When did Martin Luther King die? It's been four decades since that event, but let's ask the question in its broadest light. Reflections on King's death are focusing on what he accomplished. Basically King led the movement to secure legal equality for African Americans and, by extension, all Americans. As a nonwhite immigrant I have benefited from the civil rights movement, and have never forgotten my debt to King. Without him America would have had Brown v. Board of Education but not the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act or the Fair Housing Bill. King accomplished a lot.
But he failed in one key respect. King's dream was for America to become a color-blind society where we are judged not by the hue of our skin but by the content of our character. A telling phrase: many conservatives celebrate King's concept of a merit-based society. Yet King didn't say we should be judged by our merits; he said we should be judged according to character.
What happened to King's idea of a color-blind America? It has been stifled not by the Ku Klux Klan or the Southern segregationists. Remarkably it has been abandoned by the very civil rights activists who fought alongside King. Note that the greatest African American leaders, from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington to Martin Luther King, argued for a century that blacks wanted nothing more than to be treated equally under the law. Yet almost immediately after this legal equality was secured, through King's leadership, the NAACP and the other civil rights groups gave up on the idea of color-blindness and began to demand race and ethnic preferences.
The new civil rights orthodoxy was expressed in Cornel West's book Race Matters. West's argument is that it is naive to have color-blind laws and policies in a society where race till matters. Since race matters, we have to institutionalize race as the basis of public policy. Since race matters, we no alternative than to fight racial discrimination with state-sponsored racial discrimination.
The great irony, of course, is that when you institutionalize race in order to combat racism, you move further and further away from the ideal of a society where race ceases to count. First the civil rights movement fought for decades to get race out of university admissions, job hiring and government contracts; then after King's death, it fought to put race back. Yes, the argument was that "benign discrimination" is better than "invidious discrimination," although let us remember that all discrimination is benign to the one who benefits from it, and invidious to the one who pays for it.
King had his flaws, but in an age of racial charlatans like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Jeremiah Wright, Americans of goodwill continue to wonder: where are you now, Martin Luther King? Have we lost your kind forever? Perhaps the best way to celebrate King's legacy is to recall and attempt to restore the color-blind ideal that he fought and died for.
Martin Luther King was gunned down on the balcony of his hotel 40 years ago. But he really died when his dream of a color-blind society was killed by his own followers.
Reader Comments ( Page 1 of 19)
1. And Barack Obama, despite all his talk of change, is not the one to resurrect MLK's dream. But hey, I'm just a "typical white person".
fanmanaf1 at 12:51PM on Apr 4th 2008
2. DoubleD, you are not advertising one of your books? Incredible.
JefFlyingV at 12:53PM on Apr 4th 2008
3. Atheist and DNA discoverer, Dr. James Watson makes RACIST comments inspired by his belief in Darwinism.
http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3067222.ece
FORMER ATHEIST at 1:02PM on Apr 4th 2008
4. Is there really a connection between Darwinism and racism? Get the REAL Facts.
http://www.evolutionfacts.blogspot.com
RICHARD DAWKINS at 1:30PM on Apr 4th 2008
5. i completely agree..we need to resurrect the true message of King
lincoln at 1:34PM on Apr 4th 2008
6. FORMER ATHEIST still hasn't gotten the massage that Dr. James Watson DID NOT discover DNA.
prfssrx (?)
FORMER ATHEIST (a bluff)
PROFESSOR X (explains the prfssrx alias)
HORACIO MATTESA
Micah Jones
THOMAS QUINN
Bill Jacobs
Whatever your name is, just change your name to SPAMMER and be done with it!
Mokele Mbembe at 1:36PM on Apr 4th 2008
7. Richard Dawkins/Former Atheists/Atheists are imaginary/big dumb idiot; it's a sad fact that the principles of darwinism can be used to potentially breed humans with "better" traits. It's known as eugenics. It's wrong and an ethical nightmare.
It doesn't however, disprove anything relating to evolution.
Try again.
Ryan Anderson at 1:36PM on Apr 4th 2008
8. Everyone, everyone. I'm not a racist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk8BOvJVt9A
Racism.
Dinesh D at 1:43PM on Apr 4th 2008
9. Here is the crux of the civil rights problem: yes it would be nice if we could truly achieve an ethnic neutral national conciousness. Unfortunately, there are elements of society that insist, that even profit, from keeping ethnic awareness paramount. Cities dismiss poverty as an ethnic trait than a cultural disfunction. Politicians kiss up to constitutents by either promising help or limiting help. If there were true ethnic blindness it would remove a political card to be played. And, as much as it nausiates me, Dinesh has a point: if ethnic neutrality were reached then organizations like NAACP and individuals like Sharpton would be rendered obsolete.
