Martin Luther King's intellectual, ethical, and political commitments
January 20, 2018 12:12 AM Subscribe
MLK Now - "In the year before King's death, he faced intense isolation owing to his strident criticisms of the Vietnam War and the Democratic Party, his heated debates with black nationalists, and his headlong quest to mobilize the nation's poor against economic injustice. Abandoned by allies, fearing his death was near, King could only lament that his critics 'have never really known me, my commitment, or my calling.' " (via)
They ignore his indictment of the United States as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” his critique of a Constitution unjustly inattentive to economic rights and racial redress, and his condemnation of municipal boundaries that foster unfairness in housing and schooling... This is a tragedy, for King was a vital political thinker. Unadulterated, his ideas upset convention and pose radical challenges—perhaps especially today, amidst a gathering storm of authoritarianism, racial chauvinism, and nihilism that threatens the future of democracy and the ideal of equality. What follows is an effort to recover those unsettling ideas by shedding light on three of the most important and misunderstood elements of King’s mature thought: his analysis of racism; his political theory of direct action and civil disobedience; and his understanding of the place of ethical virtues in activism and social life...
King’s interests in fear, ideology, and politics led him to believe, as he expressed in “The Power of Nonviolence” (1958), that we must “attack the evil system rather than individuals who happen to be caught up in the system.”
This systemic focus, crucially, does not inflate “racism” to make it explain all racial disparities, but understands that such inequalities are outcomes of many phenomena that interact with racism, yet cannot be reduced to only racism. These include technology, political economy, and cultural patterns. As early as 1964, for example, King presciently warned in Why We Can’t Wait that “if automation is a threat to Negroes, it is equally a menace to organized labor.” Arguing for an alliance between civil rights and labor activists, King foresaw how capital investments in “efficiency” would dislocate middle-class jobs, stagnate wages, and devastate unions’ political power. Granted, discrimination and historical disadvantage would cause these burdens to fall hardest on poor blacks—yet it still opened the possibility of broader political alliances...
In the face of accelerating automation and the elimination of living-wage jobs, King endorsed a number of egalitarian policies, including basic income and a full-employment guarantee, which have once again become rallying cries. Our present-day interest in these policies, however, remains too tethered to technocratic governance. King thought only mass civil disobedience would create, shape, and sustain such transformative goals...
For King, such persistent failures of reciprocity—political, social, and economic—made civil disobedience legitimate... The mass dimension of protest allows for people of all walks of life to be more than spectators, and instead be transformed by their resistance to oppression, rediscovering courage and self-respect in the face of assaults on their dignity... its nonviolent aspect remained crucial, in part because of its unique ability to throw racist ideology off balance. On King’s account, the racist worldview predicts that the humiliation and disregard dispensed in its name will bring back more of the same... For King, “adherence to nonviolence—which also means love in its strong and commanding sense,” politically performed a feat of redirection. By unsettling racist expectations and disclosing new possibilities for living together, nonviolence and an ethic of love became vehicles for staging grievance, disrupting distrust and retaliation, and envisioning new forms of cooperation...
King’s blindness to the gendered dimensions of charismatic authority and hierarchical leadership within protest organizations—and the black church—is surely reason enough to be critical of his example... Any retrieval of King’s legacy has to amend his triple evils [racism, militarism and poverty] to include a fourth: sexism...
Still King’s call to internationalize nonviolent social justice movements continues to matter in at least one important respect. We face global existential challenges of climate change, nuclear weaponry, war and terrorism, and wealth inequality (abetted by offshore tax havens and attacks on capital controls). Yet the institutions that exercise the most power over these circumstances remain insulated from democratic action and accountability to citizens. If there is any hope to prevent disempowered citizens’ rage and resentment from being exploited by demagogues and reactionaries, it must be channeled into coordinated, enduring social movements that force electoral and economic reckonings while fostering respect for our shared “garment of destiny.”
King was hopeful, but not blind to the difficulty and costs of these aspirations. Members of such movements will face repression, scorn, prison, and sacrifice. Racism and sexism will threaten solidarity, violence will injure our faith in cooperation, and inequality will breed its rationalizations. But when threats are mortal, retreat and accommodation are avenues to self-destruction. As we scour for exemplars of struggle, we must not write off the United States’ most peculiar radical and his enduring intellectual and political challenge. King calls on us to think and argue publicly about the crises of our present, and collectively determine the broadest range of nonviolent coercive powers at our disposal. “Our very survival,” King wrote in Where Do We Go From Here, “depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.”
