I revered Dr. King. Still do. Fusing Christian thought with Gandhi’s tactic of “satyagraha,” King immortalized the idea that regular people could peacefully lock arms in civil disobedience to abolish bad laws. Jim Crow laws, in his case.
In a 1957 speech, King quoted Faust author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe about the tragedy of the human condition: “There’s enough stuff in me to make both a gentleman and a rogue,” he said, paraphrasing Goethe’s “Two souls live in me, alas, irreconcilable with one another.”
King quoted Plato’s comparison of man’s “struggle within” to a charioteer with “two headstrong horses, each wanting to go in different directions.”
On race, America is schizophrenic in that way – one nation galloping full speed inside the chaos between two headstrong horses. Both sides are deeply divided. Both hold firm to King’s legacy to justify irreconcilable visions. And both can’t be right. There’s enough stuff in King’s legacy for “gentlemen and rogues” to pluck out ideas to anchor conflicting interpretations of life in America after slavery, Jim Crow and Barack Obama.
Antiracists, for instance, see “colorblindness” as a distortion of King’s Dream speech.
For them, “content of character over skin color” is a racist idea because it asks blacks to ignore the peculiar history attached indelibly to their skin color. “Not seeing color,” they say, is a Trojan horse for racist ideas and policies that perpetuate systemic racism.
That’s why blurting out “colorblindness” gets you the same vitriol as “All Lives Matter.” Say “All Lives Matter,” and they hear “Blacks Lives Don’t Matter.” Racial overseers also whip you for saying, “melting pot” and “assimilation.” It’s like cussing in church.
“So in reality, the ‘colorblind’ and ‘melting pot’ ideologies that many believe to be consistent with Dr. King’s dream are actually distortions and misappropriations of Dr. King’s true dream,” wrote E. J. R. David, Ph.D., associate professor, University of Alaska Anchorage in Psychology Today. “Both concepts are illusions that have done nothing but to preserve oppressive systems and hide prejudiced attitudes, essentially operating as barriers to truly achieving MLK’s dream.”
And what’s the proof that “oppressive systems” are being preserved? Disparities in black wealth, education, housing, prison population, maltreatment by cops, etc., they say. Disparities, for them, are the strange fruit grown from policies fertilized by “racist ideas” that keeps the oppressive system flourishing.
King said that six decades ago.
That was the point of Ibram X. Kendi’s recent column, The Second Assassination Of Martin Luther Jr., The Atlantic. He wrote that focusing on King’s “colorblindness” distorts his larger message years after his “Dream” speech. “These self-professed admirers of King are digging a new grave and burying King’s body of work within it.”
Eleven years after the Montgomery Boycott, four years after the “Dream” speech, and three years after President Johnson introduced his poverty programs and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, King was roused from his dream.
In a 1967 interview with NBC’s Sander Vanocur, King said that after a lot of “soul-searching” and “agonizing moments,” some of his old optimism was superficial and needed to be tempered with reality.
“I must confess,” King said, “that that dream that I had that day has, in many points, turned into a nightmare. … I think the realistic fact is that we still have a long, long, long way to go.” Realistic, for King, because government money he wanted for blacks was being lavished on war in Vietnam.
Killing Jim Crow was solely about dignity, King told an audience at Stanford University in 1967. “Massive action” was needed to achieve equality. How? Mostly big government programs and spending.
In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go From Here, King urged “special treatment” for blacks. “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years,” he wrote, “must now do something special for him, ...”
King, in his time, was right about the stench of oppression that lingered after Jim Crow died. But as excruciatingly difficult as it was, he was wrong to look to government programs as the solution to black progress.
This is not small government dogma. This is the cold, hard, reality that’s been ignored for decades. And the proof is in the pudding. Government has spent trillions on thousands of programs over five decades, and it has institutionalized mountains of rules, regulations and policies designed to choke off racism wherever it struggled to breathe. It didn’t work. Disparities linger.
Looking to government is like dumping water out of a sinking boat and ignoring the hole that’s causing the water to gush through. It helps, but it doesn’t get the job done.
Believing that government can never do for blacks what blacks can only do for themselves was never about racism. The government clumsily did its job when it replaced bad laws with good ones. That brought equality. To build “equity,” individuals must invest sweat equity into improving their economic performance to compete in business and wealth-creation. There’s no other way to close disparities.
Yet activists still use disparities as evidence of racism. And because they’ve decided for all of us that government is the only solution for black progress, anyone who disagrees is accused of perpetuating racism. Strangely, even blacks.
Skin color is used, not to solve problems, but as a weapon in dirty politics. It’s tearing the country apart. And they don’t care.
This is where “government-solution” black activists have transcended skin color to become very human. They’re enriching themselves on the backs of discouraged blacks in troubled communities. The communities become unlivable, but they become richer. They’ve reconciled with their rogue.
From Goethe to Marlow, authors have created their own versions of Johann Georg Faust, the depressed scholar approached by Mephistopheles, Lucifer’s agent, to exchange his soul for worldly pleasures.
Author Willard Farnham said Mephistopheles never really appeared to corrupt men, but to collect the souls of men who already were. “He appears because he senses … that Faustus is already corrupt,” wrote Farnham, “that indeed he is already ‘in danger to be damned.’”
We sense that, too.
Dr. King was made of different stuff than the “saviors” we see today. Relying on a fix-all government was understandable given the times in which he lived. We can’t know for sure, but being the gentlemen he was, I believe that if King had seen the debilitating results of government largesse, he would’ve changed course.
He might’ve said to the very capable headstrong horse, “Quickly now! Adjust your course to the reality. The cavalry isn’t coming.”
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