After nearly fifty years since Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. (August 28, 1963), anyone who was alive at the time recognized that his dream found measures of fulfillment in the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Laws against discrimination brought about noticeably improved race relations throughout the next decades. But now, what dominates daily news reports prompts questions. What happened to King’s dream? How did America arrive at this juncture where racial divisions are deeper and wider than they have been since the 1960s? Many others have commented on these questions. This blog series does not purport to offer the definitive response to these questions but rather, it offers a brief explanation of social-cultural-political-religious currents that have shaped the contemporary culture’s eager embrace of Cultural Marxism in its various forms–Black Lives Matter, Critical Theory/Critical Race Theory, Social Justice Theory, Antifa, etc.
The previous blog entries make the case that Martin Luther King, Jr. reasoned that human dignity and morality, as well as the U.S. Constitution’s protection of God-given rights, morally obligate all Americans, in ordinary life and in the courtroom, to look upon and to regard one another not by the color of one’s skin but by the content of one’s character. However, after King’s life was violently ended by an assassin’s bullet, the Civil Rights Movement took a drastic turn. Why?
A National Nightmare Ends—King’s Dream Fulfilled Legally
The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 rendered racial discrimination illegal, ending Jim Crow laws in the South, and achieving King’s vision of equality before the law constitutionally and legally. However, these constitutional and legal achievements came at a steep price because during the 1960s a massive sea change took place in America’s social-cultural-political realm. America’s retention of moral authority was in jeopardy because of the mishandling and squandering of that moral authority America by elected politicians, particularly from southern states. King 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. 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, principled, and moral 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.
Another National Nightmare Begins—King’s Dream Revised: Black Power Exploits “White Guilt”
As politicians surrendered America’s moral authority to which King had made his appeals, Black Power militants seized it as their own to exploit perpetually by appealing to Marx’s “conflict theory” with themselves as the oppressed and America as the oppressor. America’s acknowledged collective guilt became Black Power. If America had allowed its moral authority to be compromised by discrimination based on skin color, when Black Power leaders seized America’s moral authority, they weaponized it to intimidate America’s Whites. Marx’s oppressed class became the oppressor as Shelby Steele adeptly expresses: “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, 55).
Inevitably, where one finds a vacuum of moral authority, a transfer of moral authority and of power takes place. Steele captures this transition of moral authority and power from America, as represented by governing officials, to America’s black population. During a Black Power speech by comedian and activist Dick Gregory, Steele seized on the message of race as power which he was hearing. 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).
The Genesis of Systemic Racism
Though the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s discredited and unseated white supremacy, declaring everyone equal before the law, Black Power leaders discovered that “white guilt” rendered racism valuable to America’s Blacks as perpetual victims, the very people who had suffered the indignities of racism. Because Martin Luther King, Jr. grounded his work for civil rights in the Classical Liberal tradition of the American democratic republic, he had argued that morality and constitutional principles obligated America’s white population to acknowledge and to regard Blacks as their equals. However, given their devotion to Marx’s oppressor-oppressed “conflict theory,” Black Power leaders constructed a social-cultural system in which white people are obligated not to moral and constitutional principles but to black people as a class not merely as individuals. Now, even where there are no observable acts of racial bigotry, oppression, and discrimination, racism could still be brandished against Whites. How? Just as the Marxist notion of class conflict authorized Black Power’s social construction of “white guilt” it authorized the reconceptualizing of racism as a kind of “class racism” that is now widely known as “structural racism” or “systemic racism.” Thus, every alleged racist act or event, no matter how slight or even if contrived as a hoax, proves that the entire social-cultural-political-religious system is racist to its core, requiring massive redress. Consequently, all white people who accept the validity of this social-cultural-political-religious construct find themselves obligated to Blacks who alone can dispense temporarily the moral authority they lack. This entirely temporary bestowment of pardon is received only by confessing one’s guilt of white supremacy by virtue of being white. This confession of white guilt is perpetual, without end. The confession is as ephemeral as the pardon. The confessor never finds release from the chains of white guilt. With this guilt, this loss of moral authority came the loss of “white identity.” Thus, while “black identity” is legitimate and to be celebrated as “black pride,” “white identity” is utterly forbidden. The very notion is condemned as racist. Therefore, everyone who identifies as white is thereby aligned with white supremacy. Apart from an identity that grovels and acknowledges complicity in white guilt and white supremacy, no white identity is allowed.
