Thoughts on Martin Luther King Day, 2021
The left may not have trashed Martin Luther King’s statues, but they’ve done an excellent job of trashing his message and his legacy.
I cannot help but think that King would weep if he were alive today and could see what’s going on.
Then again, he was used to having enemies out to destroy him. And even in his time, it wasn’t just some in the white community who were against him. There were forces in the black community who thought his message wasn’t harsh or vengeful enough.
In honor of King, here’s a repost of something I wrote this past June, with a few edits added.
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 us all weep, considering that such a statement would now be highly controversial and unlikely to find a comfortable home anywhere except the right.
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 far higher.
MLK and BHO in the same post. talk about pearls and swine or one of these things is not like the other.
Agree completely. Your opening is so true.
I think we are leaving behind us any faint idea that the left actually believes as many as one thing it has said and required of us as a matter of justice, morality, ethics, and freedom.
To the left ,these are all weapons to use against those who can be manipulated by them
Which brings up the question of how would you like to be a person who cannot be manipulated by them?
What is especially frustrating is that people we know, people who seemed decent and kindly, people who would never have seemed like this, also use these weapons against us. But they actually believe, see no contradiction, unlike their masters.
“whataboutism” is called a hurtful, mean-spirited accusation–and the sheep believe it–when it means you’ve been busted yet again for your hypocrisy.
It’s like watching riots where protestors scream non-sequiturs at the police as if they want to start an argument whose facts and ground rules they control.
There is no common ground.
One of them, the formerly decent; “Trump is a dictator!”
Me, to myself. “Dictators don’t lose elections, get impeached, aren’t investigated by their own government, aren’t slagged endlessly in the media.” Is this person so stupid as to believe this or am I supposed to be that stupid?”
Me to one of the formerly decent: “Dictators don’t get impeached.”
One of the formerly decent: Two second recalculation…”Trump is a terrible person!”
Hate to say it, but discussion is useless and accepting their facts and ground rules as the only way to have a discussion is worse than useless.
Dr King said many things to appeal to what is now considered conservative principles. But did he believe them or was he just conning whitey until the CRA 1964 could be passed? Quotas and preferences were immediately used after 1964; did King in any way object? Not to my knowledge.
When I was in high school in the 60s, we had a black assembly (complete with standing for a black anthem) in which a poem was read, “Slow down Negro”. How ironic that if a white person brings up the content of their character thing, the leftist figurative response is “Slow down white supremacist”.
My leftist acquaintances on Facebook are all repeating variations of attacks on “white people” (they themselves are all white of course) for quoting MLK in the vein of Neo’s quote rather than some of his harsher remarks.
If you call them the Kindly Ones, they’ll pass you by and hurt someone else.
Almost relevant as Williams Jenning Bryan Day…. Who can forget his famous Cross of Gold Speech which defined a generation? Oh, wait.
Outward Propitiation might confer some immediate survival advantage, but pay some attention to your lying eyes, too.
https://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/the-talk-nonblack-version/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5048849/FBI-report-claims-MLK-night-sex-orgies.html
Magical 😛
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSHvH5vUMD8
It’s possible to have humane and decent relations between two very different races inhabiting the same turf, but you can’t get from there to there by worshiping false gods, tolerating charlatans, praising failure, and self-flagellation.
I’m constantly stunned to hear the support for BLM. A movement that starts with identifying the color of one’s skin before then judging their character based on the identification.
Then there is this BS being peddled around again: “Facial recognition can identify one’s political party”. The actual 5 year old study says it is 75% effective. If you think 75% is good, then I’d like to see your prove it by going to a restaurant that fails to properly prepare food 25% of the time. But it is from Stanford, in the heart of Silicon Valley. They seem to enjoy judging people superficially.
@Leland:
I am involved with machine learning in my income-generating activities.
Being 75% good at predicting something when everyone else is only 50% good at predicting it is a state of being much to be desired. Hell, I’d take 50.5% ignoring taxes and transaction costs. Agreed that if a restaurant has the potential to give you a bad case of C. difficile, you may face Gambler’s Ruin 😛
I wouldn’t discount at all the sorts of tyranny that Big Data and ML make possible.
One small silver lining is that the womyns who run amok LARPing in the hard science faculties today are up in arms and there’s a huge push on for ‘Ethical’ Machine Learning. i.e. if your ML model run on huge corpus of real world data has the temerity to notice that Blacks commit violent crimes at n times the rate of Whites, then by golly gosh your model is raycisss and must have been trained on systemic bias –> ergo must tweak the training data and also muzzle any ‘incorrect’ outputs. And they all lived happily ever after.
PS: Superficial Judgement / Stereotyping is an evolved survival mechanism. Only when you are in a safe environment and have the luxury of time and resources can you afford to judge individual people based their gloriously complex individual personas. Out on the African Savannah (or taking a walk through Baltimore) you do that often enough, you die.
Don’t knock ‘Superficiality’… Depending on the connotation can be good or bad.
Besides, do you think Stalin would have hesitated to deport a population identified by an ML algorithm if it was ‘only’ 75% effective? 😀
Bill M:
Martin Luther King was far from perfect. But supporting affirmative action in the 1960s was a far cry from supporting the things that are happening now in the name of “anti-racism.”
