On supremacies and equality: the Reverend Martin Luther King, 1960
From a speech Reverend Martin Luther King delivered at DePauw University in September of 1960:
Black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy, and God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men. God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race and the creation of a society where all men will live together as brothers, and all men will respect the dignity and the worth of all human personality.
It’s enough to make you weep, if you think of the fact that such a statement would now be highly controversial and unlikely to find a home on any college campus.
It would probably be problematic on three fronts at least. The first is its use of the phrase “black supremacy” as similar to “white supremacy,” when we all know that according to the Gospel of Marx they are totally different in every way because of the power differentials. The second is the idea that white lives matter too, and that we are one human race who are brothers (actually, come to think of it, MLK’s use of the term “brothers” and “men” to mean “humanity” would probably be a huge no-no as well). The third is his assertion that God is a large part of the reason that all people are one and all need to be respected.
You know what I mean: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Note, also, that the words say “the pursuit of happiness” – that is, the opportunity to seek it, not the right to have it. All people are not going to be happy, and they are not going to be equal in their life conditions. But they are created equal, and given liberty to, among other things, pursue happiness.
It is no accident that King was a minister. The black community has long been an especially religious one (statistics for 2014 can be found here; I’m not sure what’s been happening in the ensuing years). Also, the underpinnings and strength of the idea of equality has inherent religious dimensions. Without religion, it’s certainly possible to believe the same thing – or at least pay lip service to it. But for many people, leftism has become their religion and leftism says that people must be regarded as different and judged by different standards, according to a hierarchy of victimhood, class, race, and gender that the left sets up.
Also, some religions have been taken over by leftism. One only has to look at Barack Obama’s own church in Chicago, which was headed by another Reverend, Jeremiah Wright, to see what I mean.
Speaking of Obama, remember this sort of thing? It’s a fascinating segment of a speech, because Obama is stating the application of the Declaration to all in inhabitants of the US and quoting the document, but cites the doctrine of equality while leaving out the Creator as the one doing the “endowing.” It’s a significant omission, I believe, and no accident:
Certainly, a person can believe in these truths without believing in God. Also, there are churches and other religious groups that have embraced leftism and its racial blaming and hierarchies. But Martin Luther King’s vision loses much of its potency when its religious underpinnings are weakened. I believe that is at least part of what has happened to it in the last few decades.
Why was King addressing “black supremacy” back in 1960, when there was still not just de facto discrimination in the US but also de jure discrimination? It’s because there has long been a tension and an argument even in the black community and the civil rights community (including white people) between inclusiveness and separatism, love and rage. It’s not new. In the late 60s, not too long after that speech of King’s, it reached a fever pitch. Now the temperature of the fever is even higher.
You are certainly correct that King’s quote would be “problematic” in most ‘woke’ corridors today. Indeed, stating the quote, word for word, without citing the source might get you harassed and fired, depending on where you work. Even citing the source likely wouldn’t save you from a determined social media mob.
King is a complicated figure, for many reasons, as I think most followers of this blog know. He certainly seemed to move further left in the last couple years of his life. Of course it is impossible to know what his thoughts on America of the last 50 years (in particular, the last eight or so…from the Zimmerman/Martin imbroglio forward) would be. I am skeptical of conservatives who suggest he would have evolved into the center-right. But I also think he would be disgusted by the Antifa and other violent radicals exploiting alleged racism to commit mayhem as well as shameless racial hucksters like Al Sharpton and all of his progeny (and there are scores of them now, including much of BLM).
But that’s just my opinion.
The problem is that some people seem incapable of seeing people as individuals. The “woke” left sees people in groups based on color. Then they call other people racists, which is ironic. I sometimes think there are people whose brains are incapable of distinguishing individuals from the group as a whole.
I think Matthew in the bullseye. Plus, in the 60-70s the left had not thoroughly corrupted politics and law enforcement. So now blue states and in particular blue metro areas are in a turmoil of their own creation, they aren’t riding the tiger, they are desperately clinging to it’s tail.
Diversity + Proximity = War
And all the pretty words and well-meaning thoughts in the universe will not change this baked-in fact of primate ethology so long as we are evolved from apes; i.e. we’re stuck with it forever.
And that’s that. There is no solution. There are ameliorations. Some ‘nicer’ than others. Looks like we’re going to get the nastier ones in the end because the Good People turn into Turd-Flinging Monkeys at the slightest hint of any effort to really deal with the issues we face.
This is a tragedy for all sides involved; a multi-generational slow-motion civilizational train wreck.