The problem is at what point is this ethnic neutrality reached? When the law no longer makes any reference to enthic law or regulation? When the media no longer refers to ethnic subcultures? When the US Census no longer asks if a person if black or white? Where is the line drawn. Also, if the line is drawn, what is to guarentee that it would be respected. Before large employers were held accountable for their employment practices, there was no deterant in an employer from prefering one ethnicity over another. What would prevent that attitude from reasserting itself?
Also, Dinesh fails to take the next step. It isn't just ethnic neutrality that is the goal of a civilly equal America, but sex and gender as well as religous and economic neutrality. While it is impossible, and undesirable, to make all people literally equal, it should be the goal of any democracy to establish laws that do not favor one person's legacy over another.
The ironic hypocracy that is often pointed at by conservatives, calling for neutrality while favoring ethnic support laws, makes sense when you understand that without those laws minorities would be at a disadvantage... not due to any inherent flaw but due to the prejudices and preconceptions of society. When gays are treated the same as straights, then you can talk about the elimination of laws designed to protect them. Until then, support laws are the best we can do to give a hand to aspects of our country that would otherwise be unfairly marginalized.
Somber at 1:44PM on Apr 4th 2008
10. A side note... because people are insisting on being nits...
Prejudice and Bigotry have thrived long before evolution came along to give it a face of science. Jews were persecuted by romans, babylonians, egyptians, and probably just about every european authority for centuries. Jews were demonized for religous and ethnic excuses, as well as rampant paranoia and opportunistic plays (rules in medieval europe would barrow money from Jews and then purge their country of jews when the bills came due).
Prejudice is a biological holdover from more uncivilized times: people who could recognize outsiders who might have been a threat were more likely to avoid harm or attack first, and thus survive to spread their genes. "Social Darwinism" didn't create bigotry. What it did was give a clinical 'scientific' excuse for the haves to repress the have-nots. People who were poor deserved to be poor and people who were rich deserved to be rich. In reality, Social Darwinism was employed to perpetuate the attitudes that kept one class of society in poverty and to protect the privilages of another. Darwin himself adamantly opposed those who would apply his principle to some as unbiological as societies.
Oh, and Eugenics comes in two flavors: breeds and improvements. The breed eugenics believes one ethnic legacy is superior to another, and thus has to do all it can to advance and protect itself. Ironically, this is counter-darwinian. If the 'Aryan' race was superior it wouldn't need to lift a finger to protect itself. Improvement eugenics are people who want to make humanity better. Here, the problem is 'what is considered better'? Would eliminating Autism be 'better'? How about Lou Gherigs disease?
Please think before you post.
Somber at 1:55PM on Apr 4th 2008
11. The reason racism isn't over, is because of the individual: the individual manager, cop, teacher, etc who makes decisions, and influences lives on a daily basis, through racist practices.
MLK didn't die, dd. His legacy is alive and well in your career and level of success in this country. Don't look for when he died. Rather, get on your knees and thank him, dope.
America's Most Gangsta at 1:56PM on Apr 4th 2008
12. What?? no book plug??
Oh, please allow me to retort!
America's Most Gangsta deconstructs race relations as it has never been done before.
America's Most Gangsta at 2:00PM on Apr 4th 2008
13. dd, I have no desire to argue over whether or not you are a racist. We have traded emails where I have shown, with specific examples, how you are indeed a racist. I only wish to argue at the present time, however, that you are an asshole.
America's Most Gangsta at 2:03PM on Apr 4th 2008
14. Dinesh, you are a shrewd observer concerning the employment quotas, which have not worked out the way they were intended to.
I, too, am a non-white US citizen, but I have witnessed lazy employees getting hired over better qualified ones, simply to fill this quota, and, seemingly, the quota employee is so aware of it that they think they cannot be fired, so they are too willing to coast throughout their careers.
The worst thing, perhaps, is that other people became envious of the preferential quota, and demanded to be included. This goes for females, (who are hardly a minority at 50% of the population). I have recently, literally heard a young female say she can get hired easily at any civil engineering firm, simply for being a female with a bachelors degree, even though she cannot seem to pass the state civil engineering test after 3 tries and more than a year on the job.
I suspect that eventually employment quotas will be implemented for homosexuals, via the ENDA bill and a liberal congress and president.
Essentially, these employment quotas are laws to discriminate against the traditional white male, because every other "minority" group benefits, while remaining stuck in a minority group mentality at the level of each individual employee.
America has so much potential, but is so self-destructive.
Rev 3:16 at 2:10PM on Apr 4th 2008
15. Somber, excellent post.
JefFlyingV at 2:12PM on Apr 4th 2008