Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Chapter 3
Chapter 3: Racism and the White Backlash
Summary
In Chapter 3, Dr. King focuses his attention on the dilemma of white America. To begin, he traces the insidious birth of white supremacy and racism to its roots among America’s elites and academics. He lays out the case of America’s inherent ‘schizophrenic’ nature, and challenges white America to confront its ugly past, while embracing the ultimate ideals it extols to the rest of the world. He concludes by calling out the church for its negligence in being a voice for moral justice, and lays out the moral case against segregation and racism.
The “White Backlash”
“Rationalization and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our individual and collective sins. But the day has passed for bland euphemisms. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery…In short, white America must assume the guilt for the black man’s inferior status.”
“Ever since the birth of our nation, white America has had a schizophrenic personality on the question of race. She has been torn between selves — a self in which she proudly professed the great principles of democracy and a self in which she sadly practiced the antithesis of democracy.”
“This tragic duality has produced a strange indecisiveness and ambivalence toward the Negro, causing America to take a step backward simultaneously with every step forward on the question of racial justice.”
“This step backward has a new name today. It is called the “white backlash”…It is the surfacing of old prejudices, hostilities and ambivalences that have always been there.”
“The white backlash of today is rooted in the same problem that has characterized America ever since the black man landed in chains on the shores of this nation.”
“For the good of America, is it necessary to refute the idea that the dominant ideology in our country even today is freedom and equality while racism is just an occasional departure from the norm on the part of a few bigoted extremists.”
What is racism?
“What is racism? Dr. George Kelsey, in a profound book entitled “Racism and the Christian Understanding of Man, states that: “Racism is a faith. it is a form of idolatry…In its early modern beginnings, racism was a justificatory device. It did not emerge as a faith. It arose as an idealogical justification for the constellations of political and economic power which were expressed in colonialism and slavery. But gradually the idea of the superior race was heightened and deepened in meaning and value so that it pointed beyond the historical structures of relation, in which it emerged, to human existence itself.”
“In her Race: Science and Politics, Ruth Benedict expands on the theme by defining racism as ‘the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to hereditary inferiority and another group is destined to hereditary superiority.’ I tis the dogma that the hope of a civilization depends upon eliminating some races and keeping others pure. It is the dogma that one race has carried progress throughout human history and can alone ensure future progress.”
“Since racism is based on the dogma ‘that the hope of civilization depends upon eliminating some races and keeping others pure,’ its ultimate logic is genocide. Hitler, in his mad and ruthless attempt to exterminate the Jews, carried the logic of racism to its ultimate tragic conclusions. While America has not literally sought to eliminate the Negro in this final sense, it has, through the system of segregation, substituted a subtle reduction of life by means of deprivation.”
“Racism is a philosophy based on a contempt for life. It is the arrogant assertion that one race is the center of value and object of devotion, before which other races must kneel in submission.”
“Racism is total estrangement. It separates not only bodies, but minds and spirits. Inevitably it descends to inflicting spiritual or physical homicide upon the out-group.”
Tracing the “dominant and contradictory strains” of the American Psyche
“Of the two dominant and contradictory strains in the American psyche, the positive one, our democratic heritage, was the later development of the American continent.”
“Yet even among the electrifying expressions of the rights of man, racism — the myth of inferior peoples — was flourishing here to contradict and qualify the democratic ideal. Slavery was not only ignored in defining democracy, but its enlargement was tolerated in the interests of strengthening the nation.
“In fact, this ghastly blood traffic was so immense and its profits were so stupendous that the economies of several European nations owed their growth and prosperity to it and New England rested heavily on it for its development. Charles A. Beard declared it was fair to say of whole towns in New England and Great Britain: “The stones of your houses are cemented with the blood of African slaves.”
The birth of white supremacy
“It seems to be a fact of life that human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some rationalization to clothe their acts in the garments of righteousness. And so, with the growth of slavery, men had to convince themselves that a system which was so economically profitable was morally justifiable. The attempt to give moral sanction to a profitable system gave birth to the doctrine of white supremacy.”