This is a great article, thanks.
One concrete implication of this view—beyond curbing the impulse to mock and condemn on social media—is to avoid forms of political resistance that seek to “humiliate the opponent” rather than “win his friendship and understanding.” These vengeful approaches deny others the capacities for moral learning. They foreclose unanticipated forms of reconciliation and community, and judge, a priori, the life horizons of others based on their worst transgressions, cognitive mistakes, or group identities. Worse, the misguided notion that such practices build partisan solidarity and affirmation are woefully shortsighted. Inevitably, such passions turn inward, destroying organizations with recrimination, excommunications, and cynicism.
This hit home hard for me.
posted by Sebmojo at 3:30 AM on January 20, 2018 [21 favorites]
One concrete implication of this view—beyond curbing the impulse to mock and condemn on social media—is to avoid forms of political resistance that seek to “humiliate the opponent” rather than “win his friendship and understanding.” These vengeful approaches deny others the capacities for moral learning. They foreclose unanticipated forms of reconciliation and community, and judge, a priori, the life horizons of others based on their worst transgressions, cognitive mistakes, or group identities. Worse, the misguided notion that such practices build partisan solidarity and affirmation are woefully shortsighted. Inevitably, such passions turn inward, destroying organizations with recrimination, excommunications, and cynicism.
This hit home hard for me.
posted by Sebmojo at 3:30 AM on January 20, 2018 [21 favorites]
What did MLK say about municipal boundaries?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:51 AM on January 20, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:51 AM on January 20, 2018 [1 favorite]
Would this era of social media have made a difference?
posted by infini at 9:12 AM on January 20, 2018
posted by infini at 9:12 AM on January 20, 2018
rather than “win his friendship and understanding.”
I think King would have appreciated Daryl Davis's approach.
posted by kneecapped at 11:25 AM on January 20, 2018 [1 favorite]
I think King would have appreciated Daryl Davis's approach.
posted by kneecapped at 11:25 AM on January 20, 2018 [1 favorite]
My first thought is that it's exhausting to think that every generation has to learn these lessons anew from their parents and teachers or these values might not survive in the world.
How should we, in our own time, account for the fact that the cameras disappeared in Missouri when the threat of violent rebellion subsided? Or, likewise, that Ferguson remains far more well known than the reliably peaceful Moral Mondays movement, in which protestors assembled at the North Carolina state legislature weekly for over a year (2013–14) to be arrested in protest of conservatives’ assaults on voting rights, civil liberties, and social welfare?
This plus the discussion of King's personal standards of conduct and deportment brings to mind a few things for me, such as a couple of the endless arguments I've rehashed with friends and family. I've been thinking a lot lately about the importance of considering the things that make people uncomfortable, the things we don't want to talk about when we talk about protest or even change. So this made me want to talk about them for a minute.
First, even well-intentioned people have persisted in making tone arguments about how various messages related to protests haven't been carried "the right way" or with "the right phrasing," e.g., when State Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal told Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon "FUCK you." Even people who purportedly can't be shocked by anything see that as an erosion of discourse and decorum, a sign of irresponsibility, etc., rather than the true outpouring of frustration from working directly with protesters and seeing what they see on a daily basis. And obviously Mike Brown was not the stainless martyr that people wanted to see in King—but as has been endlessly rehashed as well, the moment was perhaps more teachable for all that, because the point (at least to those who care) is that anyone is deserving of justice and of the presumption of innocence, and that on the flip side of that, anyone can become the target of a posthumous smear campaign when the powers that be are threatened. But hopefully Brown's treatment after death also illuminated for at least a few people that no one deserves to have their body lying in the street for hours after their death, to be tarred and feathered in the media with strategic releases of their personal information for alleged crimes that presaged their death, to gather as a community in mourning only to be met with machine guns and tanks and tear-gas grenades. Rest in peace, Edward Crawford. The photographers who capture moments like that win the Pulitzer Prize, while the men who actually live them die under mysterious circumstances, months later.
