by
W. B. Allen
Dean, James Madison College
- Michigan State University
White Lillies hang their Heads and soon decay
And Whiter Snow in Minutes melts away
Such and so withering is our blooming Youth.
To Things immortal Time can do no wrong,
And that which never is to Die,
Forever must be young.
Ames’s Almanack for 1741
© William B. Allen 1996
Take “The Failure of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.” as an alternative title for this production. Its
aptness derives from the failure of the much-repeated “content of our
character” rhetoric popularized by King in 1963. His failure, however,
extends beyond rhetorical failure; it is a failure in statesmanship. The
appropriate context in which to measure the justice of these reflections,
accordingly, would be that in which one likens the inquiry to such themes as
“Why did Washington succeed?” (as I have considered elsewhere) or “Why did
Lincoln succeed?” (as others have done). In sum, King’s failure amounts
to the failure to advance the claims of American culture at an hour of crisis
in which that was the principal objective required to respond to the crisis.
In addressing this issue I must integrate
distinct understandings which span my writings in diverse fora. In my
technical writings I have elaborated the principles that bracket the problem of
race in the United States (which is to say that I have laid out the grounds on
which alone that problem can be resolved). In my official writings I have
prescribed modes by which constituted authorities could invoke and pursue such
resolutions, and in my popular writings I have articulated the goals which must
inform every initiative addressed to the problem of race in the United States.
In order to approach the present question
one must bear in mind the first and third of these lines of inquiry.
To that end I identify as prefatory reading two works, one from my technical
writings and one from my popular writings. The first appeared originally
only in a French composition but has since been translated. The essay,
“Equality and Right in the Contemporary World” facilitates judgment as to the
appropriate terms of discourse in approaching this inquiry. The second
essay, “Who Created Dinesh D’Souza,” reviews a recent contribution of King’s
latest victim and in the process identifies the characteristic flaw of the
failure to address a conception of American community which has impaired
virtually all attempts to discuss race and culture in our time.
In order to understand the following
discussion, one would do well to come to grips with those two essays
first. Moreover, one should also consult King’s last major publication, Where
Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, or at least the fourth
chapter in that work, “The Dilemma of Negro Americans.” It is necessary to
recognize the tremendous impact that King had and not to confuse the notion of
his failure with any notion of insignificance. His presence in the
nation’s history was not less large than those of Washington and Lincoln—only
less good.
Any of the topics that bedevil discussions
of race and culture could be developed in order to illustrate this
argument—affirmative action, the underclass, voting rights, educational attainments,
residential isolation. I borrow a form of shorthand, however, for I think
that I can convey the conceptual content by describing in a short space what
has occurred within the narrow realm of hate speech. After which we can
take up King’s problem directly.
Hate Speech
The development of the concept of “hate
speech” is far more a cultural than a legal phenomenon, despite the
concentration of attention on the subject in the legal arena. What is grammatically
either a verb or a noun has borrowed adjectival force to obscure a moral vacuum
in our culture. Everyone may understand this simply by recurring to
familiar experiences. The question, naturally, is why do we refer to this
evil as “hate speech” as opposed to “hateful speech.” The answer is that
we wish to discriminate between the “redneck” who vocalizes “nigger” and the
“brother” who vocalizes “nigger.” If the speech itself were stigmatized
as hateful, we would sweep both parties into our net. Thus, we employ a
form—an inapt grammatical form—to express a pre-judgment, namely that those who
use hateful speech maliciously and as an unfavorable cultural or racial
comparison are criminal. The crime is the intent, not the speech—and yet,
not the silent intent but only the uttered intent, except where the utterer
benefits from a pre-judgment that she is not criminal in this respect (as in
the case of the gang-banger who says, “I’m going to kill that nigger!” and
indeed does so).
Our familiar experience reveals the chaos
in our morality. Most of us as children or parents have experienced the
parental admonition that a child abstain from hateful speech. Indeed,
many are the parents who have heard from the lips of their own progeny, “I hate
you.” Parents typically regard this, among other usages, as hateful
speech, which should be avoided, but without taking their children
literally. Parents do not call such usage “hate speech,” however.
That would imply that, whatever the locution, the child means to express hatred
literally and not merely to wound or offend. Accordingly, it is a
parenting skill to discourage “criminal” usages without “criminalizing” the
users.
To return to the level of life and death,
it is clear that we, as a culture, have come to license what are
otherwise criminal (or at least very bad taste) usages (including much of what
is mindlessly defended as black English), while nonetheless criminalizing some
users (some people can only use “black English” badly). We have
internalized at the deepest moral levels norms of segregation and favoritism,
with the result that, as a society, we cannot accomplish what even the least
trained parent seeks, namely, to “criminalize” usages without “criminalizing”
any users.
