Do we have the Right to Honor Dr. King Today?
I‘m not sure we do.
Especially among us white people: Our celebrations are too often triumphalist — masking that his dream is far from being realized. Our platitudes obscure how far we stray from so much of what he thought and said.
This latter point was especially emphasized for me last week. Certain conservative factions (and many white liberals as well) regularly evoke King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ to justify an ideology of colorblindness. Colorblindness is the idea that policy and public speech should make no reference to race, an idea often associated with King’s “not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character” line. Many conjur up this idea when accusing contemporary anti-racist advocates of reverse racism when they say things like ‘we should have more people of color in this space….’ There is no end to the indignant sanctimony of white people feeling attacked by attempts to create equity. Conservatives recently fumed at such apparent anti-white racism when the California Women’s March was cancelled because of its all-white leadership. Wouldn’t Martin Luther King tell us not to care about the race of the members of the leadership team? Isn’t that the definition of racism? I saw several people making such points in the wake of that situation.
But colorblindness was decidedly not King’s philosophy. That famous line of his speech is often taken grossly out of context from the rest of his thought. He was unequivocal that racial justice requires policies that privilege underrepresented (black) persons and very intentionally create equal social and economic representation — policies and laws that discriminate. Advocating for policies like affirmative action, King said: “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.” He encouraged black activists to take their money out of white-owned banks and invest in black-owned ones. He made regular, wide-sweeping, and very critical remarks about white people — claiming unabashedly that anti-black attitudes are a “way of life” for most whites.
He was despised much more for these statements than his opposition to Jim Crow. In fact, a sizable majority of the country disliked Jim Crow, and believed that white and black were ‘equal.’ What white people didn’t like were the demonstrations (aka, ‘riots’) , and the claims that white people were to blame for inequality rather than a lack of work ethic or moral values.
By the dubious standards of many self-congratulatory white people today, King is a flagrant racist. Which is, naturally, the criticism he regularly faced from white moderates and conservatives in his own day. They regularly accused King of being obsessed with race and for hating white people.
I wish more Americans had the self-awareness to recognize how much they have in common with King’s critics. Our public discourse would be greatly served if more of us simply admitted when our philosophy on race has more in common with King’s enemies, despite sorry attempts to claim him for our side. If King were alive today, he would quickly be rejected as a race-baiting, anti-white, identity politician. The sort who are responsible for Trump’s election, of course. Few white Americans, left or right, would still today be comfortable with his philosophy of blatant preferential option for poor black Americans.
The triumphalism common on this day, recently displayed by a dubiously ahistorical op-ed by Jeff Jacoby, is also inappropriate. To King, dismantling Jim Crow had little ultimately to do with accomplishing his dream. Equity would only exist when there was actual economic and social equality, something that would require much more than allowing black and white drink from the same fountain. Speaking in 1967: “It’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job. . . . It is much easier to integrate a public park than it is to make genuine, quality, integrated education a reality.”
He continued: “Negroes generally live in worse slums today than 20 or 25 years ago. In the North schools are more segregated today than they were in 1954 when the Supreme Court’s decision on desegregation was rendered. Economically the Negro is worse off today than he was 15 and 20 years ago.”
These conditions continue today. Education is arguably as segregated as it was around the time King spoke the above words. Unemployment among blacks is still about twice that as for whites. The average white family has 16 times the wealth of the average black one. In Boston, where I live, the average white family is worth $247,500 and the average black family is worth a few dollars. Only the historically ignorant can claim that King’s dream came to pass. By his very own standards, it has not.
King knew that Jim Crow was just one of numerous social systems that have existed to decorate this perpetual social inequality. Today mass incarceration serves the exact same function of Jim Crow just with different justifications and different manners. There’s really not much to celebrate.
The edifice of social habits has changed a lot over time, but the stark inequality and the use of black bodies for cheap labor as the necessary underpinning of the American economy has been consistent.
If we choose to honor King on this January 21st, I hope and pray we at least confront his legacy honestly and that we correctly assess our relationship to it as individuals and as a nation. Especially those of us who continue to enjoy all the power and privilege that still comes with being white in America.
S. Kyle Johnson is doctoral student of theology at Boston College. He studies the intersections of faith, spirituality, and politics. Find him at www.skylej.com or @winsomewindows on Twitter.
