by Amadeo D’Adamo Jr.
To the editor:
Fifty years ago this month, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke his memorable phrase, “I have a dream that some day…”
Those of us who joined him in Washington could look around and believe that “that day” was not long in coming. We were with hundreds of thousands of other Americans from every part of the country, of every religion or none, union workers and business woman and men, and of every shade, from black to white.
I was wrong about when that dream would be fulfilled, yet the clues were there immediately as we drove back to New Jersey, jubilant and hungry as we drove through Maryland. Every restaurant, including the eight that we stopped at, was closed. Management simply would not serve black Americans and white Americans together until federal law made it a crime not to do so.
Racism, like its siblings — anti-Semitism, the growing anti-Islam feelings in our country, the anti-Dream Act people, and, yes the idea that it’s okay for 20 percent of America’s children to go to bed with nutritional deficiencies — is a puzzle to me; a puzzle because many, if not most, Americans say that they believe that we humans are made in the image of God . . .
Consider what “made in the image” may actually mean. I cannot decide what it should mean to others, to legislate beliefs or to categorize those whose beliefs are different than mine as heretics, infidels or sinners.
What “image” means to me is that every human is a sacred vessel and merits being treated as such. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out against injustice of any sort and particularly about racism and the need for peaceful interaction between peoples, treating each as a sacred vessel.
So! What is racism? Racism is a rejection of the creative power of God to create humans with skin of different hues.
The racist is actually saying, “God, you are pretty stupid in not creating people exactly like me.”
Enough said!
Amadeo D’Adamo Jr.
Hillsborough
