One of the differences between Martin Luther King's approach to the race problem and that of many of those who celebrate him today is that many of our contemporaries see racial guilt as a collective stain whereas King saw it as individual and color-blind. To paraphrase the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the guilt for crimes of the past runs not through races nor through nationalities but through every individual human heart.
The collective view that whites, for example, share moral responsibility for what other whites did to blacks in the past, is implicit in demands for reparations and other racial preferences, but it's nonsensical.
Suppose you are of English descent and you read about how some Englishman two hundred years ago committed an atrocity against a Frenchman, would you feel that you personally owed contemporary French some sort of apology?
Suppose you are a male and you read about the horrific 2022 murder of four Idaho college students by Bryan Kohberger, another male. Would you feel that you are somehow responsible because you shared the same gender as Mr. Kohberger?
Would you feel some shared responsibility if your name was also Bryan? What if your surname just by happenstance was Kohberger? How much guilt would you bear for the Idaho murders?
If you think you would indeed be in some sense responsible, why do you? And if you think it absurd to claim that you are in any way responsible, that one's nationality or gender or surname do not make someone guilty for crimes committed by others who have those things in common with you, why is your race uniquely different?
Specifically, why are whites collectively expected to repent for what other whites did to blacks two hundred years ago?
Does a black man in Philadelphia share guilt when a black man in Los Angeles murders a white man? If a black man's great, great grandfather murdered a white man's great, great grandfather, does the contemporary black man bear guilt for the crime?
If your brother commits a crime and is sent to prison would justice be served by imprisoning you as well, merely because you're related, if you had no part in the crime?
Interestingly, the notion of collective guilt, a favored trope of the left, only applies when it works against whites. The left is today insisting that Israel has been cruelly punishing the Palestinian people in Gaza for what other Palestinians did on October 7th. But if collective guilt is a legitimate concept, why shouldn't all Palestinians pay for the atrocities of Hamas?
In fact, campus left-wingers at some of our major universities hold American Jews reponsible for what Israeli Jews are doing in the Middle East, yet these leftists claim it's a war crime to punish the Palestinians for what the savages that the Palestinians elected, supported, and cheered for, did to Jews on October 7th.
The concept of collective guilt is absurd. Guilt and merit are individual, not collective. No one today is guilty for what people of their same race did to others a century or more ago or are doing today. They're only guilty to the extent that they themselves participate in harming others or explicity or implicitly condone harming others.
We'd have a much healthier, cohesive society if everyone honored Martin Luther King by following his example and acknowledged that simple fact.
