If MLK Were Alive Today

[Kamaji]

If MLK Were Alive Today

How might the civil rights leader regard the anti-racist radicals of our own day and age?

JANUARY 17, 2022
PETER VAN BUREN

What would Martin Luther King Jr. think about critical race theory?

As an educated man, he might be offended by the latest woke gambit of challenging unbelievers to word games, tricking them into not being able to “define” CRT so they can’t oppose it. The con is, the definitions that believers themselves use are squirmy. The simplest is: Everything good that happened to white Americans and everything bad that happened to black Americans from 1619 up to this moment is because of slavery.

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Most people who believe in CRT avoid the practical questions that recognition might invite. It’s about empty faith, belief without the possibility of proof. Like any zealot, they simply know it is true—sometimes because things haven’t worked out in their own lives and they cannot be responsible, and they think we should reshape all of society based on their interpretation of lived experiences.

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Playing for the “systemic racism” team means the willful ruling out of bounds any discussions that could lead to unwelcome conclusions. So, you must ignore cases of black Americans doing well, and ignore cases of white Americans doing poorly. You must also dump people as diverse as Hasidic Jews, 19th century illiterate Irish immigrants, and Louis C.K. into a category called “white.”

As a “systemic racism” supporter you must not question why racist whites have “allowed” Asians, Hispanics, Persian real estate agents, and Ghanaians to succeed. You don’t want to talk about how all sorts of groups have found success in America. (If we are a white supremacist nation, we are quite bad at it.) You must also not wonder why the racist police are equally poor at racism, failing to gun down in appropriate numbers the many non-whites who cross their gun sights in Asian, Indian, and Hispanic neighborhoods.

Belief in America’s unique racism also requires not asking a lot of questions about how, of the 12 million abducted into slavery out of Africa, only about 388,000 people were brought to the U.S. You cannot talk about slavery as a part of economies across the globe and over millennia. You cannot wonder why BLM isn’t focused on the Dutch, the Arabs, or the British, who helped create the slave trade infrastructure. Belief in systemic racism demands you see slavery, which existed globally and in North America before there was a USA, as a distinctly American thing.

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Martin Luther King, on the other hand, understood the Founders—men of their 18th century—as clearly as he saw the scope of progress on a Biblical (rather than internet) time scale. In his August 1963 address from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King said, “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.” It is possible King might see himself more Jefferson’s intellectual heir than he would see Nikole Hannah-Jones as his.

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King understood charlatans come in all colors, and so demanded we judge people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. He also believed in the responsibility to act, and indeed found the soul of his movement in it. “If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us,” he once said, “the opposition we now face will surely fail.”

It may be unfair to put words in the mouths of the dead, and indeed there are people reading this who question the propriety of a Caucasian even writing critically about Martin Luther King. So let’s try it this way: What will happen when those who still understand King (never mind the oh-so-earnest undergrads with purple hair and lily-white skin) realize his successors, the critical race theorists, have built their message on a foundation of untruths, hate, hypocrisy, violence, and plain carny talk?

A lot to think about on this day, remembering MLK.

Source:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/if-mlk-were-alive-today/