In Honor of MLK Day, Read MLK

One of the recurrent themes of the "anti-CRT" push by conservative politicians and activists is that they are merely upholding the legacy of Martin Luther King. Liberals counter by pointing out that Republicans seem to think MLK's entire legacy consists of one line from one speech, and that Republicans only like him because he's conveniently dead. But no no!, they say, MLK is the beacon of what racial relations in America should be! He is the antithesis of CRT!

So here is my suggestion for compromise: in every state which is currently enacting a "CRT" ban, school boards should develop a course that is simply and entirely devoted to reading the collected works of MLK. They can read statements like this:

“Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.”

And this:

Whenever the issue of compensatory 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 nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro.

And this:

First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season." 

And these:

The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and racism. The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.

[...]

“Again we have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifices. Capitalism was built on the exploitation of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad.”

There are many more besides. It is a rich corpus of work, after all, more than sufficient to support a semester's worth of study. Reading them all together, from the "I Have a Dream" speech to the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" to the "Three Evils" speech could spark such interesting discussions and give a more thorough foundation to the ideas and ideology of a man whom -- liberals and conservatives agree -- is one of America's great heroes.

You want to ban "divisive concepts"? I dare Republicans to try and ban the "Collected Works of MLK" class as "divisive".

UPDATE: Nikole Hannah-Jones basically just did this in speech form.

Happy MLK Day!

Whether you march, or write, or sit in or stand up or speak out, here's wishing a great MLK day to all those putting in the work to making our society more fair, more just, more equitable, and more egalitarian than it was yesterday.

Thanksgiving Starts Early Roundup

The law school is already starting to empty out in anticipation of Thanksgiving.

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Martin Luther King, Jr., was no fan of anti-Zionism. While some quotes to this effect have been fabricated, the famous one ("When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking anti-Semitism.") is quite real.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) defends the traditional definition of vegetable.

New Mexico Secretary of State becomes the latest pol to wildly inflate the existence of voter fraud, only to find that it remains a minuscule problem. Unfortunately, rather than conceding error, she just retreats into ever-more ludicrous bluster about how her opponents are "partisan" and how even one instance of fraud is too many. Can't somebody teach conservatives the meaning of efficiency?

The Harvard Law Review's Supreme Court Foreword -- this year by Dan Kahan -- is up. It focuses on motivated cognition as a barrier to "neutral" constitutional decisionmaking, looks very interesting.

Gaddafi helps sow a society-wide ethos of anti-Semitism in Libya. Gaddafi is overthrown. People throw off anti-Semitism? Nope -- people call Gaddafi a Jew. Sigh.

MLK Day

Dr. King was one of the great figures in our nation's history -- and not just because he's dead. I think he would be proud of some of our advances as a society, but I think he would be gravely disappointed in what is left to be done. The best way to celebrate Dr. King's legacy to recognize it is still a work in progress, an ambition that had eloquent foes then and eloquent foes now.

That One Quote

Great cartoon on MLK's unlikely membership in the Tea Party.

No, Dr. King Would Not Be Proud

On the occasion of helping lead a right-wing rally on the Mall on the anniversary of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream Speech", Sarah Palin declared her hope that "Dr. King would be so proud of us."

In his famous speech, Dr. King answered those who asked "When will you be satisfied?" He replied:

We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied, as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only”. We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

As my friend notes, some of these, like the exclusion of Blacks from hotels, the "Whites only" signs, and the flat prohibition on Blacks voting in the South, have been rectified. Others, though -- like police brutality and rampant residential segregation, have not.

Has Sarah Palin spoken out on the issue of housing segregation? Has she spoken out on the issue of police brutality? Not that I can recall. Those aren't her issues. Those aren't her passion. And I doubt she knows or cares enough about the legacy of Dr. King to even know her short-comings.

I wrote several years ago that, for much of America, the only "good" civil rights leader was, quite literally, a dead one (Dr. King). There is a reason why the same admiration the right bestows upon Dr. King hasn't been granted to any of his surviving lieutenants.

Being dead, he can't contest or contextualize the actual content of his beliefs. Being dead, he can't remind audiences of the criticisms and abuse he was subjected to during his campaigns, and how it is eerily reminiscent of the charges foisted upon contemporary Black leaders. And being dead, he is no longer a political threat, and thus is a safe person to prop up upon an altar and praise. Were he alive, we might be faced with the uncomfortable prospect that this great hero of American history might demand we actually fulfill our covenant with Black citizens, and that would require actual change and reform and sacrifice. Dead people tell no such tales.

I firmly believe that, if Dr. King were alive today, Sarah Palin and her cohorts would believe he is a radical agitator, a socialist sympathizer, maybe someone who once had some important ideas, but whose time had effectively passed. It is quite fortunate, then, that he is dead, so he can be stripped of his essence and turned into a icon.

