COLUMN: A not-so-welcome speaker

From Binyamin Appelbaum's, "Carving Marble," Fall '99 From Binyamin Appelbaum's, "Carving Marble," Fall '99On January 26, at the University of Pennsylvania's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Public Reception and Keynote Address, the Reverend Al Sharpton will rise to speak. But perhaps you haven't been introduced to the man selected to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Please, allow me. I clearly remember the first time I came across Al Sharpton in the pages of The New York Times in 1996. There had been a murder-arson at a Harlem clothing store. The body count echoed the worst acts of racist extremists hell bent on destruction in the 1960s. Eight dead minorities lay in the charred ashes, side by side with their killer, a hate-filled racist who took his own life with the same gun that had taken theirs. The funny thing was, the killer was a black man, too. He had set out that day to get the purported owner of the store, a white man. In the weeks following the incident, it became clear that the killer had not hatched his mad plot alone. A rabble-rousing voice on the radio had advocated kicking whitey out of the storefront in the days before the incident. The voice belonged to Al Sharpton. This is not a column about free speech. I do not doubt that Sharpton has the right to speak where and when he will. Half the time, I even think that is a good thing. This is a call for self-examination. Because Al Sharpton is not an appropriate apostle of King's message and vision and those who asked him to bring that message to Penn's students have violated the spirit of King's day. King dreamt of a world where children of all races and colors came together for the most mundane of purposes. Sharpton's dreams are rarely multicolored or hopeful. King brought together Americans from a diversity of backgrounds under the banner of civil rights. Only a small fragment of one community marches with Sharpton. Rabbis and ministers, blacks and whites, all marched together under King's banner. There are no diverse communities represented at Sharpton's table. Where King set out to forge a new society from the divided shards of the America he knew, Sharpton does not attempt to build a better future -- only to decry the inequalities inherent in the hand he was dealt. Oppressed communities -- socially, economically, racially -- have always turned to false messiahs like Sharpton. Those disenchanted with political processes that have failed them time and again have found god in the gospel of self-sufficient power that Sharpton and his ilk preach. Anti-establishment rhetoric comes in two basic flavors. The first is anarchy -- the belief that the world is better off without formal rules and government. Sharpton's flavor is somewhat different -- he wants to carve an autonomous zone out of an existing system of government: Ours. The dream of black self-rule has been championed by an eclectic group over the years. Nineteenth-century abolitionists and 20th-century Black Panthers, Ku Klux Klan leaders and Nation of Islam members have all favored some version of the same story -- if blacks and whites cannot live in harmony, then they must live apart. The tendency of visions born most closely from the despair of reality to turn most radically to the unrealistic is a strange and noteworthy thing. But if reality tells us that America is still a country torn by racial divides, it tells us no less explicitly that neither group is going to leave. If we have not found a way to live together, then we simply must renew the attempt. Living apart is an option reserved for the imagination alone. King knew this reality, and dreamed of a better future. It was --and still is -- no more than a dream. But if we don't have our dreams, all we have left is our present flawed reality and all of our solutions become necessarily destructive. This is Sharpton's reality. And, on many days of the year, it is ours. But MLK Day -- more than most others on our calendar -- has emerged as a moment for national reflection on our cohesiveness as a society, on our treatment of all the people who make up our national fabric. All of them. Each and every one of the communities that make up this nation of ours. Al Sharpton will speak to us, ostensibly in tribute to King. But I want it said here and now -- he does not know of what he speaks.