I submit that we can trace this
catastrophic result directly from the consequences of King’s moral confusions
regarding the dynamics of race and culture and his failure as a statesman.
First, though, we should permit King to define the question and his approach to
it.
The Dilemma of the Negro Americans
Martin Luther King was incontestably the
foremost public figure in the United States at the time he broached the most
important question confronting the nation, the question figuring in the title
of his book, “Chaos or Community.” In raising that question as he did, he
promised to deliver what the nation most needed at that moment. The
question was rhetorical in form, conveying clearly King’s judgment that
community was the appropriate answer. Moreover, an attentive reading will
reveal that every significant issue touching questions of race and culture that
we have discussed since have been raised by King. If we seem rather to
have inherited chaos than community, we must seek the reason for that in some
relation to the response he provided and the nation’s response to his
response. Several possibilities confront us: either King responded
correctly with an adequate view of community but his wisdom went unheeded; or
King responded incorrectly and his error passed for wisdom in the nation,
entailing the natural consequences; or variants of these and other possibilities.
King looked for moral strength in a
mystical and mythical “capacity for hardships” in American blacks to forge the
path toward the journey’s end of full integration into American society.
“It is on this strength that society must now begin to build.” In that
analysis he jettisoned any potential for the claims of freedom and
self-government as sufficient to bottom the appeal for wholesale inclusion in
American society (“This is no time for romantic illusions and empty philosophical
debates about freedom. This is a time for action.” p. 68). The reason for this
result is that the difficulties American blacks faced in 1967 (when he wrote)
were cultural and inherited, and only a liberation from the weight of that
inherited tradition could supply the measure of opportunity required to change
life chances for American blacks. The discovery of a cultural basis for
black disadvantages provided for King the “most optimistic” part of the story,
for he reasoned, culture could be turned from the work of destruction to the
work of reconstruction.
...the
causes for its present crisis are culturally and socially induced. What man has
torn down, he can rebuild. At the root of the difficulty in Negro life
today is pervasive and persistent economic want. To grow from within, the
Negro family—and especially the Negro man—needs only fair opportunity for jobs,
education, housing and access to culture. To be strengthened from the
outside requires protection from the grim exploitation that has haunted the
Negro for three hundred years. (p. 128)
This “optimistic” conclusion comes eight
pages into an analysis which opened with the observation that the “dilemma of
white America is the source and cause of the dilemma of Negro America.”
King’s two Americas, setting the tone for the 1968 Kerner Commission report,
relate to one another only as “oppressor” and “oppressed” are related to one
another. For the American black, therefore, the connection between his
pain (“the central quality” of his life) and his hopes is a needed intervention
from “outside” to transform oppression into salvation. The reality he
found in America is no community.
“Being a Negro in America means being
scarred by a history of slavery and family disorganization” (p. 122), King
wrote, weaving the reality of 300 years into an accumulated burden of 1967 and
presenting an account of the abstract “Negro family” as if it were an
autobiography. In these early pages the reader cannot escape the
obvious implication that, respecting “negroes,” the “content of their
character” is a product of suffering, impotence, and impoverishment.
Neither in recounting the tales of woe or the magical survival of American
blacks does King so much as once advert to any intrinsic human capacities or
strengths, either in explanation of past achievements or in projecting future
achievements. Culture, it seems, is a force independent of humanity.
Since for King the strophe of cultures in
America is color, one might anticipate that the antistrophe would be character,
as in the expression that people are to be judged, “not by the color of their
skin, but by the content of their character.” That would mean that the
cultural change one seeks is not so much color blindness (which would be merely
a consequence of paying primary attention to character) but rather that
sensitivity to character which would merge two cultures into one. To
change the culture one must teach the society how to make judgments of
character. According to King, however, American blacks can not take on
that task themselves, for they live under the spell of “color shock”:
...it
constitutes a major emotional crisis. It is accompanied by a sort of
fatiguing, wearisome hopelessness. If one is rejected because he is
uneducated, he can at least be consoled by the fact that it may be possible for
him to get an education. If one is rejected because he is low on the
economic ladder, he can at least dream of the day that he will rise from his
dungeon of economic deprivation. If one is rejected because he speaks
with an accent, he can at least, if he desires, work to bring his speech in
line with the dominant group. If, however, one is rejected because of his
color, he must face the anguishing fact that he is being rejected because of
something in himself that cannot be changed. (p. 131)
Famously, each of King’s hypotheticals
served in the earlier part of this century as the catechism black families
carefully rehearsed in their children (including, I dare say, the family of the
elder King who instructed King, jr.). The conclusion, however, that the
aspects of character which one might change have been subordinated to the
overriding power and importance of “color shock” serves to relegate the earlier
catechism to a second-order necessity. A day may come when one can counsel
poor men to “try harder,” if ever the society can rid itself of “color
shock.” We have a paradox, however, in the fact that, for King, the
evidence of “color shock” became poor education, poverty, and social
disadvantage. Thus, the “wearisome hopelessness” is justified by
the impossibility of attempting any form of cultural improvement prior to
reversing the effects of oppressive victimization.