We could quote King all day on his emphasis that if one waits for the message to be carried at the right time or under the right circumstances, change will never occur. It's clear enough that there is no one right way to say things that will minimize the fears that contribute to oppression, but sometimes the cup of endurance runneth over, and there you are, on the street or staring at the screen. And there are other examples to follow. I think it's important to remember that many, if not most, of the key protest leaders in Ferguson were A. women, B. feminists, and C. queer. They wore Assata Taught Me shirts, and their vision of justice was intersectional. For me, the messages they carried helped justify and contextualize my own burgeoning feminism. But they very much expected you to do your own work of self-examination and consciousness-raising so you could participate fully and be an independent contributor, to remember and center and amplify the voices of the most oppressed, women and young men of color and limited means. They didn't plan this, but they benefited from the lessons of those who came before them and wrote about how to do it.
Then there's the radical notion, which many of us discussed during events in Ferguson, that maybe the import of this couldn't be made real for some until they felt a visceral threat to their way of life from the oppressed, until that shock made them perhaps do the tiniest bit of the work of self-examination, until they even briefly considered the fact that property is not more important than people's lives. I remember staying up late as damage spread up West Florissant Avenue, tabs open with Facebook chat, police scanners, Twitter on the #Ferguson hashtag, MetaFilter open, simultaneously worried about my own property and coming to the difficult recognition that the shock this made us all feel was perhaps necessary to wake people up. Fomenting recognition of dissonance is also something King's standards did from a different direction—providing images of men and women in suits and Sunday dresses being hosed down and beaten managed to spark some recognition of humanity among those who otherwise couldn't gin up any sympathy for the oppression of their fellow man.
Of course, I'm not saying destruction and fomenting fear are good protest techniques or are equivalent to nonviolent resistance. What became clear almost immediately in Ferguson and in protests since, if you read what actual protesters on the ground have been saying, and has been the case with most of the "black bloc" stuff, is that there are societal groups (police, government, and anarchists alike) that want and in some cases initiate destruction themselves for strategic ends: to discredit a movement, to devalue property, to enact some fantasy of societal collapse, to bring about the end times or some such nonsense. This might be obvious to anyone who's ever protested and seen the accompanying violence by people who are not protesters. But as the articles linked above point out, those who followed King grappled with and engaged with questions like this too, and they sometimes came out of it with other conclusions.
The other thing this makes me think of is that our educations here in America woefully underprepare us for dealing with these issues. Through grade 12, the history of and importance of protest is rarely taught outside of specialized current-events courses, and even then it's only engaged with in the most perfunctory ways. This nation was founded in protest, but that's not a connection many students are encouraged to make. Engaging on social media and in person on the constellation of topics connected to this makes that clear. Consciousness-raising is one tool that has to be used in conjunction with protest, with efforts to effect systemic change, etc. There are absolutely times to say "Fuck you," and I'll always disagree with anyone who says some dated standard of decorum says otherwise. But I think studies have shown that the work of connecting with people in good faith to remind them of your and everyone's shared and essential humanity is one of the most important things—and it's one of the hardest things, as the articles touch on, in an era when these are not questions people necessarily deal with on any level if they aren't forced to do so by circumstance, whether they happen to be churched or unchurched.
posted by limeonaire at 1:24 PM on January 20, 2018 [15 favorites]
How should we, in our own time, account for the fact that the cameras disappeared in Missouri when the threat of violent rebellion subsided? Or, likewise, that Ferguson remains far more well known than the reliably peaceful Moral Mondays movement, in which protestors assembled at the North Carolina state legislature weekly for over a year (2013–14) to be arrested in protest of conservatives’ assaults on voting rights, civil liberties, and social welfare?
This plus the discussion of King's personal standards of conduct and deportment brings to mind a few things for me, such as a couple of the endless arguments I've rehashed with friends and family. I've been thinking a lot lately about the importance of considering the things that make people uncomfortable, the things we don't want to talk about when we talk about protest or even change. So this made me want to talk about them for a minute.
