The Real Martin Luther King
By Max J. Castro
Once again we are at that time of the year when the United States officially celebrates the life and legacy of the supreme hero and martyr of the civil rights movement, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The fact that Barack Obama, an African American, today presides over the White House reminds us of how far this country has come. Yet — while many today speak and act as if we have achieved a postracial society — there are myriad inconvenient facts that remind us that we still are very far from realizing MLK’s dreams.
One of the sources of the fallacy is that, in the more than thirty years since that dreadful day in Memphis when an assassin’s bullet cut down King in the prime of his short but transformative life, the fullness of MLK’s progressive philosophy has been bastardized and reduced to such a degree that an even demagogic right-wing charlatan like Glenn Beck can feel entitled to claim it as his own. Meanwhile the complex, evolving, and sometimes contradictory man that was King has been transformed into a fetish, a sort of secular saint to be worshiped on a Holiday.
Yet it should be remembered that as far back as 1963, the multitudinous gathering in the nation’s capital that Martin Luther King and his followers organized — the event at which on August 28th King pronounced his immortal “I have a dream” speech — was called the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”
It is a testament to the power of the ideology that has ruled in this country (and increasingly in the world) since shortly after Dr. King’s death — the ideology of ever more savage variants of capitalism — that the whole of King’s thought and praxis has been shrunken to one simple wish, the hope for a color-blind America in which his four little children would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.
From that reductionist, false, and malicious formulation, it is only a small leap to be able to say: “You, black and brown peoples, you have arrived at King’s Promised Land. What are you still complaining about? Or is Barack Obama not the president of the United States?” It is a fallacy, but one that arguably the majority of white people buy into, especially if they are Republican, and most especially if they are Tea Party supporters.
The truth, as the title of the March on Washington reminds us, is that for MLK racial and economic justice always went hand-in-hand. And, if we are still far from achieving a full measure of racial justice — and we are — we have never been farther from attaining even a semblance of economic justice.
On the racial front, there is in fact some evidence that, at least on some significant dimensions, we may be regressing. One glaring example is what has been happening lately in the Wake County School District in North Carolina. An 800 square mile area that includes city of Raleigh, the state capital, as well as surrounding areas, the Wake County School District has long been held out as a model of economic and racial integration, a sharp contrast with the pattern of race and class segregation that characterizes the vast majority of the public school systems in this country. But, within the past year, a concerted effort led by a wealthy conservative Republican operative and supported by the national Tea Party engineered a right-wing takeover of the Wake school board.
The new school board wasted no time in discarding the district’s celebrated diversity program. At least one superintendent quit to protest the move, which will inevitably lead to race and class re-segregation of the schools. As Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, told The Washington Post: “It’s not like this is a new idea, ‘Let’s experiment and see what happens when poor kids are put together in one school’…We know. The results are almost always disastrous.” Disastrous, that is, mainly for the poor black kids who will bear the brunt of the new educational regime in the Wake County School District.
At the same time, there has not been a time in recent memory in which immigrants, especially Latinos, and particularly the undocumented, have been under such widespread and fierce attack. From municipal governments to state legislatures to the halls of Congress, the rhetoric and the laws enacted or proposed are reactionary and far-reaching. A prime example: In order to deny legal status to the children of undocumented immigrants, some Republicans in Congress are even trying to carve out an exception to the concept of birth right citizenship enshrined in the 14th Amendment. A number of states also are threatening to deny birth certificates to the children of “illegal immigrants.”
On the economic front, the continuing aftershocks of the Great Recession have highlighted the intersection between economic and racial inequality. While the official unemployment rate for whites is 8.5 percent — almost twice the full employment rate — the situation is worse for Latinos, who suffer a 13 percent unemployment rate and worst of all for blacks, whose rate of unemployment is 15.8 percent. The real unemployment rate, which counts not only those actively looking for work but also discouraged workers, is much higher for all groups. And if the vast army of young blacks and Latinos who are currently incarcerated were in the labor force instead, the unemployment numbers would be even more frightening. Nor is education the great equalizer. For whites with a college degree, the unemployment rate is 5.5 percent; for blacks it is 9.9 percent. Still, the greatest inequality corresponds to wealth. Blacks have a net worth of 10 cents and Latinos 12 cents for every dollar of net worth held by whites.
How far are we from achieving King’s dream? At the apex of the post-war boom in the late 1960s, when economic inequality in the United States was at one of the lowest points in modern history, Martin Luther King believed that there was way too much economic injustice. What would he be thinking and doing today when inequality is at its highest level since 1928?
Especially toward the end of his life, MLK also spoke forcefully against the Vietnam War and, more generally, against role the United States too often played in the world, that of opposing popular movements and propping up right-wing dictators. What could he think of our government’s priorities, including the ruinous cost of three official wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terror) and several unofficial ones (Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, etc.) at a time when people on the home front are dying because government refuses to pay for life-saving organ transplants?
By all means let us celebrate the life and deeds of Martin Luther King — the real, transgressive man, not the denatured, neutered version concocted to fit the vested interests and the dominant ideology of our time.
