A Brief Biographical Comment.
For my entire academic career, I have been asking the question—What Happened to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Dream?—the title of this blog series. As a history major in college, the question was warranted and prompted not only by events I observed daily but also by numerous readings supplemental to the textbooks we history majors were required to engage. Many of those essays subverted Western culture, derided Christianity, endorsed Black Power, and not-so-subtly exalted a Leftist if not a Marxist worldview. Many of my requisite readings seemed to approve of the social unrest and cultural upheaval portrayed on the television evening news. During those days, Black Power movement speakers and leaders—Dick Gregory, Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Huey P. Newton & Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party—became familiar to observant students in the early 1970s.
One of my greatest academic regrets is that when I transferred from one college to another, I foolishly failed to replace accrued credits from a poorly taught philosophy course by sitting under philosopher R. Allen Killen who critically assessed the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory, featuring Herbert Marcuse’s extensive impact upon campus sit-ins to protest authority as well as riots and racial strife at that time. That lamentable decision required me to do remedial readings in philosophy and it delayed my grasp of the currents that were transforming the culture at that time until maturity compelled me to do the requisite research after completing graduate studies.
My own research and critical assessment of the Frankfurt School’s wholesale restructuring of Western culture equipped me well to teach the Christian worldview in college classrooms, but such knowledge was also a persistent source of disaffection from many students and colleagues alike. Christians who speak from acquired expansive and biblically informed knowledge do not seek solitude. Rather, isolation comes because others eschew anyone who holds and confidently expresses such biblically informed knowledge. The disquieting of worldviews inadequately grounded in the Holy Scriptures is too great for many to endure. The easiest defense against challenges to one’s worldview is avoidance, and evasion now dominates academic professors and administrators who uncritically join pop culture’s unthinking embrace of Critical Race Theory, one of many developments from the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory.
The 1960s Social-Cultural-Political Sea Change.
One need not agree with Ibram Kendi’s worldview to acknowledge the derivation of his call for the reversal of “racial discrimination” to be imposed upon America’s white population. His observations compel readers to think beyond Critical Race Theory, which to the average American sounds academic and off-putting. True, the birth of Critical Race Theory among academics of the 1970s is significant to its ascendancy and to its current domination of America’s society and culture. Nevertheless, what predates its conception must not be overlooked. During the 1960s a massive sea change took place in America’s social-cultural-political realm. It was a cultural revolution due largely to the mishandling and squandering of America’s moral authority by elected politicians, particularly by senators from southern states but also by President Lyndon B. Johnson and later by the Supreme Court of the United States.
Martin Luther King, Jr. persistently, peacefully, and reasonably appealed to moral arguments and to the equality of all, regardless of skin color, long ago codified in the U.S. Constitution. Members of the three branches of the federal government contributed to the rejection of King’s appeals for America’s Blacks to be treated as the Whites’ equals. By their recalcitrant opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Democratic senators led by Albert Gore, Sr. (D-TN), J. William Fulbright (D-AR), and Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), not only delayed action on the bill but exhibited the depth of their prejudicial partiality against America’s black population as they sustained a seventy-five-day filibuster with Senator Byrd filibustering for the final fourteen hours on his own. Their oppositional actions and words in the Senate aided and abetted the squandering of whatever moral authority and influence America still retained. Instead of embracing the honorable and principled influence afforded them by their senatorial oaths to uphold the U.S. Constitution, their extended resistance to the Civil Rights Act, until their filibuster was finally terminated by a four-vote margin on June 10, 1964, stained the entirety of America and handed moral authority to America’s blacks whose militant leaders would shortly come to exploit by countermanding King’s appeal as they seized upon skin color as power, a power they have retained in perpetuity, especially following King’s untimely death which brought an end to black Americans’ appeal to America’s morality and the argument for equality rooted firmly in the Constitution.
Consider Ibram Kendi’s use of Johnson’s commencement address at Howard University.
As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair” (How to Be an Antiracist, 19).
What Kendi implies Shelby Steele expresses directly, that President Johnson, whose own moral authority on race relations was defective, contributed significantly to the loss of America’s moral authority with his commencement address at Howard University, June 4, 1965.
Here the president of the United States had virtually described the crucible blacks had endured, saying for all the world that blacks had been “hobbled” by that old oppressive formula—full responsibility with little freedom—so they had never been allowed to become competitive. Johnson clearly realized that responsibility had been an unfair and oppressive burden on blacks. His Great Society was, among other things, a redistribution plan for responsibility by which he asked white America to assume considerable responsibility for black advancement. Thus, by implication, the president of the United States had agreed with the new militants that it was morally wrong—given what had been through—to ask them to be fully responsible for pulling themselves up.
So suddenly in American life, the matter of responsibility was qualified by a new social morality. If you were black, and thus a victim of racial oppression, this new morality of social justice meant you could not be expected to carry the same responsibilities as others. The point was that the American society no longer had the authority to enforce a single standard of responsibility for everyone because—by its own admission—it had not treated everyone the same (White Guilt, 53).
Steele also effectively captures white America’s loss of moral authority by the actions of governing officials and the passing of power to America’s black population. During a Black Power speech by comedian and activist Dick Gregory, Steele seized race as power as he observes,
Standing there in that church I realized that no one—least of all the government—had the moral authority to tell me to be responsible for much of anything. And this realization, blooming in the mind of a twenty-one year-old after a hard day’s work, was like winning my own private revolution. I could hardly stand still.
And the moral authority that America suddenly lacked passed into me as pure moral power. Suddenly I could use America’s acknowledged history of racism just as whites had always used their race—as a racial authority and privilege that excused me from certain responsibilities, moral constraints, and even the law.
