MLK famously said that he hoped for a society in which people were assessed on the basis of their character rather than their skin color.
But half a century later, society seems to be just as hyper-focused on skin color. We seem to have made almost no progress at all towards disregarding color; indeed, the advent of identity politics is putting more and more emphasis on someone’s characteristics (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) Notably, the rise of white identity politics arguably played a key role in Trump’s 2016 win.
Possibly a silly question, but… how much do you actually know about MLK? Like, have you spent any significant amount of time looking into what he’s said, his writings, the background of his movement? Or did you go over “I have a dream” once in high school? Because I’ve found that people who complain about “identity politics” usually belong to the latter category:
The most significant issue to be addressed by this essay is how Martin Luther King, Jr.'s legacy has been misused in support of the colorblind thesis. As noted in the prologue, King dreamed that one day his “four little children [would] live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” This statement has been wrenched out of the social and political context in which King lived and died and has been misappropriated by some proponents of colorblindness who erroneously argue that “if colorblindness was good enough for Martin Luther King. . .then it ought to be good enough for a society that still aspires to the movement’s goals of equality and fair treatment.” This incorrect and ahistorical perversion of King’s statement distorts his actual views and legacy, and illustrates the dangers of the misuse of "acontextual snippets."
It’s not hard to figure this out, because the effect of colorblind ideology is never actually removing racism, but rather removing any tools we have to talk about racism. Most racism is subconscious - you can’t just turn it off. (And if it is active, most of those people aren’t interested in being colorblind.) For many of us, raised in a society that is deeply racist, surrounded by media that is deeply racist, those stereotypes and differences are ingrained in our subconscious. Ignoring them enables them.
(None of these are new or interesting critiques of “colorblindness”, mind you. There really ought to be a rule that anyone who cites “I have a dream” in favor of colorblindness without reading his writings from the Birmingham jail about “white moderates” gets flogged on a plantation or something.)
If we successfully overcome overt prejudice, then all racism would be as unimportant as black racism against white people is today, which most people would consider unimportant.
That doesn’t really work because power relations are absolutely a thing. Assuming that black people have the same subconscious biases against white people (not sure that’s the case), you don’t have black people running almost every fortune 500 company, black people don’t run most HR departments, black people don’t overwhelmingly control the levers of power in society. Maybe if we overcome overt prejudice and completely redo the last 400 years of history, we could get there.
I think we were moving towards it, in something like a several steps forward a few steps backwards type of way. I think sometime in the middle of Obama’s second term, for a reason that till this day completely eludes me, some people here in the US and around the world started becoming more nationalistic and racist. Since then we’ve been slowly losing ground. Now it’s a few steps forward several steps back loss of progress. I have a few thoughts on what may have happened, but I have no idea if everyone of these things contributed some, if some didn’t contribute at all, or which factors are more important in the recent increase of racism. Here are two of my thoughts, one specific to the US and one for the world as a whole.
We (American society in general) may have become too complacent and willing to tolerate hate speech from the far right. The thinking may have been, at least in part, that if a black man has become president, that means racism is over. Therefore what could be the harm of letting a few loonies spread there crazy theories. Now we’re finding out what the harm is.
I think something changed in the world overall in the last 5 to 10 years or so that has encouraged the rise of nationalism. I’m not sure what triggered this. This isn’t a problem limited to countries where the majority are people of European decent. Sure we have Trump, Boris Johnson, Viktor Orban, etc. But there are also Rodrigo Duterte, Narendra Modi, Jaír Bolsonaro, and so on. Racism isn’t limited to white people, and whatever is causing some white people to become more racist might be contributing to the same problem in non-European countries, the only difference being who the targets of discrimination are.
I think Obama *was *the reason for the change. From the day he took office it felt like every [conservative / republican / right wing whatever] made it their mission to ensure he failed. He was supposed to be a one term president and serve as warning to majority white nations everywhere that this is what happens when you put one of “those people” in charge. When he managed to succeed despite all of the obstacles their inbred belief in white superiority came off the rails, they lost their shit and started to fight back using the same tactics their grandparents employed to great success.
