Color blind or just plain blind?

MARTIN LUTHER King Jr. Day, I have come to think, re-centers me, especially since I moved to Montgomery, Ala. The holiday is a day dedicated to service, but is also meant to recommit to what we do in our daily lives.

What I do is teach students about the media. Specifically, I like to think that I teach them how to read, criticize, use and often resist media manipulation. In a word, to become media-literate. I also teach public speaking and human communication to students who are not majoring in the field.

The ability to appropriately and effectively communicate in public is considered essential for anyone who wishes to graduate--undoubtedly, a powerful tool, one that politicians should be able to use to better convey their messages. But what if their messages are awful?

So I thought about my students last Monday while I was sitting in the Dexter Avenue Church. I attended the service that the Bobby Jackson and the World Heritage Organization have been sponsoring for 36 years. As I was handed the program, I was pleased to see that Gov. Robert Bentley was to speak also, right after he was sworn in, perhaps 400 feet away, in front of the State Capitol, surrounded by the local political intelligentsia.

Sure, I wanted to hear what this retired dermatologist had to say to the people who had gathered to commemorate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King. After all, he had admirably promised during his gubernatorial campaign not to draw his $121,000 annual paycheck until he reached his goal of lowering the unemployment rate (currently at 9 percent) to 5.2 percent.

Not an easy task, according to the forecasts for recovery of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Alabama.

"THE TELEPROMPTER went off," Gov. Bentley said, referring to the inaugural speech he had just delivered. He had just reached the pulpit, and was beginning his remarks. Some people laughed. A nice attention-grabber, after all. But then, becoming aware of his audience and of the occasion, Gov. Bentley right out of the gate announced himself to be color-blind.

To further prove his point, he produced an anecdote telling of a time when, asked how many African American patients he had had in the many years of his practice, he answered he wouldn't know. Obviously, he didn't notice that he was in a church full of Black people. He didn't even notice, when he told the audience that it's not easy to trust a Republican governor... (Would he have said that in front of a bunch of wealthy white folks?)

So Gov. Bentley may have done a bit of audience analysis there. Yet the governor's beliefs emerged strongly when he had to retrieve a trope like the "I don't see no color" in order to supposedly appeal to a "different" audience.

Bentley attempted to further appeal to his audience, which, he assumed, was made up solely of Christians. In fact, to add insult to injury, he said that if they were Christian ("You've been saved" and "the Holy Spirit lives within you just like the Holy Spirit lives within me" as he put it, perhaps galvanized by his standing behind a pulpit), then they were his brothers and sisters, and prompted whomever wasn't (Christian) to become one.

Bentley--the deacon and Sunday school teacher for over 30 years at First Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa--continued: "Now I will have to say that, if we don't have the same daddy, we're not brothers and sisters. So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister."

Then Bentley added that he wanted them to be his brothers and sisters, as to show the extent of his Christian love. This conditional love and equality (this blind, yet equalizing love, at one condition) he offered to the audience, as well as his attempt to show he's no racist, speaks volumes for his reactionary beliefs and, I hope to be disproved, his future policies.

Gov. Bentley said he visited MLK's office downstairs from the sanctuary. When asked if he wanted to sit in his chair, he refused. I'm glad he did. As I'm glad he said Dr. King was one of the greatest men who has ever lived in the United States and in the world. What the governor didn't say was that his own message, regardless of the importance of his presence at Dexter today, is quite different from the one of Dr. King. And I'm afraid no improvement in communication skills or public speaking will make it better.

UNFORTUNATELY, GOV. Bentley's strain of Christianity admits only the saved ones in the graces of the Lord--and for all that matters, in the land of Alabama. This was not the message of Dr. King, who was accepting of people of all races and religions. He dreamed a dream that resonated since then throughout the entire world and still speaks to peoples of different upbringings and walks of life because of its universal message of peace, tolerance and solidarity.

Dr. King wanted to eliminate poverty in the United States; he was fighting for economic justice before he got shot in Memphis. And Dr. King rejected violence; like the many killings and lynchings and assassinations (too many) that occurred all over the South up until the 1990s (too recent), most of which are still, to this day, unsolved. Those martyrs are remembered at the Civil Rights Memorial on Washington Avenue.

I understand that a message of unity is important for Alabamians. As an outsider, I want to believe that many people of goodwill have tried to heal social scars, perhaps through reconciliatory politics. Bentley, too, said he will be the governor of all Alabamians, although I highly doubt you can do that in a state where social inequality is so tangible.

I hope Gov. Bentley won't forget the children of his state, their health and education. I hope he will be reminded, instead, that counties are different in Alabama and that different communities have different needs. Some definitely more urgent than others.

They are not all the same as the governor suggested today, and his attention to them shouldn't be equal. Because, as Dr. King wrote from a jail in Birmingham in 1963, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." So it won't be by protecting the privileges of the few (chosen Christians) that we're making this state and the world a safer place.

Right after the speech, Bentley's communications director, Rebekah Caldwell Mason, was called to rectify: "He is the governor of all the people, Christians, non-Christians alike." As his first public appearance as governor, Bentley did anything but impress me.

The Black woman who was sitting next to me in church asked me if I could e-mail her the pictures of the governor. She had forgotten her camera, she said, and even offered me money for the photo. I hope Gov. Bentley won't disappoint her too much after all.