MLK or BLM

Today we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, a man whose vision of racial comity has unfortunately been betrayed by the progressive left as Robert Woodson and Joshua Mitchell argue in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Woodson is a veteran of the civil rights movement and author of several books. Mitchell is a professor of political theory at Georgetown University and author most recently of American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time. They write:

King’s words and actions glorified America by transfiguring its racial wound and revealing its redemptive promise. Yet today many black leaders have lost sight of King altogether and are aiding and abetting the crucifixion of their own people. Rather than hope, they see despair; rather than the Easter Sunday of true liberation, they offer the bleak Good Friday of never-ending misery.

Black Americans, the authors assert, have historically followed three paths in coping with slavery and the subsequent period of Jim Crow. There were blacks who called for their fellow blacks to leave the U.S. altogether (Exit), there were those who called for resistance, either armed or vocal (Voice), or both, and there were those who called for loyalty to the principles upon which the country was founded (Loyalty).

They state that King offered an inspiring combination of the strategies of loyalty and voice, and that it cost him dearly:

King paid a heavy personal price for his hope that America was redeemable. Twice his home was bombed; once, his wife and daughter were nearly killed. Surrounded by hundreds of angry, armed black men after that bombing, he discouraged retaliatory violence. He was assaulted several times, and jailed as well, but he remained steadfast in his commitment to nonviolence.

He united black Americans behind the proposition that racism is evil in itself, not simply because white people visited it upon blacks, and that all must unite to combat evil. He warned us about the self-destructive path of violence, not only for blacks but for the whole nation.

And, of course, he was ultimately murdered on April 4th, 1968. Woodson and Mitchell cite the belief of many pro-slavery whites that "blacks were morally inferior and thus incapable of self-government," and point to the irony that many blacks today acquiesce to this argument when made tacitly by both black and white leftists:

Today many black leaders defer to angry white progressives who make the same arguments about blacks’ lack of moral agency, reject the country’s founding principles, and seek to undermine its institutions. For months, the radical left has been exploiting the country’s genuine concern for fairness to keep blacks in a constant state of agitation, anger and grievance, urging them toward behavior that lives down to the slanderous stereotypes of white supremacists.

The leaders of these movements insist that every inequity suffered by blacks is caused by institutional and structural racism, that they have no power to liberate themselves, and that they will remain oppressed until white people change. Even to raise the issue of what role self-determination plays for blacks earns you the label of “racist.”

In other words, blacks are implicitly taught that whatever progress they might make depends not on their own effort but on the noblesse oblige of whites. Woodson and Mitchell go on to level particular scorn at Black Lives Matter for their advocacy of counterproductive policies and measures:

For every unarmed black American killed by the police, hundreds are killed in neighborhood homicides....Those who call for the defunding of police departments, such as leaders of the official Black Lives Matter organization, are silent about this inconvenient truth. They have a narrative and cannot let the facts get in the way. Their story is that the whole of American history is stained and the whole of America must be overthrown.

When citizens declare that they support Black Lives Matter, do they share its opposition to the nuclear family, its objective of abolishing the police, and its view that the Christian cross is a symbol of white supremacy? These positions of the organization — language that has largely been scrubbed from its website — in no way improve the lives of black Americans.

Black Americans have only one way forward that has any chance of long-term success:

Like all Americans, blacks have triumphed over their circumstances only when they have adopted bourgeois virtues such as hard work, respect for learning, self-discipline, faith and personal responsibility.... There would have been no civil-rights movement without this. But radical progressives now insist that such virtues are the legacy of white supremacy, colonialist values that reflect the continuing bondage of blacks to oppressive Western culture.

The only “authentic” expression of blackness in America, they claim, is the opposite of bourgeois self-restraint and discipline — indulging in the passions of the moment, whether anarchic rioting, insulting teachers or other unsalutary forms of expression.

The radical left — disdaining exhortations toward work, family and faith as “respectability politics”—argues that blacks should feel free to indulge their “true” nature, echoing the age-old white-supremacist notion that said nature is violent, lascivious and incapable of self-restraint.

The left masquerades as the messiah to blacks, but its policy nostrums are perhaps even more toxic for blacks than they've been for people everywhere else in the world they've been implemented. The left's call for the abolition of the family and religion and the obscuring of our nation's history (except for the troublesome parts), combined with the economic socialism they advocate and the constant hectoring of white America for its alleged racial sins, is a recipe for cultural and social disaster.

Progressives are either ardent for that disaster or they deny that it'd be the inevitable result of their policies, but it's hard to see how it could be avoided or how blacks wouldn't suffer worse from it than anyone else.

After all, the poor, whether black or white, are still very much reliant upon a prosperous America. To the extent they depend upon tax revenues and charitable donations for their health care, transportation, housing, food, schools, police, and so on they need America to be prosperous.

The left's desire to make everyone "equal" is, in effect, an attempt to make almost everyone (except themselves) poorer which would be a calamity for those dependent on a relatively wealthy and generous middle class for the resources that help make their lives less painful and which help them rise out of poverty if they're motivated to do so.

Woodson and Mitchell finish with these words:

We must turn away from the present course, which preaches despair rather than hope. Black achievement must be glorified. The crucifixion of black America by the radical left must halt. There is a grander, more fruitful future for us all.

There is, but it will only be achieved by embracing King's dream of a colorblind society rather than by wallowing in the rhetoric of those obsessed with exacerbating our social frictions and keeping us divided along racial lines.