While King wrote little of questions of
character in American blacks, save to exculpate things such as crimes with
reference to the “environment” and “victimization,” he did not entirely neglect
the matter. It may be a dramatic illustration of the path taken in his
book (and life) that he focuses, as did many others, on the disproportionate
number of American blacks who served in Vietnam as an injustice, while saying
nothing of disproportionate heroism, disproportionate sense of duty,
disproportionate inclination to volunteer, etc. Nevertheless, when he
enumerated five recommended responses to “the Negro’s dilemma,”[2] he began with his closest invocation of
character, “a rugged sense of somebodyness.” To overcome a “feeling of
being less than human, the Negro must assert for all to hear and see a majestic
sense of his worth.” Naturally, mere self-assertion is not a substitute
for solid accomplishment. Moreover, it may be the case that a premature
self-assertion may subvert the genuine foundations of accomplishment, which
alone engender self-respect. Nonetheless, King evidently means in this
appeal to inculcate a sense of need for such fundamental virtues as courage and
moderation. In this regard, it is impossible to explain why his spirited
defense of real life in the ghetto (where there are “churches as well as bars,”
“stable families...as well as illegitimacies,” and “ninety percent of the young
people who never come in conflict with the law”) did not provide him
substantial opportunity to sermonize on opportunities for emulation in the
pursuit of “somebodyness.” Praiseworthy elements of character must surely
inform the “striving” and “hoping” which he described in that context. I
surmise that he did not expatiate on these themes, because they were not
compatible with the ultimate response he had fashioned for the main question.
The remaining responses to “the Negro’s
dilemma” are “group unity,” a “constructive use of the [limited] freedom we
already possess,” union “around powerful action programs,” and “enlarging the
whole society, and giving it a new sense of [progressive] values.” These
prescriptions for “social change” merge in a single consideration, which King
enunciated in his final chapter, “The World House,” in which he describes the
emergence of a coherent political movement transcending the United States and
animating a global movement toward social democracy. That ultimate
political movement is the analogue to the indigenous political movement on
which he relied in the United States to nurture his five-point program (“More
and more, the civil rights movement will have to engage in the task of organizing
people into permanent groups to protect their own interests”). As he
described it, it consisted of blacks (as a group, though needing to be mindful
of not being taken for granted), northern liberal Democrats, labor unions, and
an ever-widening circle of oppressed peoples. This general account gives
full credit to King’s candid assessment that “there is a need for a radical
restructuring of the architecture of American society,” in which the emphasis
is placed on the word, “architecture,” meaning design and conjuring up
fundamental principles rather than incidental or corollary circumstances.
King did not focus on a discussion of
character in discussing the future of America for three reasons that are
discernible. In the first place, he places no faith in the attributes of
character which he discerns in American whites. In the second place, he
expects no rewards for exertions of character by American blacks (the argument
against the “new black middle class” makes this apparent; as opposed to
preaching to the middle class to return to the ghetto, one could always
sermonize to the poor to follow the middle class—a lesson no commentators have
learned since King’s time). In the third place, a focus on character
within the context of a given community would be inconsistent with a mission to
transcend that community and to build community anew on entirely different
grounds. Though King acknowledged, as one would expect, that “we are also
Americans,” that is a decidedly subordinate moral consideration in his
analysis. The fact that “our destiny is tied up with the destiny of
America (p. 62)” does not commit American blacks, in King’s view, to that view
of American destiny which is intrinsic to its founding. For Martin Luther
King, it would seem, American racism can be negated ultimately only in the negation
of the moral soil from which it sprouted, as though it were native to that soil
rather than an excrescence. The appeal to black “group identity” must be
understood as a step toward generating new moral soil, as opposed to the feeble
cry, “We are people, too!” in retort to the experience of racism. Support
for that generous interpretation will derive from the obvious truth, which even
King must have recognized, namely, that there has never been an era in which
folk honestly believed, no matter how hard they tried, that blacks were not
people. That same generosity then places a new construction on the boast,
...historians
in future years will have to say there lived a great people—a black people—who
bore their burdens of oppression in the heat of many days and who, through
tenacity and creative commitment, injected new meaning into the veins of
American life. (p. 158)
Martin Luther King answered his rhetorical
question, “chaos or community,” by dreaming of founding a new community.