TL;DR: With due respect to all genteel well-meaning folk present, what the Reverend (granted, except when running trains on female groupies) Doctor (xeroxis causa) MLK (pbuh) had to say or would have said on any given topic had he not been assassinated is at this stage of the game a giant meaningless irrelevance. And people wonder why ‘Conservatives’ have conserved nothing…
There is a very quiet but profound reason for rejecting all forms of government benefit or privilege based on the race of the citizen — and that is the extreme difficulty of deciding where to draw the lines. There will always be people who “look like” they belong to one race but who — by whatever race-classification rules the government and the race hucksters adopt — will end up classified as something else. The Elizabeth Warren “1/1024” controversy is an example of this problem.
Note that this is not the same as saying that race isn’t “real” — that’s another argument altogether. It’s also not saying that averaging various traits by race cannot be done — if race is treated as real, then the few people who are hard to classify are just another source of measurement error (and all measurements have an associated error).
What this observation does point out is that at the margins, for the in-between people, there will be some who end up classified in a “stupid” way. Government policy is necessarily binary — either you qualify for whatever’s going down, or you do not. So, there will always be people who, by the rules, qualify but look like they shouldn’t.
This is an unavoidable source of unfairness for all government benefits or privileges based on racial categories.
Sorry to have missed that speech. My wife and I arrived at DePauw a few years later, but still when it was a liberal arts school in the sense of a broad-based education and learning to think, rather than a school for liberals in the sense of just memorizing hard left talking points, as it has become more recently.
It’s so often forgotten that by the time of his assassination in 1968, MLK was no longer much in fashion in the black community, especially among young blacks. It was the Black Panthers with Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton, as well as the speechifying militants Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown.
“Soul On Ice” by Eldridge Cleaver went to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, a book in which he advocated raping white women as a symbolic act, part of “the Struggle” and a good way to trouble the minds of white men.
Huey Newton was in prison for shooting a white cop (for which no one on the Left blamed him) and “Free Huey” buttons were a common accessory in my high school (which was 20% black).
That quote obviously shows MLK was a racist and all his statues must be torn down, and all streets named after him changed.
miklos:
That’s what the last paragraph of my post was about.
Note, however, Cleaver’s “conversion”—and subsequent writings—after he decided to travel a bit and “see the world”.
It’s been four years since I stopped watching television. Best decision I ever made but I must admit that I miss the Discovery Channel with shows like Deadliest Catch, Bering Sea Gold, Alaskan Bush People, Gold Rush, Moonshiners, Survivorman, and Naked and Afraid 🙂
A common thread these shows have is their unabashed celebration of freedom. But more importantly these groups seem to have no desire to force their way of life on the rest of us. Sure crab boats will compete for the largest tally of the season. That is just honest fun. But when someone is in danger they drop everything to help each other.
These shows represent for me what Federalism should be about. Each state is an incubator. Some states will discover the right formula and flourish. Other states will suffer from bad ideas and policies. Rational leaders will recognize their mistakes and change course. Some may look at the successful states and adopt some of their ideas. In theory this is how it should work.
But the older I get I see we have a leadership class problem. They can never admit mistakes! As it’s been said: They just double down on stupid. Why is that? Part of it is that they get to play with other people’s money so they have no skin in the game. In other words, they are “essential” but you are not. Secondly they pander to the weakest among us at election time. Thirdly and most importantly they work hand in glove with their allies in the media and academia to create a highly polarized political divide between themselves and the proponents of competing ideas.
I think this needs to end. It is tearing us apart. I am probably not the first to recommend this but I’d like to voice my support for civil rights legislation that forces both public and private entities to achieve parity with respect to party affiliation. 50% Left, 50% Right. The actual details of making it work, I haven’t a clue.
“ but cites the doctrine of equality while leaving out the Creator as the one doing the “endowing.” It’s a significant omission, I believe, and no accident”
In a UN speech Obama said “The future does not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam”, and was very emphatic while saying it. That wasn’t an accident either. The man is the enemy of everything that America is about.
Neo,
Yes, you addressed the rise of the Black Power militants in general terms. I wanted to be more specific and name some names. There’s more emotive power when one talks about some of what someone like Eldridge Cleaver was actually spelling out. The business about raping white women as a revolutionary act hit me hard and repelled me when I was 16 and 17 years old.
There was a lot of Black Panther presence at my high school. Some of us in Physics class joked about becoming the “white mice” to protect ourselves. I saw a lot of black-on-white bullying and violence. Never once saw anyone white pick on anyone black. It was unheard of. Some black guys would stand outside lavatories and ask the smaller white guys for money before letting them in. This happened with black and white girls as well.
