Hola mi Gente,
The exploitation of King’s name, the
distortion of his teachings by conservatives, is one of the uglier developments
in contemporary American life. I agree with Michael Eric Dyson that the “I have
a Dream” speech should be put to rest-- in my opinion for at least ten
years.
* * *
Misquoting the
Dream
A
society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years
must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a
just and equal basis.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or
Community?
When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was
alive, mainstream society viewed him mostly with fear and contempt. In response
to King’s anti-war stance (as expressed in a 1967 speech), TIME magazine
called King a “demagogue for Radio Hanoi.” Years later, Reagan the Great damned
King as a near communist.
Today, however, a miracle has taken
place in America: Dr. King, it’s now been discovered, was a conservative! By
taking a snippet from one 1963 address Dr. King has been co-opted by the right
as the most quoted opponent of affirmative action in America today.
While the transformation of King from
communist to conservative is almost complete, it deserves an explanation.
It should come as no surprise that
Martin Luther King, Jr. would have his words taken out of context. After all,
King’s status today effectively ensures that conservative writers,
academics, pundits, and politicians will feel compelled to borrow King’s words
to advance their warped agenda. What better political plum than claiming the
ideological support of an iconic figure such as King? Nowhere is the tendency
to “play the King card” more evident than in the claim by dozens of contemporary
conservative writers, academics, pundits, and politicians that King’s basic
goal was “color-blindness” and that he viewed such visual impairment as the
road by which racism would best be addressed.
Typically, conservatives rely on one
line from one speech. Of course it’s only the most famous line delivered by
King, one of the few most folks have probably heard: the one from the 1963
March on Washington, the “I Have a Dream” speech in which he expressed the hope
that one day persons “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the
content of their character.” For conservatives, this is proof that King would
oppose race-conscious policies such as affirmative action, since -- after all
-- such efforts require an acknowledgment of race.
Conservatives of all colors and stripes
have clung to this line as a rallying cry in their war against “reverse
discrimination.” Shelby Steele, for example, in The Content of Our Character (the title obviously
used in order to evoke the famous King line) is a harsh critique of affirmative
action policies, claiming they have “done more harm than good” and implying
that King would agree. Steele seeks to prove this not only with reference to
the “Dream” speech, but also by recounting a 1964 presentation in which King
implored black youth to get ahead: the implication being that King was an
apostle of the myth of rugged individualism and hostile to special efforts to
provide full opportunities for people of color.
In similar fashion, many other
conservatives have misrepresented King. If you’ve been on the internet for any
amount of time, I am sure you have run up against the now ubiquitous practice
of the cutting-and-pasting of the Kool-Aid King. See if you notice any
of the following...
Clint
Bolick, a leading critic of affirmative action, wrote in 1996
that King did not seek “special treatment” for blacks, and cites the “content
of their character” remark as justification for his position. Tamar Jacoby
wrote in 1998 that King’s “dream” was color-blindness. The Thernstroms, in the
social science bible, America in Black and White, make the same
claim. Paul Sniderman wrote, “The civil rights movement... took as its ideal a
truly colorblind society, where, as Martin Luther King Jr. prophesied, our
children would be judged... ” by, yup, you guessed it, you know what.
Some have gone further and have
advanced the notion that the modern civil rights movement’s support of
affirmative action is a betrayal of King. Dinesh D'Souza (who has been convicted
for his lack of impulse control) in End of Racism, states authoritatively that affirmative
action is a “... repudiation of King’s vision, in that it involves a
celebration and affirmation of group identity.” He makes the bold assertion
that Black leaders are the antithesis of Martin Luther King's principles, which
he defines as the ideology that “race should be ignored and we should be
judged on our merits as persons.” Strangely, D'Souza calls for the repeal of
the 1964 Civil Rights Act, arguably the greatest legislative achievement of the
movement King led. Thanks to corporate-controlled, activist, conservative
Supreme court, D’Souza, unlike King, has seen his dream come to fruition.
Yet, despite the overwhelming noise by
the right that Dr. King principally sought color-blindness and would have
opposed affirmative action, even a cursory examination of his writings makes
such a position extremely difficult to defend. King never said he believed that
the best way to achieve the dream of racial and economic equality was to
pretend racism had vanished. Nothing could be further from his stated principles.
In fact, contrary to the popular modern fiction advanced by conservatives, King
favored quotas, affirmative action, reparations, and race-based hiring
as immediate relief from systemic racism. This is an unpleasant bit of history
to those who have tried to turn him into a (safely dead) black conservative
with which to bash liberals. But they were his actual views.
From the outset, King placed
responsibility for the nation’s racial inequality squarely on whites. In an
article written in 1956 and included in James Washington’s edited collection, Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches
of Martin Luther King, Jr., King wrote that whites had “rejected the very
center of their own ethical professions... and so they rationalized” the
conditions under which they had forced blacks to live. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail in 1963,
King specifically criticized white ministers and white moderates, who he
condemned for being “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice,” and whom he said
were perhaps more of a barrier to true freedom for blacks than the Klan. This
is the letter in which he famously wrote that an unjust law was no law at all.
In short, King was hardly color-blind. He was clear who he felt were the
victims and who the chief perpetrators of racism were -- and he said so in
clear and forceful language.
It is true that King called for universal
programs of economic and educational opportunity for all the poor,
regardless of race. However, he also saw the need for programs targeted at the
victims of American racial apartheid. King was even clearer on affirmative
action. In a 1963 article in Newsweek (published the very month of the
“I Have a Dream” speech), King suggested it might be necessary to have
something similar to “discrimination in reverse” as a form of national
atonement for the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation.
The most direct articulation of his
views on the subject is found in 1963, in Why
We Can't Wait,
King noted:
Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but he should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up.
In a 1965 Playboy interview, King spelled out
what that something special might entail, and it was far more
substantive than affirmative action. In fact, King stated his support for an
aid package for Black America for $50 billion.
I am not saying that King's thoughts on
this issue should be the determining factor on how people should feel about
affirmative action or other race-conscious efforts. How they feel and think
about the legacy and abiding problem of white racism is up to them. No one
should assume that simply because Dr. King appears to have supported such efforts
that this necessarily makes King, and those who support affirmative action
today, correct.
I am trying to point out how
conservatives are compelled to link their views to King in an attempt to dismantle
or disparage such programs (and misrepresent and warp King’s message in the
process). I find it the height of dishonesty and hypocrisy to claim the mantle
of King's moral authority. Regardless of the debate over the effectiveness or
legitimacy of affirmative action, it is only fair and just to insist that we
present King’s views honestly and completely and not attempt to use his words
for purposes he would have found unacceptable.
My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery
from civilization…
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