By Jaime Vergara
For Variety

WILLIAM Styron died last year. You remember him as the white southern gentleman from Virginia who was accused of being a racist for stealing the Black Panthers’ thunder in his book, “Confessions of Nat Turner.” A white man attempting to construct the internal castle of a black man was a no-no in ’67.
But yes, he spoke truth to power, even as he did the same again in “Sophie’s Choice.” He chose to portray both the institution of slavery in America and the Holocaust of Adolf Hitler as fundamentally a violation of universal human right. A Gentile plumbing the depth of a Polish Jew’s predicament would fare no better in ’79. Styron strove to narrate what you came to discover about the Vietnam War and the War on Poverty before the Memphis bullet took your breath. Ethnic historical grounding is not the locus of offense; dehumanization, political oppression, economic injustice and social dysfunction are.
The CNMI finally put your name in its calendar of holidays. Not surprisingly, we mucked up your memory quickly. What you would have made as a day-on, is instead a day-off; a time of labor for humanizing deeds has become just another entitlement benefit for the comfort zone breed. The personality cult is unavoidable, and business acumen dictates that your name be copyrighted. The racial mercenary opportunism of some does not sit well but it is hardly surprising. And definitely, the homophobic Afros walking in your shadows have turned your cause of compassion and acceptance on its head.
We practice subtle and not so subtle reversed discrimination on Caucasians on our island, and with a vengeance, the haoles live up hillside in gated homes and comfortable condos, holding upper management positions in the private sector, and choice advisory niches in the public sector. We blame foreign workers as ever at fault victims when we run over them on our roads. We even make light of this with posters that read: I brake for garment factory workers! We avoid the mysterious Bangladeshis and Nepalese; we abuse the Korean mom-and-pop proprietors. We exploit the Japanese. A Pinoy rock music playing in my 6th grade class delighted my students, including a Chamolinian girl until, upon discovering that it was a Filipino band, she proceeded to loudly exclaim: Yuck! We all nurse our native prejudices with pleasure!
We use your name to protest matters we are up against, rather than “pro testare,” affirm and attest what we stand for. We would not heed the words of an older English brother, D.H. Lawrence who put into words what you so dramatically performed as an exemplar in life:
“As we live, we are transmitters of life. And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us. . . . Give, and it shall be given unto you is still the truth about life. But giving life is not so easy. It doesn’t mean handing it out to some mean fool, or letting the living dead eat you up. It means kindling the life-quality where it was not, even if it’s only in the whiteness of a washed pocket-handkerchief.”
You had a dream, not just for a race but for the species, and we killed you for it. Your deed allows life to flow. We continue in the stream of the dream; may we live in the daily performance of the life giving deed.