Affirmative action and preferences/quotas are two different things. Affirmative action was sold as actions designed to let non-white groups access the same opportunities as whites e.g. going to heavily black schools to recruit collage applicants or advertising jobs in locations where qualified black people would more likely become aware of them. Those who support the kind of preferences used by colleges in admissions often hide behind the term “affirmative action”.
One might ask a similar question regarding Hubert Humphreys promise to eat the paper upon which the CRA was written if it was ever used to allow quotas and preferences. Did he really mean it?
The bait and switch did not just come about in the last decade, it was there from the start.
Zaphod:
“Stereotyping is an evolved survival mechanism. ” etc
I’ve often thought that the attempt to utterly squash “stereotyping” inevitably becomes an attempt to nullify one of the basic abilities of the brain: pattern matching. It’s a good thing to disrupt erroneous and misleading generalizations, but it’s hopeless to try to prevent the brain from noticing the five green dots among a hundred red ones. Ultimately it’s a foolish and impossible attempt.
I mean, it’s not just the human brain, it’s the animal brain. Dogs and cats do it. Way too deeply a part of us to be excised.
“Black Supremacy” is founded upon the premise that only by having their turn at the Master/slave relationship can there be atonement by the white race. At base, that’s what motivates the Rafael Warnocks and Maxine Watters. Clearly, they are willfully blind to it revealing that they have turned into the very thing they purport to hate…
The irony is literally Shakespearean and all too human.
Diversity, not limited to racism, breeds adversity and division. Be wary of anyone exercising liberal license to indulge color judgments. #HateLovesAbortion
Affirmative action and preferences/quotas are two different things
Yes, affirmative action was not meant to evolve (i.e. chaotic) or progress (i.e. monotonic) as affirmative discrimination based on diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgments). Social justice anywhere is injustice everywhere.
““Black Supremacy” is founded upon the premise that only by having their turn at the Master/slave relationship can there be atonement by the white race.”
My understanding is that FAR more blacks were slave owners of blacks (in Africa) than whites in the New World ever dreamed of.
I love that NBA stars ignore Uyghur slaves picking cotton of all things in China.
More stuff that you just can’t make up …
I once read a piece that noted MLK, if he had lived in Eastern Europe under the Communists, would be unknown. He would literally be a forgotten, dried, splash of blood on a piece of pavement somewhere. No other evidence of his existence would remain.
If you accept that, then MLKs reputation recedes. He had some admirable inner strength. He also was caught in questionable activities. And mostly, he was lucky to have been born in the right place.
I have little confidence – though I’d like to be mistaken – that Martin Luther King believed in his own soaring universalist rhetoric, any more than he believed in living out the dogmas of the Christian religion he supposely ministered, or in the principles of academic integrity he flouted. What grounds has anyone to trust that he really did?
On the other hand, I tend to doubt that the most strident black racialists in academia, actually believe their melanin theory of racial superiority either.
Of course you can throw the Kennedys and the Bidens in there too: as plagiarists, hypocrites in their personal lives, etc … And I suppose FDR as well, although he actually did seem to believe in the welfare state redistributive hell he preached openly. But few worship the Kennedys or FDR nowadays, though Jack Kennedy is still quoted too, and no one serious ever did really admire Joe Biden.
No thread is complete without some honey from the Bee.
https://babylonbee.com/news/blm-celebrates-mlks-birthday-by-tearing-down-a-statue-of-him
Somehow I don’t think this “journalist” understood King’s speeches.
https://notthebee.com/article/this-is-a-real-wapo-headline-and-i-cant-stop-laughing
“To understand Trump’s support, we must think in terms of multiracial Whiteness.”
She is perplexed by the many Black and Hispanic voters for Trump, and their presence in pro-Trump groups, including the “deadly riots” at the Capitol. But there is an answer (other than acknowledging that his policies were the best thing that’s happened to Blacks and Hispanics in many years):
“Multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political color and not simply a racial identity — a discriminatory worldview in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others.”
Now go to Tucker Carlson’s show and skip down to Jason Whitlock’s message after his monologue.
(h/t TJ on the “Drumming” thread) —
TJ on January 19, 2021 at 12:09 am said:
Tucker Carlson has an epic opening statement taking down the anti-American fascism inherent in this fraudulent “inauguration.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6SNM1F3LGs
“but cites the doctrine of equality while leaving out the Creator as the one doing the “endowing.””
I remember reading that Obama had been linked with Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) during his presidency alongside Nancy Pelosi (maybe it was Hilary Clinton). If this is correct then it comes to little surprise of Obama’s tone towards the devout and this particular omission. It’s a conscious choice that’s probably a personal belief, and not done out of political correctness to appease the non-religious.
JimNorCal,
“In the 1860 Census, … on the eve of the Civil War, there were 393,975 slave owners in the United States…”
It’s been asserted that 25-32% of families had slaves, as usually it was the family patriarch who was the listed slave owner.