So no, I don't think Dr. King would be proud to be treated in this manner. I don't think he would be proud to have his legacy abandoned -- contorted as some abstract paean to "equality" rather than as a concrete struggle for justice. Sarah Palin can change that, by actually adopting Dr. King's agenda. But she won't. And he is not proud to be used as a tool by the likes of Sarah Palin..

RIP Dr. King

That is all.

The Hard Road Before Sheikh Nasser a-Din al-Masri

When I was younger, I used to wonder why there wasn't a Palestinian equivalent to the Israeli peace movement. Israel had Meretz and groups like Peace Now -- where were they in Palestine? Palestinian politics, in my mind, was a battle between different varieties of terrorists: secular Fatah, Islamist Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and Marxist PFLP and DFLP. It wasn't so much that I expected every Palestinian to adopt a Meretz-like line so much as the seeming lack of political diversity that confused and frightened me.

These were the opinions of a young kid, and of course today I recognize them to be too simplistic and ill-informed. Nonetheless, there remains the nagging question of why the movement to create an independent Palestinian state has so persistently remained within the confines of violent struggle?

Gershom Gorenberg (via) has a fabulous essay examining that precise question in, of all places, The Weekly Standard. It explores the idea of a Palestinian Gandhi or Martin Luther King -- the history of Palestinian nationalism, the persons promoting non-violent ideologies, and the barriers to seeing such a dream become reality. It is a stellar piece of work, and I highly recommend it.

There is one more obstacle to the emergence of a non-violent Palestinian resistance movement that Gorenberg doesn't really address. Palestinians want an independent state and an end to the Israeli occupation -- both just goals that persons worldwide ought support. But for some of them, including many of the political leaders, that is not all they want. Some want to destroy the state of Israel. Some want to slaughter the Jewish inhabitants. Some might be willing to allow Jewish inhabitants, subject to Palestinian domination or Islamic theocracy. Some might settle for expelling the Jews (or the "Zionist" Jews -- the Jews who can't trace their ancestry in Israel/Palestine prior to some arbitrary date). These goals, of course, should not be supported by anyone concerned with justice or progressivism. The general problem is that these agenda items bleed together: when Hamas kidnapped an IDF soldier, were they trying to advance the goal of ending the occupation, or killing off the Jews? The answer is: both. The trouble is, I can support one, but I'm obligated to abhor the other.

Whatever support I have for the creation of a Palestinian state is tempered by the fact that -- even outside the tactics they use to achieve the goal -- many of the people pursuing such an outcome are also pursuing much darker and ignoble ends; ones I cannot support; ones that put my very life in peril were they to come to pass. And unfortunately, the tactics for the former are applied equally to pursue the latter.

When it comes to non-violence, however, the mixture of laudable and terrible ends does more than just muddy the waters -- it is outright poison. While Gandhi's satyagraha may have succeeded in getting the British to leave India, he never extended the principle to see if it could get them to leave London as well. I'm skeptical the expansion would have met with much success.

The point isn't to undermine the possibility of a Palestinian non-violent resistant developing. I believe one can, and I sincerely hope it does. The point is that the viability of such a movement will depend on disentangling various Palestinian political aspirations -- some of which are the sort which could be worthy heirs of King and Gandhi's legacy, and others which are nightmarish inversions of them.

Obama's Best Speech of the Season?

On the eve of Martin Luther King day, Barack Obama spoke on King's old pulpit at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. His speech was bold, progressive, and necessary:

“For most of this country’s history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man’s inhumanity to man. And all of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays - on the job, in the schools, in our health care system, and in our criminal justice system.

“And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King’s vision of a beloved community.

“We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity.

As Steve Benen put it, if anybody still thought after the Donnie McClurkin incident that Obama was going to throw gay Americans under the bus, they can lay those fears to bed.

Pam Spaulding describes Obama's words as "so necessary", but adds:

This topic has always been a perceived as a third rail topic for the other leading Dem candidates, Clinton or Edwards -- they are, like many whites, particularly if they see themselves as allies, dread being seen as pointing out the evils and hypocrisy of such bigotry in the black faith community, even as wrong and tragic as it is on its face.
[...]
That we cannot discuss the matter of homophobia or anti-Semitism in the black community bluntly is everyone's problem. This burden and legacy of fomenting bigotry out of fear and ignorance is borne by all of us. If no one takes responsibility, we all fail. And we're failing -- look at how easily gender bias and racial overtones have surfaced over and over in the campaign so far. It's almost reflexive to "go there," the toxicity and effectiveness of stirring those sentiments has been part of the political process by both parties for so long that they are addicted to it.

