Maeda's SIMPLICITY

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

I was two-and-a-half years old when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Ten years later I would be the beneficiary of much of the civil rights activism of the 60's and find myself on a school bus leaving the predominantly black southern part of Seattle for the predominantly white northern part of Seattle. The fact that there was a junior high school in walking distance from my home yet I was being bussed 30-minutes away to another school across the city didn't make much sense. But I'm glad it happened, because the schools in the north were cleaner, newer, and simply better schools compared to the more rundown schools in my neighborhood.

In seventh grade I had a mathematics teacher—her last name started with an 'H' and I no longer remember the rest. She was a warm, supportive instructor, but had a particularly strict way of running her class. Around this time my father had brainwashed me with the idea that there were only two schools that I was to attend—either MIT or Harvard. Not knowing where either of these schools really were, and not knowing what they actually stood for, I confided in my math teacher that I wanted to go to one of these schools. Subsequently Mrs. H pulled me aside after class to tell me something to the effect (in a very gentle way), "That's too bad John. Because they don't let Orientals go to MIT." I naively thought to myself, "Oh ... well that's the end of that. I'll have to find another school to go to." I told this story to my mother, who wasn't very happy about this incident for reasons I did not then understand. It would be six years later at MIT when I would learn that "Oriental" is a derogatory word when applied to people of Asian ancestry, and that actually there are a great deal of number of Asian people at MIT. I would never think much on this issue for many years, probably to my fault.

Today as the co-chair of the MIT Committee on Campus Race Relations I find myself confronted with the issues of race again. This time the issues are broader and beyond the scope of what I understand as simple fairness and political correctness. Attempting to resolve many of the feelings around this extremely sensitive issue cannot be achieved with any minor amount of work. Major changes have to occur, and major leadership like that of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. give indication that society does move forward thanks to the sacrifice of a select and gifted few. I have hope that in this century that the gifted few, through a continually improving educational system, can lead to the gifted many.