Given King’s reasonable and peaceful appeal to morality and to the nation’s founding principles, what incited this radical shift that has come to dominate the twisted version of a dream voiced so eloquently almost fifty years ago? How did the 180-degree pivot take place from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s appeal to morality and to America’s founding documents for peaceful harmony through equality to Ibram X. Kendi’s insistence that “antiracist,” which is racism directed against Whites to dismantle the alleged White Supremacy?
This seismic turn from King’s reasoning from America’s founding documents to Critical Race Theory’s embrace of a Neo-Marxist ideology took place by the accumulation of several cultural shifts that followed and built upon Karl Marx’s imposition of his “conflict theory”—the struggle between the oppressor (bourgeoisie) and the oppressed (proletariat). Others have tracked the developments that have led to the current situation, the public domination of Critical Race Theory, an ideology developed among academics. Following is a brief account that retraces the accumulating layers of ideas that gave rise to the Neo-Marxism that now dominates the American culture and society.
The Frankfurt School’s Contribution—Critical Theory
Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist, expanded Karl Marx’s conflict theory from an economy-centered class struggle to a societal and cultural conflict for hegemony, domination, between the oppressed and their oppressors. Others, such as György Lukács, built upon this turn to the Marxist presumption of a hegemonic conflict for dominion in society and culture. Lukács, Hungary’s Commissar for Education and Culture during the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, developed what he called Cultural Terrorism that worked on his belief that “Communist ethics makes it the highest duty to act wickedly. . . . This is the greatest sacrifice revolution asks from us” (Origins of Political Extremism). He attempted to carry out his Cultural Terrorism by a state-sponsored promotion of sexual promiscuity in Hungary’s educational system. If he could compromise Christian sexual morals and subvert parental authority in classrooms, he reasoned, Western Civilization built upon a Christian foundation could be overthrown. When the Hungarian Soviet Republic met its demise Lukács went into hiding and eventually fled to Vienna. Then, in 1922, he participated in a symposium (“Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche” [“First Marxist Working Week”]) hosted by Felix Weil from which Weil developed the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) known as the Frankfurt School which gathered numerous Marxist intellectuals many of whom became prominent, such as, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Jürgen Habermas. The Frankfurt School’s main objective was to conceive new groups of the oppressed proletariat to revolt against their bourgeois oppressors. Marcuse blended his Marxism with what Sigmund Freud called “polymorphous perversity” to incite a new proletariat consisting of homosexuals and transexuals to revolt against their heterosexual oppressors. Though the rest of the American culture remained largely unaware of Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, his book received much attention on college campuses where Marcuse’s ideas played a major role in the sexual revolution of the 1960s which unleashed upon the whole society a culture of polymorphous perversity that radically altered the culture to this day. But the trajectory of ideas, especially university students’ exposure to Critical Theory’s exploitation of Marx’s “conflict theory” to expose oppressors and to end oppression, launched by the Neo-Marxist intellectuals of the Frankfurt School was bound to inflame the imaginations of the several radical groups of the 1960s. This, it did.
The violence of April 4, 1968, that abruptly ended Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life and peaceful efforts to end racial discrimination and segregation left the Civil Rights Movement under the leadership of the Black Power Movement and the Black Panther Party who were already exhibiting their frustration with the sluggish progress toward social change despite King’s constitutional and legal accomplishments. They followed Malcolm X who had been assassinated earlier (February 21, 1965), who preached the need to pursue autonomy, equality, and justice “by any means necessary.” His adherents also accepted violence and separatism as viable options to King’s objective. The Black Power message and agenda may have led to the decline of the movement’s prominence in the late 1970s even though its influence did not disappear. Perhaps the U.S. society had its fill of violence with riots sparked by racial conflict and Viet Nam war protests to endure the forcefulness of Black Power. The U.S. society seems not to have been sufficiently prepared to tolerate the “activist spirit and in-your-face energy of Black Power” until more recently when that same activism and in-your-face animosity now shows itself forcefully in the Black Lives Matter movement accompanied by Antifa. It is noteworthy that the Black Power/Black Panther movement altered the course of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream as Steele observes.