First, even well-intentioned people have persisted in making tone arguments about how various messages related to protests haven't been carried "the right way" or with "the right phrasing," e.g., when State Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal told Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon "FUCK you." Even people who purportedly can't be shocked by anything see that as an erosion of discourse and decorum, a sign of irresponsibility, etc., rather than the true outpouring of frustration from working directly with protesters and seeing what they see on a daily basis. And obviously Mike Brown was not the stainless martyr that people wanted to see in King—but as has been endlessly rehashed as well, the moment was perhaps more teachable for all that, because the point (at least to those who care) is that anyone is deserving of justice and of the presumption of innocence, and that on the flip side of that, anyone can become the target of a posthumous smear campaign when the powers that be are threatened. But hopefully Brown's treatment after death also illuminated for at least a few people that no one deserves to have their body lying in the street for hours after their death, to be tarred and feathered in the media with strategic releases of their personal information for alleged crimes that presaged their death, to gather as a community in mourning only to be met with machine guns and tanks and tear-gas grenades. Rest in peace, Edward Crawford. The photographers who capture moments like that win the Pulitzer Prize, while the men who actually live them die under mysterious circumstances, months later.
We could quote King all day on his emphasis that if one waits for the message to be carried at the right time or under the right circumstances, change will never occur. It's clear enough that there is no one right way to say things that will minimize the fears that contribute to oppression, but sometimes the cup of endurance runneth over, and there you are, on the street or staring at the screen. And there are other examples to follow. I think it's important to remember that many, if not most, of the key protest leaders in Ferguson were A. women, B. feminists, and C. queer. They wore Assata Taught Me shirts, and their vision of justice was intersectional. For me, the messages they carried helped justify and contextualize my own burgeoning feminism. But they very much expected you to do your own work of self-examination and consciousness-raising so you could participate fully and be an independent contributor, to remember and center and amplify the voices of the most oppressed, women and young men of color and limited means. They didn't plan this, but they benefited from the lessons of those who came before them and wrote about how to do it.
Then there's the radical notion, which many of us discussed during events in Ferguson, that maybe the import of this couldn't be made real for some until they felt a visceral threat to their way of life from the oppressed, until that shock made them perhaps do the tiniest bit of the work of self-examination, until they even briefly considered the fact that property is not more important than people's lives. I remember staying up late as damage spread up West Florissant Avenue, tabs open with Facebook chat, police scanners, Twitter on the #Ferguson hashtag, MetaFilter open, simultaneously worried about my own property and coming to the difficult recognition that the shock this made us all feel was perhaps necessary to wake people up. Fomenting recognition of dissonance is also something King's standards did from a different direction—providing images of men and women in suits and Sunday dresses being hosed down and beaten managed to spark some recognition of humanity among those who otherwise couldn't gin up any sympathy for the oppression of their fellow man.
Of course, I'm not saying destruction and fomenting fear are good protest techniques or are equivalent to nonviolent resistance. What became clear almost immediately in Ferguson and in protests since, if you read what actual protesters on the ground have been saying, and has been the case with most of the "black bloc" stuff, is that there are societal groups (police, government, and anarchists alike) that want and in some cases initiate destruction themselves for strategic ends: to discredit a movement, to devalue property, to enact some fantasy of societal collapse, to bring about the end times or some such nonsense. This might be obvious to anyone who's ever protested and seen the accompanying violence by people who are not protesters. But as the articles linked above point out, those who followed King grappled with and engaged with questions like this too, and they sometimes came out of it with other conclusions.
The other thing this makes me think of is that our educations here in America woefully underprepare us for dealing with these issues. Through grade 12, the history of and importance of protest is rarely taught outside of specialized current-events courses, and even then it's only engaged with in the most perfunctory ways. This nation was founded in protest, but that's not a connection many students are encouraged to make. Engaging on social media and in person on the constellation of topics connected to this makes that clear. Consciousness-raising is one tool that has to be used in conjunction with protest, with efforts to effect systemic change, etc. There are absolutely times to say "Fuck you," and I'll always disagree with anyone who says some dated standard of decorum says otherwise. But I think studies have shown that the work of connecting with people in good faith to remind them of your and everyone's shared and essential humanity is one of the most important things—and it's one of the hardest things, as the articles touch on, in an era when these are not questions people necessarily deal with on any level if they aren't forced to do so by circumstance, whether they happen to be churched or unchurched.
posted by limeonaire at 1:24 PM on January 20, 2018 [15 favorites]
« Older Winter Into Spring | An Homage to You Rudy Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by koavf at 1:34 AM on January 20, 2018 [8 favorites]