Near as I can determine, there were somewhere between 5,000 – 7,000 black slave owners. About 42% owned just one slave and there’s reasonable speculation that often, a husband bought his wife to keep her at his side.
One black slave owner was purported to be richer than 9 out of 10 whites in SC. He was born a slave and bought his freedom in his 20s. He had 63 slaves and freed none.
It’s much more comolicated than assumed.
MLK equivocated. Or at least he stated conflicting things at different times. Yet his rhetoric was often inspired and stated ideals in powerful, memorable ways.
So did Mahatma Gandhi.
Great Leaders are often inconsistent or can be diminished by absorbing their hypocrisies — Jefferson is most noted today, too often only to condemn ridiculously by reducing a great thinker into a useful propaganda stereotype.
Should we reject King, Jr? And Gandhi? Or find the public wisdom despite their failings and struggles. Which is the Christian way?
If we are to appreciate merely the publicly available wisdom and platitudes uttered by these persons, apart from their own character and unvarnished motivations in relation to these platitudes, then why bother with the man at all, other than as an historically incident case?
It is one thing to acknowledge that a deeply flawed man strenuously proclaimed a series of aspirational propositions in the public square – perhaps at risk of his own life as turned out to be the case with King’s advocacy. But it is quite another to celebrate the man as the embodiment of the (most particularly Christian) ideals he officially preached, when he was irrefutably anything but.
In fact apart from his most certainly sincere advocacy of full political and civil rights for Black Americans, it is difficult to find anything else about him that was a transparent and a sincere living out of those broader ideals within which he nested his racial justice claims. A man who adopts a philosophy as a matter of convenience and as a plausible vehicle for an agenda, is quite different from a man who lives that philosophy so that the agenda is merely an expression of it.
My guess is that it was 50-50 that he was on a trajectory to become something rather different than the person he presented as, had he lived. The internal contradictions between what he was publicly espousing, and his lived values would likely have become too great to sustain.
The Catholics are fond of repeating the assertion of one saint, that the floor of Hell is paved with the skulls of bishops.
The principle is no doubt of wider application as well.
“Should we reject King, Jr? And Gandhi? Or find the public wisdom despite their failings and struggles. Which is the Christian way?” – TJ
Geoffrey makes some good points, but I like to think that Truth and Good Advice should be taken regardless of the source, with some more stringent vetting if the character of that source is questionable.
I do agree that King’s legacy might have been more tarnished had he lived long enough for the dross to outweigh the gold; ditto JFK, and probably others.
We Christians also seem to prefer dead Saints to live ones, as the Jews prioritized their dead Prophets.
On Aff. Action, I now believe it has been more negative for the Black communities. A Brain Drain of the best Blacks OUT of the mostly Black local communities into more integrated, more white communities. Leaving a lack of many of the best Blacks for the other Blacks to look up to.
There’s a similar argument about an Africa Brain Drain to the US – where the most promising Blacks get educated, often with US aid (and/or USAID), and then leave their own country for the USA. With much better opportunity.
[maybe reduce it by targeting more aid to married Black folks with jobs who stay in school districts with a high proportion of students not from married families. Incentives work.]
Yes – good words and good ideas are good based on the words, and the ideas.
NOT ‘the identity” of the person saying them, or doing them.
Even bad, evil people can say good things – and the good things said are still good.
More importantly, even sinners can discuss and believe in ideals that they fail to achieve in their own lives.
I read that MLK had more than 40 affairs with other women – based on FBI “secret” tapes & J. Edgar Hoover obsessive spying on him.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7071713/FBI-tapes-Martin-Luther-King-Jr-40-affairs-laughed-friend-raped-parishioner.html
I don’t like Trump’s cheating on all of his 3 wives; don’t like Clinton cheating on his wife; don’t like MLK cheating on his wife.
The good words, and especially the good ideals, are just as “good” despite the flaws of the speaker – tho the ability of normal people to achieve the ideals should be more questioned.
The US Black problem is far more systemic promiscuity, than systemic racism.
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I cannot help but think that King would weep if he were alive today and could see what’s going on.
AFAIK, only Bayard Rustin among King’s associates objected to the turn toward patronage and racial preference schemes among black politicians. (I believe Ralph David Abernathy and James Farmer may have dissented from the party line on some questions as well). I’m not aware of anyone influential in protest movements or in elective office who worked to build a black caucus in the Republican Party. (James Farmer, Pearl Bailey, and Wilt Chamberlain were among the very few prominent black Republicans in that era). Black politicians vary in their sensibilities, tactics, and emphases, but tend within the Democratic Party to vary little in their policy prescriptions. I’m not seeing why one would subscribe to the counterfactual that King would have objected to contemporary black politics. His widow was never a dissenter among black politicians. (I do think his daughter has a distinct perspective. Don’t know the details, however).
Art Deco:
He was for some sort of affirmative action, and most likely would have continued to support it for quite some time. But he would have rejected the hate and the black supremacy, which already existed as a movement in his own time and which he rejected during his lifetime. I see no reason to imagine he would have changed on that score. His contemporaries for the most part had also died before the current anti-racism movement came into being – what they were reacting to during their lifetimes was less extreme.