The "third rail" analysis is, I think, solid (although it's easy to under-state the degree of political courage it takes for a Black man to deliver this speech on MLK day. Whites aren't the only people at risk from the rail). It's a difficult issue. Specks and logs and all that. But open, honest dialogue is the only way forward. And Obama deserves massive amount of credit for opening the doors and demanding that everybody take stock of their own participation in injustice.

***

A brief perusal of blogger reaction seems to buttress my instinct that this speech hit a sweet spot:

The Vig: "If you don’t think the man who spoke those words is worthy of being the next president, I can’t help you."

Daniel Hernandez: "Barack Obama crystallized his message so powerfully yesterday, a political rhetoric of true reconciliation, the type I don't believe we have seen in generations."

Buffalo Pundit: "After 12 years of Reagan and/or Bush, after 8 years of Clinton, and after another 7 years of another Bush, this speech speaks to me, and rings true."

And finally, one of the ways you know my quoted section is good is that in this unbelievably hackish dissection of it ("Obama says he wants unity, but he's upset by greed-motivated lending policies causing people to lose their homes. Guess he doesn't want to unify mortgage brokers!") by "The editors of the American Federalist Journal", the above excerpt doesn't even make an appearance. When even the snipers can't snipe, you know you've nailed it.

The Guilty Ones

In my post on dead civil rights leaders, I noted that even the scion of light, Dr. Martin Luther King, was the subject of vigorous and vicious attacks from the mainstream right at the time of his activism. These attacks take very similar forms to the contemporary assaults the right regularly lobs at modern-day civil rights activists, which should be grounds for suspicion. Apropos of that, I happened to be assigned an old National Review article written in the aftermath of the Los Angeles race riots, by (I regret to say) Jewish theologian Will Herberg. Here's an excerpt:

It did not come easy for us in this country, under the weight of the vast influx of immigrants and the residual effects of the frontier tradition, to consolidate a secure internal order based on custom and respect for constituted authority; but finally we managed. This internal order is now in jeopardy; and it is in jeopardy because of the doings of such high-minded, self-righteous "children of light" as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates in the leadership of the "civil rights" movement. If you are looking for those ultimately responsible for the murder, arson, and looting in Los Angeles, look to them: they are the guilty ones, these apostles of "non-violence."

For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their rabble-rousing demagoguery, they have been cracking the "cake of custom" that holds us together. With their doctrine of "civil disobedience," they have been teaching hundreds of thousands of Negroes -- particularly the adolescents and the children -- that it is perfectly alright to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance; in protest against injustice. And they have done more than talk. They have on occasion after occasion, in almost every part of the country, called out their mobs on the streets, promoted "school strikes," sit-ins, lie-ins, in explicit violation of the law and in explicit defiance of the public authority. They have taught anarchy and chaos by word and deed -- and, no doubt, with the best of intentions -- and they have found apt pupils everywhere, with intentions not of the best. Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind. But it is not they alone who reap it, but we as well; the entire nation.

It is worth noting that the worst victims of these high-minded rabble-rousers are not so much the hated whites, but the great mass of the Negro people themselves. The great mass of the Negro people cannot be blamed for the lawlessness and violence in Harlem, Chicago, Los Angeles, or elsewhere. All they want to do is what decent people everywhere want to do: make a living, raise a family, bring up their children as good citizens, with better advantages than they themselves ever had. The "civil rights" movement and the consequent lawlessness has well nigh shattered these hopes; not only because of the physical violence and insecurity, but above all because of the corruption and demoralization of the children, who have been lured away from the steady path of decency and self-government to the more exhilarating road of 'demonstration' -- and rioting. An old friend of mine from Harlem put it to me after the riots last year: "For more than fifteen years we've worked our heads off to make something out of these boys. Now look at them--they're turning into punks and hoodlums roaming the streets.

Will Herberg, "'Civil Rights' and Violence: Who Are the Guilty Ones?", The National Review Sept. 7th, 1965, pp. 769-770.

If you read carefully, nearly all the familiar tropes are there. Casting civil rights leaders are the real villains in America's racial drama? Check. Calling them demagogues, rabble-rousers, or race-baiters? Check. Pinning the blame for racial tensions on Black cultural institutions? Check. Refusing outright to engage in the substance of the Black claims? Check. Claiming that they're the ones really looking out for Black interests? Check. Hell, they even played the "my Black friend" card with the citation to his "old friend from Harlem." It's all there. The same arguments, thrown out just as easily against Dr. King as they are against any Black leader with the temerity to speak up against White racism.

Why is the Only "Good" Civil Rights Leader a Dead One?

The Thin Black Duke lays down "Elliott's Law":

As an online discussion concerning race grows longer, the probability of a person referencing Martin Luther King, Jr. as a means to justify their racist and/or ignorant attitudes approaches one.

