Let's continue the legacy of Martin Luther King

MTV devotes

 a day's

 programming 

talking 

about race

KUDOS to MTV for devoting today, the Martin Luther King Holiday, to a conversation about race. The station is devoting 12 hours of programming starting at 9 a.m. EST and PST. Link here to join in. It is MTV's attempt to get Millennials and other young people involved on the topic of race, race relations and how to perhaps resolve some of the issues.

“Underlying some of the blindness around bias and prejudice is a lack of understanding of the history – of why we are where we are today,” MTV President Stephen Friedman told The Huffington Post.

“That’s why Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is so critical. It’s a day when we’re immersed in the history and his great legacy, and we can look back at how far we’ve come and, very importantly, look ahead at how far we still need to go.”

According to a recent MTV study, 73% of 14 to 24-year-olds believe that having more open, constructive conversations about bias will help people become less prejudiced, yet only 10% report having those conversations often.

Although in Black & White, let's remember that The Talk needs to be widened to include Latinos and Asians. The Talk is more complicated than the old black and white paradigm, in should now include brown, yellow and red and all the shades in-between.

For you new immigrants, the short-lived Asian American civil rights movement of the 70's owes itself to the strides made African Americans.

There's an excellent article by author Eric Liu on the CNN website where he states:

"As a Chinese American, I am an inheritor of what white people wrote in the Constitution and what they did to subvert it. I am the beneficiary of what black people and people of every color have done to redeem the Constitution. I am sometimes the object of a presumption that yellow people are presumed foreign until proven otherwise. 

"I own the good, the bad and the ugly of this country. None of this is neat. None of it is colorblind either."

If you're uncomfortable talking about race, clicking here might help.

MTV wants you to be part of conversation. Share your story using the hashtag, #TheTalk. Your tweet may appear on-air, or on MTVNews.com

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