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Sunday, January 11, 1998

Action, not color of skin, defines heroes

By Leonard Pitts

‘What's in a name?" the bard of Stratford-on-Avon once famously asked. "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

Which only proves that Shakespeare knew more about horticulture than civic affairs and racial politics. Lucky him.

The rest of us can only scratch our heads at the latest dispatches from the battlements of black and white. Perhaps you're already familiar with the decision some weeks back by the majority-black school board in New Orleans to rechristen George Washington Elementary because of a policy against naming schools for slave owners. Now comes the latest: Some white parents in Riverside, Calif., recently fought -- and failed -- to keep a new high school from being named for Martin Luther King Jr.

It seems they were worried that King High would be perceived as a "black" school, thus hurting the kids' chances with college recruiters. As critic Mark Van Meter put it, "In some parts of the country, (King is) not looked upon as somebody famous."

Clearly, Van Meter needs to get out of the house more often.

Inevitably, there will be those who lump New Orleans and Riverside together, judging them as identical but for the color of the protagonists. That's the easy conclusion, but ultimately, the wrong one: These two episodes say different things about vastly different constituencies.

Riverside reminds us some whites are still prisoners of their own perspectives.

New Orleans suggests a familiar question: Why can't blacks just get over it?

It is, to my mind, also a fair question. Indeed, it formed the subtext of many of the criticisms of the flap over George Washington Elementary.

Me, I thought -- and still think -- it was valuable for the nation at large to be reminded that many of the heroes it views as icons of unalloyed good also authored awful deeds.

But for all that, I wish black educators had found a way to cut Washington some slack. I could have more easily accepted such burning antipathy toward, say, Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee. But unlike those men, Washington's fame proceeds from achievements that have little direct connection to race or slavery. It would give me no more than a minor twinge to see my children attend a school named in his honor.

That just such a school became a bone in the craw for some blacks offers vivid evidence of the enduring estrangement, ambivalence and anger many of us still feel. Without questioning the validity of such feelings, it seems to me there is nevertheless a need for African Americans to master them -- if not from some vague notion of brotherhood, then as a matter of hard practicality. Seething bitterness is seldom an ingredient of life success.

So it resonates with me a little when whites, with earnest good will, wonder aloud why blacks don't just move on, seek the future, and "get over it."

The problem is, for all their good intentions, the people who ask that question are seldom able to appreciate how big and difficult the task of getting over it is. Or how it sucks the life out of you when, in the midst of trying, you run smack into a place like Riverside, smack into people telling you -- again -- that no matter what you do or achieve, you can never quite be part of America.

Think about it: Martin Luther King was a Nobel Prize winner who wrenched a generation from a trail of misery, who invoked core American ideals with an eloquence that wrought transfiguration and tears. Yet 30 years after his death, with his work vindicated and venerated internationally, some whites in Riverside -- and no doubt elsewhere -- consider him just a black hero?

Nothing wrong with being a black hero, mind you. Yet, one wonders what more he'd have to do to become, in their minds, also an American hero.

Or if he ever can.

Maybe he cannot. Which helps to explain why we should take these arguments over school names not as mirror-image episodes, but counterbalancing ones, the halves of an equation. If the events in New Orleans show blacks choosing to stand separate from the mainstream, those in Riverside explain why it's sometimes difficult for them to see any alternative.

"Why can't blacks just get over it?" is the question.

Riverside is the latest answer.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132.

Knight Ridder Newspapers