This coming Monday marks Martin Luther King Jr. Day, or, as it’s more commonly known, a weekday off of work.

Most people won’t give any consideration to what the day is supposed to symbolize and represent; no big surprise there, though?Christmas is as much about Santa Claus as the birth of Christ, and Independence Day is more an excuse for buying some cool fireworks than an opportunity to read the Bill of Rights.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is also no less devoid of misguided rhetoric than are all other holidays. In the month of December, we’re constantly admonished to, in the spirit of the season, treat people better, act a little nicer. After all, being a surly, mean-spirited misanthrope for 11 months of the year can be forgiven if you just hang up some mistletoe. Meanwhile, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, you hear a bunch of hyperbole about how far we’ve progressed as a society.

Is that the truth, though?

Sure, lynchings don’t take place in public anymore (except in Texas), and having skin darker than a summer tan isn’t necessarily automatic cause for your local friendly police officer to personally acquaint you with his riot baton (except in South Central L.A.), but sometimes I can’t help but wonder how much we’ve truly evolved since the Civil Rights Movement of the ’60s.

Especially when we’ve got former baseball icons named “Whitey” spouting off about how Caucasians are now such widespread victims of reverse racism in an overly politically correct society.

Whitey Herzog, a longtime manager in Major League Baseball, who led the St. Louis Cardinals to the World Series title in 1982, was attending the Iowa Cubs’ annual FanFest Luncheon on Jan. 11 when he offered up a few tidbits on the hardships white people face in today’s world.

Referring to Iowa manager Bruce Krimm, who is white, Herzog told the gathered crowd, “But I do think today, the people that are really getting it stuck to them are guys like this guy over here, because he isn’t a minority.”

Clearly, Whitey’s navet stems from the likelihood that, as a whitey, his chances of avoiding the harsh realities of poverty, discrimination, glass ceilings and hate crimes are far greater than all those minorities who are supposedly usurping all the good jobs from their more-qualified white counterparts, due to some gross overcompensation from Affirmative Action programs and modern Caucasian guilt stemming back to colonial American slavery.

Well, Whitey? It seems you don’t know as much about sociology or demographics as you do baseball. Otherwise, you would have seen the 2000 U.S. Census information that details that while 49.3 percent of white, full-time, year-round workers aged 15 and above make over $35,000 a year, the same is true of only 31.3 percent of blacks.

Let’s recap, Whitey, in simpler terms, so you’ll be sure to understand: Nearly half of working whites make at least $35K per year, while less than a third of blacks do.

Then again, let’s take it down a notch and solely examine the world of sports; after all, that’s what Whitey was talking about, right?

OK, then, how does this strike you? While the NBA has a relatively high rate of hiring black head coaches (13 of 29, or 44.8 percent), only three of 31 NFL coaches (9 percent) this past year were black, and two of them (Dennis Green and Tony Dungy) were just fired, despite leading their teams to the Playoffs a combined 12 times in 16 seasons.

And how about Whitey’s own sport, Major League Baseball? Surely it must be overrun with minorities in executive positions for him to have felt compelled to reel off that put upon, good-ol’-boy, vitriolic indignation?

Well, just so happens that MLB has six blacks among its 29 managers (20.7 percent), with the Florida Marlins currently without a manager. Worse still, only one of 30 MLB general managers (Ken Williams of the Chicago White Sox) is black. That’s 3.3 percent.

So, Whitey’s “clarification” of his “misinterpreted” comments that he wasn’t “talking about reverse racism, [he was] talking about opportunity” rings just a little hollow.

Then again, so do all the self congratulating, feel-good, rose-colored embellishments about how far we’ve come these last four decades.

If you do nothing else on this coming Martin Luther King Jr./Human Rights Day, think about that.

Eric welcomes feedback at: [email protected].