“Religion and the Bible were cited and distorted to support the status quo.”
“Logic was manipulated to give intellectual credence to the system of slavery.”
“Academicians eventually climbed on the bandwagon and gave their prestige to the myth of the superior race. Their contributions came through the so-called Teutonic Origins theory, a doctrine of white supremacy surrounded by the halo of academic respectability.”
“Even natural science, that discipline committed to the inductive method, create appraisal and detached objectivity, was invoked and distorted to give credence to a political position. A whole school of racial ethnologists developed using such terms as “species’, “genus”, and “race”. It became fashionable to think of the slave as a “species of property.” It was during this period that the word “race” came into fashion.”
“Generally we think of white supremacist views as having their origins with the unlettered, underprivileged, poorer-class whites. But the social obstetricians who presided at the birth of racist views in our country were from the aristocracy: rich merchants, influential clergymen, men of medical science, historians and political scientists from some of the leading universities of the nation. With such a distinguished company of the elite working so assiduously to disseminate racist views, what was there to inspire poor, illiterate, unskilled white farmers to think otherwise?”
“Soon the doctrine of white supremacy was imbedded in every textbook and preached in practically every pulpit. It became a structural part of the culture. And men then embraced this philosophy, not as the rationalization of a lie, but as the expression of a final truth.”
“The greatest blasphemy of the whole ugly process was that the white man ended up making God his partner in the exploitation of the Negro. What greater heresy has religion known? Ethical Christianity vanished and the moral nerve of religion atrophied. This terrible distortion sullied the essential nature of Christianity.”
The haunting ambivalence within our Founding fathers
“No human being is perfect. In our individual and collective lives every expression of greatness is followed, not by a period symbolizing completeness, but by a comma implying partialness.”
“George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Quincy Adams, John Calhoun, and Abraham Lincoln were great men, but — that “but” underscores the fact that not one of these men had a strong, unequivocal belief in the equality of the black man.”
George Washington
“No one doubts the valor and commitment that characterized George Washington’s life. But to the end of his days he maintained a posture of exclusionism toward the slave. He only allowed Negroes to enter the Continental Army because his Majesty’s Crown was attempting to recruit Negroes to the British cause.”
“Washington was not without his moments of torment, those moments of conscious when something within told him that slavery was wrong. As he searched the future of America one day, he wrote to his nephew: “I wish from my soul that the legislature of this State could see the policy of gradual abolition of slavery. It might prevent much future mischief.”
“In spite of this, Washington never made a public statement condemning slavery. He could not pull away from the system. When he died he owned, or had on lease, more than 160 slaves.”
“Here, in the life of the father of our nation, we can see the developing dilemma of white America: the haunting ambivalence, the intellectual and moral recognition that slavery is wrong, but the emotional tie to the system so deep and pervasive that it imposes an inflexible unwillingness to root it out.
Thomas Jefferson
“Thomas Jefferson reveals the same ambivalence.”
“Jefferson was a child of his culture who has been influenced by the pseudoscientific and philosophical thought that rationalized slavery. In his “Notes on Virginia”, Jefferson portrayed the Negro as inferior to the white man in his endowments of body, mind, and imagination, although he observed that the Negro appeared to be superior at picking out tunes on the “banjar”. Jefferson’s majestic words, “all men are created equal,” meant for him, as for many others, that all white men are created equal.”
“Yet in his heart Jefferson knew that slavery was wrong and that it degraded the white man’s mind and soul. In the same “Notes on Virginia” he wrote “For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labor for another…Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever…the Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest.”
“And in 1820, six years before his death, he wrote these melancholy words: “But the momentous question [slavery] like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union…I regret that I am not to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generations of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passion of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it.”
Abraham Lincoln
“The strange duality toward the Negro and slavery vexed the mind of Abraham Lincoln for years.”
“As early as 1837, as a state legislator, Lincoln referred to the injustice and impracticality of slavery. Later he wrote of the physical differences between blacks and whites and made it clear that he felt whites were superior. At times he concluded that the white man could not live with the Negro.”