Many contemporary anti-racism activists have expressed frustration in the way MLK--and indeed, the entire 60s civil rights movement--has been "neutered" so as to mask just how radical and revolutionary its agenda was (and, by extension, how far short we fell from achieving it). I've noticed, along with this, a meme that floats around the conservative right that tries to split the "good" civil rights activists of the 60s, whose cause was laudable and just (though not, it's worth noting, during the 60s themselves, as anyone who has read National Review articles from that time knows) from the next generation of Black leaders, who are charlatans and "race-baiters." Dr. King is the emblem of the former group, and perhaps its only political member; virtually no other civil rights pioneer of that era gets similar treatment. Dr. King serves as an apt model because he is quite conveniently dead, and thus unable to take positions that might be inopportune for his more conservative supporters. Had he not been assassinated, I firmly believe that White America would not have accorded King his current valorized status, for the precise reason that it would have been that much more difficult to mythologize his legacy if he was alive to contest it. Hence we have the title of the post: The only "good" civil rights leader is, quite literally, a dead one.

This splitting of the past (or "past", see my third point) and present civil rights leadership is entirely unjustified. First, there is very little division in the controversial elements of the political agenda of the 1960s Black community and the current Black community. "Color-conscious" remedies were always on the table. Black leaders were not hesitant to indict White America for their racism. Barbara Ransby notes the position of Ella Baker (a top SCLC and SNCC organizer) that "previously oppressive practices had to be radically reversed, not simply halted...and corrective measures had to be put into place" [Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2003), 369]. Dr. King, too, was neither particularly accommodating towards the hurt feelings of White moderates, nor opposed to remedial racial preferences. To the former, he suggested in his Letters from a Birmingham Jail that they were possibly more damaging to the prospects of Black liberation than the Klan, "more devoted to 'order' than to justice" and perpetually urging Black activists to "wait" for the time to be ripe for civil rights reform (a time that would never come). To the latter, King wrote in Why We Can't Wait:

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.

If one reads the actual writings of 1960s civil rights activists -- from Martin Luther King, Ella Baker and Thurgood Marshall to Stokely Carmichael, Harold Cruse, and Malcolm X -- it is nearly impossible to place any of them as color-blind assimilationists, or moderate accommodationists. They wanted change, they wanted it now, and they wanted it to come with the explicit awareness that Blacks were the victims of an intense and systematic campaign of White supremacy that affected and infected all levels of society, far beyond laws that said "Black" and "White". Placing them in any other historical or political framework is naked historical revisionism, pure and simple.

Second, the characteristics associated with the latter group of civil rights activists are rhetorically and substantively identical to those ascribed by White racists in the 60s to the first group. At that time, too, vocal Black leaders were invariably called "agitators" (the contemporary analogue to "race-baiter"), or folks concerned more with their own personal publicity than the needs of ordinary Black people. The "special rights" charge has a long pedigree, dating back to President Andrew Johnson's veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 on the grounds it gave special rights to Blacks. Similarly, the White press often focused on personal scandals and salacious details of activists' personal lives as an excuse for ignoring the substance of their critiques. Along all these axes, the purported nostalgia for the last generation of civil rights leaders is nothing but a facade. It masks the importation of the same racist tropes used against King and his cohorts to the current crop of civil rights leaders. We should be suspicious of these echoes.

Third, and most importantly, the split between the 60s activists and the current ones is ridiculous because often we're talking about the same people. Jesse Jackson was one of Dr. King's top associates later in his career. Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), deacon of the Congressional Black Caucus, was beaten as a freedom rider in Alabama in 1961. Thurgood Marshall articulated much of the progressive Black legal agenda while a litigator for the NAACP, and then while serving on the Supreme Court bench up through the early 90s. Maya Angelou was a close friend of Malcolm X, as well as a coordinator for King's SCLC at Dr. King's request. Julian Bond helped found SNCC. Andrew Young was Executive Director of the SCLC and one of King's key lieutenants. By and large, the folks currently represented among the Black leaders were the same folks leading the charge in the 60s civil rights movement. It's schizophrenic to the extreme to simultaneously praise and condemn the same people for the same advocacies in the same words.

Again, Martin Luther King is a useful tool for justifying racism because he died so young. Being dead, he can't contest or contextualize the actual content of his beliefs. Being dead, he can't remind audiences of the criticisms and abuse he was subjected to during his campaigns, and how it is eerily reminiscent of the charges foisted upon contemporary Black leaders. And being dead, he is no longer a political threat, and thus is a safe person to prop up upon an altar and praise. Were he alive, we might be faced with the uncomfortable prospect that this great hero of American history might demand we actually fulfill our covenant with Black citizens, and that would require actual change and reform and sacrifice. Dead people tell no such tales.