The unjust treatment he accorded George Washington, depreciating Washington’s
moral anguish about slavery and constructively denying the important fact that
Washington liberated his slaves in his will, may be accounted for by the
immensity of King’s ambition to rival Washington as a founder. King,
however, failed where Washington succeeded. It remains but for us to
inquire why.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Failure
Repeat, first, the observation that there
are few if any hand-wringings about questions of race and culture that we
entertain in 1996 which had not been considered, in some manner, by Martin
Luther King in 1967. Nor need one document the undeniable reality that
the sad state of the cultural reality in numerous black communities throughout
the United States is that matters considerably worsened in the three decade
aftermath of King’s initial influence—a period in which his influence would
scarcely seem to have diminished at all. Nothing illustrates this fact
better than the correlative to our earlier discussion of hate speech. It
was once common in the homes of American blacks whom I knew to admonish youths
to avoid terms like “nigger” in referring to one another. Such precepts
continued pervasively into the 1960s; since they have disappeared almost
altogether. I submit that they have disappeared because of the successful
invocation of the false notion of a black culture and the correlative
exculpation of blacks for all sorts of “bad behavior” on the grounds of their
“victim” status. King’s opting to shape community among blacks rather
than to shape a community on American principles is the immediate moral cause
of this enormous transformation in our society.
Not blacks alone but also many whites have
fallen prey to King’s misguided legislation. In some cases they have done
so on account of the ease with which a transition from thinking of blacks as
different and inferior to thinking of blacks as unassimilably different could
be made. This move could release much mental and moral energy which
otherwise would have had to bent to the task of building community. For
guilty consciences anxious to escape responsibility, but at a loss as to what
course to pursue, the idea that one could embrace “diversity” or “multiculturalism”
(or the idea of a separate black community which merited respect as distinct)
provided a natural outlet. By taking that course it ceased to be
necessary to ask of America how far it had succeeded in fulfilling its
principles on its own terms. Of course, the nettlesome question of economic
and social inequality remained—at least such portions of those questions as
could not be reduced to cultural difference. Moreover, insofar as no
tangible evidence of economic or social progress could ever respond to the
imperative of respect for cultural difference, it follows that diminishing
inequalities constitute no evidence at all with respect to the fundamental
question, the need for special treatment for American blacks (cf., p. 106).
This result produces a paradox, however;
namely, that special programs for blacks are justified in reference to their
supposed “history” and not their present circumstances. That means one
cannot demand either personal or cultural accommodations to American society as
an index of the salutary effects of the special programs. Thus, the idea
of “progress” escapes any logical mode of assessment, apart from the standard
of “representation” which has emerged as the totem to express the goals King
aimed at. One speaks of “underrepresented minorities” in the workplace,
in schools, and in government offices, appointed and elective. What is
actually represented in this usage, however, remains vague.
Indeed, as long as a single minority individual anywhere might be said to be
less advantageously situated than he might wish for himself, a claim of
improved representation for “minorities” retains its logical value in this
calculus. Hence, criticism of minority cultures—and so-called black
culture in particular—does not address the policy implications of the racial
problem in the United States.
While the result that nothing the nation
does can ever genuinely satisfy the demands that King made, including “massive
government expenditures,” it remains the case that those demands are deeply
embedded in the conditions of social organization and policy in the nation and
touch upon a matter with crisis implications for national community. The
task for the United States today is to discover a way to re-connect ideas of
American community with both expectations of and obligations to American
blacks. To all appearances, however, that task cannot be realized through
any means other than the refutation and overturning of the weighty edifice of
cultural exceptionalism that King built up.
To approach this problem in a manageable
way, begin by asking the obvious question, namely, whether it is true that
American blacks in 1996 (or 1967 for that matter) reflect in their characters,
habits, attitudes, and prospects the full weight of the implications of 300 years
of suffering by American blacks. Take an individual black, born in this
generation. In what way can it meaningfully be said that that individual
bears the weight of 300 years of experience focused exclusively on black
people? Is it irrelevant, in responding to this question, what the
individual’s natural endowments are? Is it irrelevant what his family
circumstances are? Is it irrelevant who are his friends? Is it
irrelevant what accidents befall him in the course of living in and moving
about this society? The list of relevant “additions” to the 300 years
experience need not end here and may, indeed, include the not insignificant
weight of 360 years of broader American experience and a European experience
stretching from a time whence the memory of man no longer runs. In
calibrating the respective weights of these “influences” and seeking to strike
a reasonable net allocation of social assets/liabilities, what possible sense
can it make to focus on the experience of slavery? No stripes will mark
this person’s back! In sum, it is an entire fiction that black people
today still feel the pains of the past.