I remember vividly a very pretty blonde girl named Sarah getting a black eye.
miklos
“Certainly, a person can believe in these truths without believing in God.” neo
I suspect that the great majority of moderate liberals claim to believe in those “self-evident truths” with a not insubstantial percentage claiming that belief in God is not a prerequisite for the very existence of “inalienable rights”.
Most willfully blind to with the rest utterly rejecting the self-evident truth that a current consensus of opinion is merely shared opinion and, that a current consensus cannot do more than merely delay a later consensus of opinion.
Which means that ‘rights’ established by shared opinion are mere privileges granted and revocable by later shared opinion.
“If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. John Stuart Mill
I think it was Michael Savage who said that it is a myth that life in the ’40s and ’50s was harmonious. He said you could easily get your ass kicked for looking at someone the wrong way, by someone of any race.
Some commenters here talk about what happened in school. I’m sorry to say but that is called bullying. It happens everywhere. White on White, Black on Black, Black on White, White on Black. etc.
We live in a time when unfortunately our leaders in the government, media, academia, and tech have never outgrown their adolescent years. They are now in positions of influence and power but they act like 12 year olds with a chip on their shoulder ready beat you because you look at them funny.
We deserve better and we should demand it at the ballot box, the products we buy, the media we watch, and the schools we send our kids to.
Early on in these riots, I saw on Facebook, a young woke white man accuse his mother of “ enabling racism “ because she quoted MLK. I pointed out to him that it was likely that some of the businesses and jobs being destroyed were black. He said it was a “ small price to pay “. Of course it was not his property being destroyed. These woke bastards act all so self righteous about destroying person Bs property because of something person A did. He was also lecturing his mother on the need to “listen”. I despise the Social Justice Warriors. I despise them with a fury. These last two or three weeks I have been furious at these devils.
“It is no accident that King was a minister.”
Farrakhan is a “minister” of some sort. Martin Luther King Jr was a Christian. He was also a pastor of a number of Christian (mostly Baptist) churches. King’s worldview & dream were founded in his faith in Jesus Christ. It was a vision/dream/worldview that sees our creation in God’s image as the basis for our common human worth & dignity (“black white or yellow” in his words) but finds its fulfillment in the work of Christ which unites everything in heaven & earth. Puts all the broken stuff back together as it was supposed to be all along. “In this new life, it doesn’t matter if you are a Jew or a Gentile, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbaric, uncivilized, slave, or free. Christ is all that matters, and he lives in all of us.” – Colossians 3:11
“At the right time God will bring everything together under the authority of Christ—everything in heaven and on earth. – Ephesians 1:10
“The black community has long been an especially religious one (statistics for 2014 can be found here…).”
The black community has long been overwhelmingly Christian in its rootedness & expression of faith. Three of the 5 points in that linked article point to the unique Christian linkage to the Black community. Not Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim or Rastafarian; Christian. And where the author cites the measures of religiosity: prayer, belief in God, importance of and adherence to…his other articles make it clear that those behaviors are tied to the Black community’s embeddedness in the Christian faith.
The corruption of that faith by the liberation theologians of the 60’s-80’s and their inherent Marxism accounts for a great deal of the loss of anchorage of the Black community to Christ. They’ve been helped along by the white Christians who abandoned the Gospel of Christ for the faux-gospel of doing good to remake the world according to Lennon’s Imagine.
That’s probably enough…thanks.
Let me emphasize. I think the whole SJW movement is a wolf in sheep’s clothing movement. It is not MLK. It is anti MLK. It will create and has created more racism, not less. These young white kids who are being lectured on being white, when they get older, many will rebel and become the worst sort of racist. And it is already making blacks more racist. Did I mention, I despise these SJW devils? Yes , more than I ever despised ISIS.
“Speaking of Obama, remember this sort of thing?”
Yep, I remember a lot of what Obama said and did that was anti-religion. I remember watching the first news clip of him pardoning the White House Thanksgiving turkeys in which he made what was clearly the “sign of the cross” over the turkey.
And, of course, I didn’t wonder why no news reporter picked up on what was clearly a mocking of religion as they gave that guy a free pass on just about everything.
In later years, he would just hold his hand over the turkey so I wondered if someone told him how that gesture came across the first time he did it.