It takes time and effort to judge based on character. This was true then and it is true now. Are individuals more willing to devote time and effort before judging someone? Probably not. Corporations and other large organizations on the other hand do devote time and effort to this judgement because it is profitable to do so. There is clearly some value in more accurately judging someone.
Once upon a time I used to think that we all at least tried to live up to the MLK ideal. But after the election of Trump, and resurgence or white nationalism and participating in several threads on the dope about why skin color is so super important in cosplay (or why Bond can’t be black, or why Superman can’t be black, or why Ariel MUST be white) I can no longer convince myself that white folks have ever judged any of us solely by the content of our characters. If we can’t even do make believe without making skin color being a critical factor then what chance does reality have?
Yes, I am painting with a wide brush…#notallwhitepeople
And with one fell swoop, we have devolved into a nothingness argument because it is most assuredly false, just as the argument FOR any sort of racial divide is completely wrong. This applies to affirmative action as well
It depends on the color of the skin. There used to be massive prejudice against Chinese, Japanese, Indians (from India) in the U.S. Now it has mostly disappeared.
Er, no, that’s still race based discrimination (read: racism). Stop doing that if you care at all about MLK’s teachings. He was NOT a fan of oppression olympics. They don’t help anyone.
Congratulations, you’ve gotten your wish. The world is now completely colorblind! You literally cannot see skin color or any other phenotypical differences between black people and white people. The only way anyone can tell you’re white is that you spend a whole lot of time on the internet being very happy that nobody can tell what race you are any more.
So how would you propose dealing with the massive wealth disparity that comes from one (no-longer-recognizable) group spending the last 300 years aggregating wealth and power, and the other (no-longer-recognizable) group spending almost all of the last 300 years de facto or de jure enslaved, discriminated against, and abused? Do we just accept these class differences and expect them to eventually sort themselves out, or what?
We have racial divides whether you like it or not. These divides come from centuries of racism. Slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow, redlining, blockbusting, the war on drugs, police brutality against black men, and much more. All acts of aggression by white people against black people that left deep wounds on countless communities. And now you want to say “forget all that” and pretend that we’re even? Even if we assume that we can be colorblind (we aren’t, as countlessstudies have shown, even close to that point), how does one ignore countless historical misdeeds and come out with justice?
(For anyone interested in how this sort of thing plays out in practice, Contrapoints did a deep dive into the way racist policies affected Freddie Gray, destroyed his life, and ultimately led to his death at the hands of the police. You can find it here - “Baltimore - Anatomy of an Uprising”.)
…But I repeat myself. If your definition of “racism” includes affirmative action, your definition of racism is pretty awful, and/or you don’t actually know what affirmative action actually is.
The real problem facing most of the members of this group is poverty. It doesn’t matter how anyone fell into poverty - and oh yes, the last 300 years definitely pushed a lot of black people into it - but there is no racial solution to poverty and attempting to approach it as a race problem doesn’t actually lead to any viable solutions. Fight poverty and you eliminate the problem.
Our economic system is not designed to decrease class differences, it is designed to amplify and reinforce them. Counter-trend mechanisms must be put into place, or the mechanisms that cause this divergence must be softened. Measures like California trying to eliminate the fee-for-not-being-able-to-pay-fees loop, or eliminating bail. Medicare for All would also be a boon, as would an automatically inflation adjusted minimum wage… and these are just a few of the glaringly obvious, low hanging fruit.
Race is a less significant factor than poverty in virtually any meaningful statistic. There certainly is racism, but class has vastly more influence than race, and this is reflected virtually across the board. Poverty is a nasty cycle, and the “divides” between races virtually vanish as soon as you control for poverty.
No one is asking you to forget. I’m trying to get you to solve, rather than divide.