In the mid-sixties . . . [s]uddenly a sharp racial consciousness emerged to compete with the moral consciousness that had defined the movement up to that point. Whites were no longer welcome in the movement, and a vocal ‘black power’ minority gained dramatic visibility. Increasingly, the movement began to seek racial as well as moral power, and thus it fell into the fundamental contradiction that plagues it to this day. Moral power precludes racial power by denouncing race as a means to power. Now suddenly the movement itself was using race as a means to power and thereby affirming the very union of race and power it was born to redress. In the end, black power can claim no higher moral standing than white power. . . . The movement, splintered by a burst of racial militancy in the late sixties, lost its hold on the American conscience and descended more and more to the level of secular interest-group politics. Bargaining and challenging once again became racial rather than moral negotiations. . . . Black power is a challenge. It grants whites no innocence; it denies their moral capacity and then demands that they be moral (The Content of Our Character, 18-19).
The Coalescence of Oppressor-v.-Oppressed-Framed Conflicts
The radical Black Power movement and the more violent Black Panther Party did not arise in a vacuum to seize the Civil Rights Movement and to turn it 180 degrees from King’s non-violent approach with his appeal to morality and to the U.S. founding documents, especially the Constitution. This radical turn was accompanied by even supported by widespread social unrest concerning numerous issues mingled with violence during the 1960s campus protests including (1) existing forms of authority, (2) antiwar and military draft, (3) free speech, (4) sexual liberation, (5) women’s liberation, (6) homosexual and lesbian liberation, (7) unrestrained use of hallucinogenic and enslaving drugs, and (8) human impact on the global environment. Marx’s “conflict theory,” the oppressed versus the oppressors worldview, possessed the minds of radical activists and began to seize the imaginations of college students throughout America. This embrace of a Marxist view of and for the world did not emerge without significant antecedents to influence this cultural and societal shift. Because of the convergence of two major factors—America’s general loss of moral authority and the radicals‘ taking control of the Civically Rights Movement—each of the many issues of social upheaval eventually became framed in terms of Marx’s “conflict theory” of oppressor and oppressed with “white guilt,” the obverse of Black Power, as the paradigmatic culprit of all oppression concerning race relations, parental authority, military power, control of language, sexual relations, sexual roles, engaging in same-sex sexual acts, or recreational drugs. A kind of natural coalescence of activists engaged in all these conflicts began to occur with Black Power activists leading the way. Steele effectively expresses how the newly birthed concept of “systemic racism” began to dominate all conflicts that became framed in terms of the oppressors versus the oppressed.
With the environment, for example, America was essentially cast as an oppressor—a kind of environmental “racist”—and the environment as its victim. Disregard for the environment presumed to come from that same soullessness, imperial greed, penchant for violence, and false sense of superiority that racism came from. And, as with race, “correct” attitudes toward the environment enforced by the blackmail of stigma, so that Americans are stigmatized with a kind of environmental racism until they prove If you don’t stand against, say, drilling for oil in Alaska to be endemic to the American character. You are a kind of bigot (White Guild, 88).
As demonstrated above, the major precursor that significantly influenced the campus culture with a Marxist ideology paving the way for the adoption of the Marxist exploitation of race as power was the Frankfurt School. In turn, the Civil Rights Movement’s pivot to Marxism paved the way for academics to develop aspects of the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory into critical theories that would alter all the disciplines and give rise to a range of newly minted “academic disciplines” including but not limited to black studies, women’s studies, environmentalism, and queer studies. Among the numerous applications of Critical Theory, the one that has unsurprisingly come to dominate is the culture is Critical Race Theory, a radical ideology carried like a virus by university graduates into every facet of the American society and culture, a Marxist dogma that now plagues and threatens the endurance and governance of America as founded.