As is typical around this time of year, particularly since this is a deca-anniversary of his assassination, we are hearing a lot about the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. For the most part, depending on the political bent of the author, the commentary focuses on the degree to which we have or have not achieved his dream. But the question of whether we’ve made it is a deceptive one, because even though “I Have A Dream” was possibly his best speech, and certainly his most famous one, I don’t think that his dream was static enough to really measure. Moreover, by the time he got to “I Have Been To The Mountaintop,” I would say that his dream had changed somewhat. No longer was he focused primarily on Civil Rights; his view had expanded. He had begun to look at poverty in a far wider scope, including international poverty in his critiques.
What’s a little more interesting to me, though, is to consider the fact that 40 years after his death, King has pretty much become all things to all people. Among capital-C Conservatives, there is this intense focus on the line, “I have a dream that one day my four children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” (I’ve actually seen one blog that claims King as a conservative. (!)) For those people, I’m curious about how they deal with the rest of what King had to say. Taking that line in isolation sounds nice, and it seems like it would refute the concept of “identity politics,” only in many instances, it seems that that quote is used solely to justify some type of inaction; either something shouldn’t be done, or it should be stopped. (Mr. Connerly, I’m lookin at you.) Only problem is, that takes the quote squarely out of its context. It seems to me that many of the people who use that quote now do so because they feel that people with their skin color are being held back, not out of concern for the content of anybody’s character. Or maybe I should say that being selfish creatures, we tend to automatically give ourselves a check in the ‘character’ box, so when we think somebody else got what we wanted, it must be due to something else. Only thing is, these jokers railing against Affirmative Action must be out of their minds if they think the situation in which they’re using Dr. King’s phrase is identical to, nearly the same as, or even mildly resembles the situation in the South in the early 1960s. As such, attempts to reuse that phrase are misguided at best, intellectually dishonest at worst.
Now that’s not to say that I don’t think that a “raceless” society is not an admirable goal, because it is. I just don’t think that the ones who made it that way can change it, because they’re not the ones who really feel the effect of what happened. In a way, it’s like a relationship where one partner cheated. Even though the cheating party brought the 3rd party into the relationship, it’s the one who got cheated on who ultimately lets that person out of the relationship, even if the 3rd party has been physically absent for a good deal of time. White folks writ large cannot make a case for a raceless society because white folks writ large both engineered and benefited from keeping the society race-based. Because of that, it’s not hard to believe that most “colorblind” talk on their part is a means to keep the status quo, since we know that even with the advances Black folks have made, there’s still a significant disparity in the way folks are treated. And no, I’m not talkin about no multivariable super-statistic, like wealth creation or infant mortality, which can be explained by any of a number of factors. I’m talkin about fairly straightforward stuff like whether a person with an identifiably Black name’s resume gets rejected when the resume of a white-sounding name (which I probably have) gets a call. I’m talkin about the fact that a first-time Black offender is more likely to get time for the same crime than a white offender. That’s straight-up one-to-one comparison. When you can tell me those types of vestiges of racism are gone, or at least statistically insignificant, then it’s time to declare race as a factor completely dead. Until then, while I personally believe it’s not as much of a factor as it once was, I can’t be mad when I hear somebody who thinks differently.
Entries (RSS)