The Fiction of Black Culture
Race has long been a problem in the United
States in ways adequately explained in various technical writings, including
some of my own. It has not, however, been a constituted fact that race is
an integral part of American culture. It is a logical error to confuse
what is pervasive with what is integral. It is a moral error, however, to
derive necessary conclusions from accidental determinants. The conclusion
that racism is intrinsic or integral to American principle constitutes such a
moral error.
On the basis of this moral error Martin
Luther King, and others besides, have created a fiction of black culture and community
that serves a single functional purpose—namely, to extract American blacks from
the warp and woof of an American culture regarded as fatally flawed. The
reality in the United States has been and remains plural communities fused and
fusing into a single American culture. There exist plural black
communities, no less than plural white communities—despite the reality that
black communities in the main have not been constituted by homogeneous
migrations as white communities typically have been. The relatively successful
effort to flatten the plural black communities into a single conception of the
black community represents a significant political accomplishment, which has
done little to alter the social landscape. On that social landscape,
accordingly, one still witnesses the leading dynamic of American
culture—assimilation—occurring under the lengthening shadow of a changing
political reality. That changing political reality means we might
reasonably wonder how long the American dynamic will persevere, as the
supporting political fretwork continues to evolve to accommodate the goals of
King’s “revolution.”
I have written above of the disappearance
of certain social practices in the black families that I knew. Others
speak and write routinely of the disappearance of supportive social institutions
and practices in black communities plagued by crime, illegitimacy, and other
dysfunctions. Every evidence suggests a social migration toward the new
political standard of participation in society, a standard that distinguishes
groups and group rights and measures social obligation strictly in relation to
indices of identity. This pattern constitutes a disintegration of that
larger patriotism which is founded in the individual’s identification of his
political happiness with the assurance of rights claimable as against
groups. The lesser patriotism—the group identity—undermines the larger
patriotism.
One could not well protest undermining
American patriotism, if it were indeed the case that American principles
neither secured any reasonable prospect of pervasive liberty, nor any
foundation for genuine community. To consider only the last point in this
space, suffice it to say that the test of American community has yet to be
made. Precisely because King, and nearly all who followed him, have
eschewed claims in the name of American community on account of the gamble
involved in shedding the lesser claim for the sake of the larger, we have not
made an honest test of the notion since the advent of the Civil Rights
Movement. Ironic, isn’t it: the Civil Rights Movement may
inadvertently have spawned the most serious obstacle to the progress of
American blacks in our time. As the Americans discovered in the
Revolution of 1776, one does not get to see how the journey ends until one has
proceeded so far along it that it is not possible to turn back.
The task to renew the appeal of American
community and the legitimacy of assimilation—including standards of decent
behavior—falls not to American blacks nor to American whites, per se. It
falls rather to every American for whom King’s failed response to the great crisis
provides reason sufficient to take on some protection against the chaos that
draws nearer with each revolution of our political solar system. It is easy
to know what must be done: take heed from the course followed by King,
not to follow it. King discarded a history of accomplishment for a paean
of victimization. He neglected even his own very middle class biography
to engraft a story of deprivation into the lineage of every black. King
sold blacks back into slavery, a cultural slavery, for the sake of acquiring
political cachet.
Elsewhere I’ve written that Washington’s
success may be attributed to the fact that he preferred justice to
patriotism. Certainly it is true, one may insist, that King preached
justice above patriotism. Why, then, may he not be regarded as equally
successful? The answer comes in two parts. First, what one preaches
does not always reveal one’s purpose. Second, and more pertinent, even if one
grants, as I do, that King preached justice, everything must hinge on the
question of understanding. A misunderstanding of the requirements of
justice will cause even a noble intent to miscarry. King did not grasp
what justice in a community requires.
[1] Presented to The Freedom School, Freedom Communication, Inc., April 12, 1996 (Washington, D.C.).
[2] “...the Negro is called upon to be as resourceful as those who have not known such oppression and exploitation. This is the Negro’s dilemma. He who starts behind in a race must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front. What a dilemma! It is a call to do the impossible. It is enough to cause the Negro to give up in despair.” (p. 142)