned that the nation's Civil Rights Movement "totally worked and now everything's fine."

New Mexicans who honored the memory and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Roundhouse on the national holiday marking the birthday of the civil rights leader took a much more serious approach. Yet, they acknowledged the same point: We have a lot of work to do.

Keynote speaker Kathy Powers, an associate professor at the University of New Mexico School of law who specializes in global reparations, lifted her voice to argue that the nation's educational system is leaving lessons about human rights and violations of those rights out of the classroom.
 
"Although the United States is a major proponent for human rights globally, also the most difficult to hold accountable as a function of being on the UN security council for example, we have to think about: Why is it not required in our education that we learn about human rights?"

"How could you ever expect to have citizens who are not violators of human rights, sometimes unintentionally, or victims of human rights violations if we don't educate them?"

The educational system, she says, can be a vehicle to make people aware of their rights and of abuses. Yet, she notes that schools have also been the instrument of human rights violations as institutions, for example, that prevent immigrants from speaking native languages and in other ways. Lastly, she says that education can be a remedy, especially if textbooks are rewritten to contain "the truth that happened."

Fixing the nation's classrooms, however, is a far cry from the silver bullet to create equality across race, class and gender the way King and other leaders dreamed of it.

"How can we get to education," she says, "when we are talking about you just have to survive day to day, especially if you are an unarmed black man in America, not to mention other groups as well. On the table right now and for the world to see, and yes they are paying attention, is the targeting of police towards the African Americans."

Speaking to a largely Anglo and Hispanic crowd of about 200 people, and absent the governor even though she was on the program as an expected speaker, Powers ended on a universal call to action, seeking a national commission that could be "a mechanism for truth."

"This is not an African American problem," she says. "This is a human issue because if anyone's human rights are violated, all of our human rights are violated."

Santa Fe Reporter