Not only was this totalitarian power broken, but now I was the one—as a victim—who possessed an almost reckless moral authority. Now I could shame and silence whites at will. With this moral authority there was the power to better defend myself against racism, but there was also a new, abusive power very similar to the abusive power that had been wielded against me—a power of racial privilege deriving solely from the color of my skin. This power to shame, silence, and muscle concessions from the larger society on the basis of past victimization became the new “black power.” (White Guilt, 54).
Consequently, though the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 & 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 rendered racial discrimination illegal, ending Jim Crow laws in the South, lamentably Martin Luther King, Jr.’s tragic death accelerated and intensified the civil rights leaders’ pivot to exploit race as power.
While King was alive, Black Power leaders became impatient with his appeal to ideas and to America’s founding. The Civil Rights Movement rejected King’s clarion calls for “colorblindness” to embrace skin color as power. Instead, they appealed to Blacks to act reflexively from their Black identity. Militance against America’s white population became the measure of one’s blackness. With their appeal to black identity as power, black leaders found resentment and anger not only to be much deeper and more dependable motivating factors for action than ideas and historical appeals to the principles of equality assured all citizens by the U.S. Constitution as argued by King. Black militants effectively preached the need for all Blacks to embrace discriminatory victimization as power not merely when they experience sporadic acts of racial bigotry but to accept discriminatory victimization as the perpetual existence integral to being black because racism is inherent to the entire system. By equating victimization with identity, black leaders were no longer dependent upon actual racial victimization to denounce white racism. When black leaders equated being black in America with victimhood itself, black anger and resentment became a political force. The idea of “systemic racism” was born, a political force more powerful than King’s reasoned ideas because the source of its power resides in “white guilt.” What is “white guilt”? No one has more aptly portrayed the nature and function of “white guilt” than Shelby Steele.
The most striking irony of the age of white guilt is that racism suddenly became valuable to the people who had suffered it. Racism, in the age of racism, had only brought every variety of inhuman treatment, which is why the King generation felt that extinguishing it would bring equality. But in the age of white guilt, racism was also evidence of white wrongdoing and, therefore, evidence of white obligation to blacks. King had argued that whites were obligated to morality and democratic principles. But white guilt meant they were obligated to black people because they needed the moral authority only black people could bestow. Only the people themselves—meaning of course the black leadership—could vet the white moral redemption, the white deliverance from racism. Thus, white guilt made racism into a valuable currency for black Americans—a currency that enmeshed whites (and especially American institutions) in obligation not to principles but to black people as a class. (Notice that affirmative action explicitly violates many of the same principles—equal protection under the law, meritorious advancement—that the King-era civil rights movement fought for.) Lacking other sources of capital, blacks embraced racism as power itself (White Guilt, 34-35).
Kendi’s reasoning finds antecedence not only in President Johnson’s Great Society program and his Howard University speech but also in arguments made by Supreme Court justices. Once again, track Kendi’s rationalization.
The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. . . . The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. (How to Be an Antiracist, 19).
The overthrow of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s appeal to morality and the Constitution’s guarantee of equal rights to all is powerfully evident in the reasoning of United States Supreme Court justices within six years after King’s death. Consider two cases deliberated by the Supreme Court.
In 1974, the Supreme Court deliberated the case of DeFunis v. Odegaard, in which Marco DeFunis, a white applicant with superior qualifications was denied admission to the University of Washington law school in favor of less qualified black applicants. When the justices deliberated in conference, Justice William O. Douglas found himself dissenting alone. He reasoned, “Racial discrimination against a white is as unconstitutional as racial discrimination against a black.” For support, Douglas appealed to Justice Thurgood Marshall who had argued twenty years earlier in Brown v. Board of Education, “That the Constitution is colorblind is our dedicated belief.” Tragically, Marshall’s response reveals that the wholesale abandonment of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s appeal to moral and constitutional principles had penetrated the United States Supreme Court. Marshall offered a shallow, profoundly immoral, and transparently unconstitutional reply: “You guys have been practicing discrimination for years. Now it is our turn.”
The power and effectiveness of white guilt’s partiality toward Blacks are potently evident in the case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld deferential affirmative action by allowing race to be one of several factors in college admission policies to favor Blacks. Siding with the majority, Justice Harry Blackmun explicitly endorsed partiality and patronization toward Blacks: “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently. We cannot—we dare not—let the Equal Protection Clause perpetrate racial supremacy.”
The seismic abandonment of King’s reasoning from morality and the U.S. Constitution for the equality of America’s blacks in favor of adopting Critical Race Theory’s embrace of a Neo-Marxist ideology took place following the accumulation of several cultural shifts that followed King’s death. The current widespread absorption of Critical Race Theory’s ideology as expressed by its popular speakers and writers prompts many to fixate on CRT and overlook the social-cultural-political sea change of the 1960s. The influence of Karl Marx’s “conflict theory”—the struggle between the oppressor (bourgeoisie) and the oppressed (proletariat)—was already evident among the Black Power leaders prior to the 1970s when intellectuals began to publish their tracts, essays, and books on Critical Race Theory. For black leaders and U.S. politicians alike, action based in emotion displaced reform rooted in ideas. Thus, even before the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. his dream that his four children would one day be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin was already becoming a nightmare because black leaders were realizing that the legal victories achieved with the Civil Rights Acts (1964 & 1968) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) enabled black leaders to exploit “race as power” in the wake of America’s loss of moral authority, the moral authority to which King regularly appealed.