MLK has become merely a name to conjure with, and a photograph. His words and actions are unmoored from his reputation.
a not insubstantial percentage claiming that belief in God is not a prerequisite for the very existence of “inalienable rights”
Exactly. An “inalienable right” requires an absolute frame of reference. God is that extra-universal frame of reference. The alternative: mortal gods and goddesses handing out philosophies, exceptions, and secular indulgences, are but poor players, strutting and… A [social] consensus is progressive (i.e. monotonic) in a limited frame, but generally chaotic (“evolutionary”) and unreliable.
[MLK] words and actions are unmoored from his reputation.
Yes, so we do not judge the man in an absolute frame of reference, but rather the philosophy he espoused based on the extent to which the principles are internally, externally, and mutually consistent, or the antithesis of the Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic, politically congruent (“=”) religion.
Huh.
Jon Baker above, has probably done as much as anyone could to describe the mindset of a real, and unapologetic psychological instantiation of the assumptions of everyday wokeness…. if not of progressivism or Popular Marxism per se.
As Gringo said they say, “eggs gotta be broken”. As Baker’s young zealot who was indicting his own mother for a reactionary appeal to a supposedly progressive ideal , said with regard to burning buildings, ” small price to pay”.
As far as the topic of this thread goes, I have no particular powers of clairvoyance, and cannot reach into the mind of Martin Luther King. He, has of course now become a favorite quote mine for sputtering conservatives who defensively whine in search of a “gottcha”, “But … But… didn’t you [by implucation] say that lions and lambs, and all men this and that, and character most of all, and a shining hill something, and blah blah blah?”
Well no they did not, King did, or plagiarized those who did.. And that was then and this is now. And a close reading of King’s life, and behavior, and development might leave one with the impression that Christianity was of the much same kind of utility to him, as an Episcopalian bishopric is to a lesbian earth worshipper. The bible as compendium of rhetorically useful phrases and socially resonant aphorisms.
It should come as no surprise then, I suppose, that the progressive left continues to deploy language which mimics natural law language, but which is essentially incompatible with the left’s own most fundamental assumptions about reality.
But when has intellectual incoherence or even deliberate hypocrisy ever given pause to a progressive? Small price to pay, a few eggs broken here and there, and so on and so forth.
I should have read down to Assistant Village Idiot’s comment before I remarked about King.
I could have saved myself the trouble.
John Guilfoyle says it very well.
As to Neo’s “Certainly, a person can believe in these truths without believing in God”, that is in effect a flirtation with truths as being relative, humanly constructed and subject to human modification. One must defer to a Higher Authority for absolute truth. Humility is required.
There must be consequences. Otherwise it is all good will, vague and twisting slowly in the wind.
King is a complicated figure, for many reasons, as I think most followers of this blog know. He certainly seemed to move further left
He was a man exceedingly meticulous about his finances while at the same time engaging in (and tolerating among his entourage) sexual behavior astonishing in its recklessness. That’s complicated.
The development of people’s ideas in their inchoate form tends to be contrapuntal. You want to figure out where King might have landed, look where his confederates started and finished. That’s with whom he’d have been arguing. The only one I’m aware of who was skeptical of the main currents of thought in and among black politicians after 1968 was Bayard Rustin. He was not influential after 1965 and he was always a stage manager, not a star.
The farther we get from 1965, the more you can see we have a passable modus vivendi in everyday life and a sh!t show in public life and the matrices in which public life is lived. The politicians, the public bureaucracies, the bar, the HR apparat, the media, and higher education are doing what they do most assiduously: making the world worse.
Cicero:
No, I was not “flirting” with “truths as being relative, humanly constructed and subject to human modification.” I was describing what I have observed about what certain people think. I have observed plenty of very moral atheists and/or agnostics who believe in such truths.
Now, whether you believe, or whether I believe, or whether it is actually the case that truths depend on a Divine Creator ultimately emanate from that Creator, is a separate issue.
“… to figure out where King might have landed, look where his confederates started and finished.”–Art Deco (2:07 pm)
I suppose that a look at Reverend Ralph Abernathy will reveal the likeliest course of King’s life had King not been murdered.
I suppose that a look at Reverend Ralph Abernathy will reveal the likeliest course of King’s life had King not been murdered.
Don’t think so. He was the second to the duelist. Not the duelist himself. His tenure as president of the SCLC did not end well.
Richard John Neuhaus offered the view that Abernathy was the odd man out in King’s circle because “he was a man completely without guile”. Abernathy’s public acknowledgement of King’s sexual escapades and his retrospective assessments of the ancien regime in race relations have been informative.