Nearly forty-eight years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. (August 28, 1963). King was at the head of the Civil Rights Movement and he led peaceful protests against the segregation and Jim Crow laws of the South. Of course, many protests that began peacefully encountered violence from racists who hated King’s message. Everyone who was alive then and mindfully observant readily recognizes that something happened to King’s dream. Indeed, his dream found fulfillment in the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968. Furthermore, race relations significantly improved throughout the next decades. However, what dominates news reports now seems more like a nightmare than a dream. What happened to his dream? One can readily point to recent developments as evidence that King’s dream seems to have retreated, even completely inverted. Black Lives Matter was founded upon the blatantly contrived, false mantra—“Hands up. Don’t shoot!”—in the wake of the police officer Darren Wilson’s shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and BLM’s reflexive presumption of racism following every death of a black individual at the hands of police officers.
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 have addressed these questions. This blog series, which begins today, does not purport to offer the definitive response to these questions. This series, however long or brief it will be, offers a biblically focused commentary on the issues designed especially for Evangelicals who share the concerns of this blogger.
Many others observe the disparity between King’s dream for people who share his skin color and what has become of America’s society and culture. Similar to what Shelby Steele has been affirming for many years, in “Atonement as Activism,” John McWhorter observes, “Today’s consciousness-raising on race is less about helping black people than it is about white people seeking grace.” He explains,
This new cult of atonement is less about black people than white people. Fifty years ago, a white person learning about the race problem came away asking “How can I help?” Today the same person too often comes away asking, “How can I show that I’m a moral person?” That isn’t what the Civil Rights revolution was about; it is the product of decades of mission creep aided by the emergence of social media.
McWhorter both correctly describes and affirms that this “Cult of Atonement” that now dominates American culture and has spread abroad is altogether different from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Throughout the years of the Civil Rights Movement Martin Luther King, Jr. reasoned that basic human dignity and morality as well as the God-given human rights protected by the U.S. Constitution obligate America’s white people, in ordinary life and in the courtroom, to look upon and to regard America’s black people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character just as they look upon and regard their own. In his “I Have A Dream” speech King eloquently affirms:
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men – yes, black men as well as white men – would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
This is the setting in which King made his passionate and memorable appeal:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.
So, when American’s heard King’s call for a kind of “colorblindness” the citizenry understood that he appealed for what amounts to all members of society and for justice also to be colorblind in the same way that Lady Justice is portrayed with a blindfold. In other words, reasonable people who have not been prejudiced to think differently have always understood that King was calling for all Americans to deal with one another impartially, and mention of how he desired his four children to be treated made this singular point obvious, that impartial treatment of others will neither advantage nor disadvantage others based on the color of one’s skin. In particular, Christians who knew the Holy Scriptures and who endeavored to live in accord with God’s Word had no difficulty recognizing how King’s appeal implicitly alluded to the Bible’s instructions that doing justice, whether in the courtroom or in ordinary affairs of life, forbids either favorable or unfavorable partiality toward anyone based on incidental and irrelevant human aspects such as one’s skin color or sex or physical stature.
So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets (Matthew 7:2).
But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors (James 2:9).
You shall do no unrighteousness in judgment nor shall you show partiality to the poor, nor shall you defer to the powerful, but you shall judge your neighbor with righteousness (Leviticus 19:15).
Nevertheless, since the rise of Critical Race Theory, it seems that those who uncritically fall under CRT’s influence have accepted a severely prejudiced interpretation of what people mean when they speak of “colorblindness.” Perhaps some poorly express what they mean by the expression. Not everyone is skilled at articulating their thoughts with clarity. Sadly, those who embrace CRT hold a position that is diametrically opposed to what Martin Luther King, Jr. called for which the vast majority of American’s have both understood and heeded. What is tragic is that many Christian pastors and educators fail to understand that when fellow Christians speak of “colorblindness” they understand the imagery, that it refers to impartiality, the grace that James admonishes over against the sin of partiality (James 2:1-13). Lamentably, many Evangelicals impute seriously flawed notions to the call for “colorblindness” because, apparently, they do not understand Martin Luther King, Jr.’s imagery. Jarvis Williams of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary denounces what he calls “the color-blind theory” because he completely mangles what his fellow Evangelicals mean by “colorblindness.” Likewise, Cole Brown’s failure to comprehend that the idea of “colorblindness” derives from blindfolded Lady Justice descends to absurdity. He shows no awareness at all that “colorblindness” has a singular and restricted reference; it refers to impartial judgment, the refusal to allow skin color to prejudice one’s judgment of others. In fact, Brown insists that the concept of “colorblindness” means:
- that one is “willfully blind to God’s image” reflected in fellow humans,
- that one rejects another person’s ethnicity,
- that one refuses to recognize differences among people,
- that one is “incapable of seeing injustice everywhere it resides,”
- that one is “unable to fight injustice,” and
- that one is “missionally ineffective.”
Of course, none of what Brown claims is true at all of Americans who understand and strive for what King envisioned in his “I Have A Dream” speech. This is even more emphatically true of especially Christians who do understand how King’s dream alludes to the Holy Scriptures.
But after King’s violent and untimely death at 39 years of age, the Civil Rights Movement started to change. His associates’ beliefs and principles began to transmogrify with the rise of the Black Power movement, devoted to black pride, self-sufficiency, and equality for all black people concurrent with the emergence of the Black Panther Party, a Marxist revolutionary group, a radicalized precursor to Cultural Marxism that has now become mainstream with the ascendancy of Critical Race Theory which has unleashed the Black Lives Matter organization aided and abetted by Antifa along with politicians, corporations, educational institutions (Christian and non-Christian alike), and even evangelical churches.
Given Martin Luther King, Jr.’s reasonable and peaceful call for harmony by appealing to morality and to the nation’s founding principles concerning the equality of all before the law, what incited the radical shift discernible among activists, like the Black Lives Matter with its commitment to Marxism and its accompanying violence, who on cue, whenever a black individual dies during an encounter with police, ravage the United States with anti-White rage, rioting, more violent deaths, fires, looting, and deepened racial animosities? Martin Luther King, Jr.’s appeal to morality and the equality of all humans before the law as guaranteed by the Constitution for peaceful harmony among Americans has been abandoned for Ibram X. Kendi’s insistence that Americans must become “antiracists,” by which he means Americans must embrace racism directed against Whites to dismantle the alleged White Supremacy. How did such an irrational pivot come about?