While reading Jonathan Eig’s King, a masterful biography, I wrote and published a blog on affirmative action and received a handful of responses. All but one were favorable, ranging from “interesting” to “wonderful.” That one, from an officer (“They” but with a singular verb) of the local NAACP chapter, was unfavorable:
“It interviewed four women classmates, all less qualified than I, for the position.” and “Few have been as well schooled as I was.” These are your words, and they wreak [sic: reek] of white privilege. While your sense of entitlement is typical, it renders you ill-equipped and unqualified to weigh in on affirmative action. The SUNY Albany English Department did its students a tremendous favor when they bypassed you.
Since They had once before attacked me in this fashion, I was surprised by They’s failure to consider my reply at the time or reconsider They’s conduct. What is the matter with They? They knows little more about me than that I am a white male, well-educated, and an NAACP life member since 1968—longer than They has been alive. Obvious at least to me is hard-to-control, black racist anger at me; both the “white privilege” and “sense of entitlement” imputed to me are “typical.” Similarly obvious is They’s resort to the color of my skin, not the content of my character, about which They knows nothing. Arrogant is They’s pronouncement that privilege and entitlement render me unfit to “weigh in on affirmative action.” They thus dismisses my lived experience as a white man affected by discriminatory programs and assumes that only—who?—is equipped and qualified to have an opinion on affirmative action—not a free speech or a democratic position.
They is an example of King’s depressing foreboding at the end of his life, that racism, whether by blacks or whites, would endure until Americans had achieved a conversion of conscience. For They, even as an officer of an organization opposed to racism, certainly remains obdurately racist. In this respect, They is no different from, say, Paula Deen, who has remained a racist throughout her life and excuses herself because her parents raised her to be a racist, as if she, a slightly younger contemporary of mine, could learn nothing from the media about racial incidents and public discussion.
I can also accuse my maternal uncle, Ralph, a liberal intellectual of whom I was once fond. Paula Deen has the excuse of being born and bred in the South; Ralph lacked that excuse. Not long after I had doubted and debated affirmative action with a family friend and my mother, I had lunch with him. Like many liberals in the North, he was ardent in his criticisms of racism in the South. For Northern liberals, criticizing Southern bigots was easy. But I knew that dealing with racism in the North would be difficult because most whites—liberals, conservatives, what-have-you’s—were racists whether they knew it or not and blind to racism in their states and cities. And so it has proved to be. Ralph thought that King, beginning to bring his campaign northward, was a dangerous man, a threat to the country. I not only disagreed, but also warned that not listening and learning from King, who preached love and non-violence, would ensure that militants disposed to hatred and violence would succeed him. They did.
Most are not all, in the South or in the North. Some white Southerners and some white Northerners are not racists. But the majority of Americans are. Today, the dividing line is less geographical than political, and a matter of degree. The Republican Party has become resolutely racist. Republican attacks on “woke” and on “critical race theory” reveal the inherent racism of unreasonable denials of racism. In the extreme, Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis maintains that slavery was an unpaid internship or a job training program. No prominent Republican has publicly rejected his falsehood. The Democratic Party reveals its racism in milquetoast tinkering to deal with racism, the grudging politics of political correctness. Widespread, bipartisan racism is reflected in the continued existence of greatly different economic, educational, occupational, and residential conditions of blacks and whites. The persistent inferiority of mostly black (and Hispanic) schools reinforces and perpetuates racially disparate conditions. Although gaps in these areas have narrowed slightly since the 1950s, they abide and blight the lives of millions of American citizens.
King’s foreboding has become a prophecy realized. King has been honored, but his message has been ignored or forgotten, not implemented. In his “Epilogue,” Eig refers to physical facts which demonstrate King’s foresight. “From Montgomery to Chicago, along those streets named Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Highway and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, poverty and segregation rates remain much higher than local and national averages.” I know of one exception: Cleveland, Ohio, where Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard runs along an inner-city parkway with commemorative gardens bordered by thriving businesses and comfortable apartment houses. Still, this urban oasis is surrounded by the usual scars of abandoned or dilapidated stores and houses, and deteriorating schools and playgrounds.
So there is much to do to recover King’s dream from the nightmare which it has become. The major laws in the 1960s and others since have made discrimination illegal, but they are not self-enforcing and have not changed hearts and minds. Racism, institutional and personal, abides. The change of conscience which King knew was necessary has, decades later, still not occurred. Because most whites still resist changing society and themselves, most blacks still remain discouraged, disgruntled, or angered by barely perceptible progress. Nevertheless, those who believe in King’s dream, black and white, must carry on; recognize those who share that dream, as They does not; and work together to realize it. Like those of the lucky few who do, I feel like the woman, who, during the Montgomery bus boycott, was offered a ride but, with thanks for the offer, refused it: “my feets is tired but my soul is rested.”
No comments:
Post a Comment