“This accounted for his conviction that the only answer to the problem was to colonize the black man — send him back to Africa, or to the West Indies or some other isolated spot. This view was still in his mind toward the height of the Civil War. Delegation after delegation — the Quakers above all, great abolitionists like Charles Sumner, Horace Greeley and William Garrison — pleaded with Lincoln to free slaves, but he was firm in his resistance. Frederick Douglass, a Negro of towering grandeur, sound judgement and militant initiative, sought, without success, to persuade Lincoln that slavery, not merely the preservation of the union, was at the root of the war. At the time, Lincoln could not see it.”
“But Lincoln was basically honest and willing to admit his confusions. He saw that the nation could not survive half slave and half free; and he said, “If we could first know where we are and whiter we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it,” Fortunately for the nation, he finally came to see “whiter we were tending.”
“The significance of the Emancipation Proclamation was described by Frederick Douglass in these words: “ Unquestionably, for weal and for woe, the first of January is to be the most memorable day in American Annals. The Fourth of July was great, but the First of January, when we consider it in all its relations and bearings, is incomparably greater. The one had respect to the mere political birth of a nation; the last concerns the national life and character, and is to determine whether that life and character shall be radiantly glorious with all high and noble virtues, or infamously blackened, forevermore.”
The tragic Abstract Freedom of the Emancipation Proclamation
“Underneath, the ambivalence of white America toward the Negro still lurked with painful persistence…With all the beautiful promise that Frederick Douglass saw in the Emancipation Proclamation, he soon found that it left the Negro with only abstract freedom.”
“It was like freeing a man who had been unjustly imprisoned for years, and on discovering his innocence sending him out with no bus fare to get home, no suit to cover his body, no financial compensation to atone for his long years of incarceration and to help him get a sound footing in society; sending him out with only the assertion: “Now you are free.””
“What greater injustice could society perpetrate? All the moral voices of the universe, all the codes of sound jurisprudence, would rise up with condemnation at such an act. Yet this is exactly what America did to the Negro. In 1863 the Negro was given abstract freedom expressed in luminous rhetoric.”
The ambivalence of white America extended to more than Negroes
“In dealing with the ambivalence of white America, we must not overlook another form of racism that was relentlessly pursued on American shores: the physical extermination of the American Indian.”
“The poisoning of the American mind was accomplished not only by acts of discrimination and exploitation but by the exaltation of murder as an expression of the courage and initiative of the Pioneer.”
“Just as Southern culture was made to appear noble by ignoring the cruelty of slavery, the conquest of the Indian was depicted as an example of bravery and progress.”
White Backlash Exists even today
“These concepts of racism, and this schizophrenic duality of conduct, remain deeply rooted in American thought today. This tendency of the nation to take one step forward on the question of racial justice and then to take a step backward is still the pattern.”
“Just as an ambivalent nation freed the slaves a century ago with no plan or program to make their freedom meaningful, the still ambivalent nation in 1954 declared school segregation unconstitutional with no plan or program to make integration real.”
“Just as the Congress passed a civil rights bill in 1868 and refused to enforce it, the Congress passed a civil right bill in 1964 and to this day has failed to enforce it in all its dimensions.”
“Just as the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 proclaimed Negro suffrage, only to permit its de facto withdrawal in half the nation, so in 1965 the Voting Rights Law was passed and then permitted to languish with only fractional and halfhearted implementation.”
“The ubiquitous discrimination in his daily life tells him that laws on paper, no matter how imposing their terms, will not guarantee that he will live in “the masterpiece of civilization.”
“All of this tells us that the white backlash is nothing new. White America has been backlashing on the fundamental God-given and human rights of Negro Americans for more than three hundred years. With all of her dazzling achievements and stupendous material strides, America has maintained its strange ambivalence on the question of racial justice.
There is good in America, but it has strayed to the far country of racism
“The racism of today is real, but the democratic spirit that has always faced it is equally real. The value in pulling racism out of its obscurity and stripping it of its rationalizations lies in the confidence that it can be changed. To live with the pretense that racism is a doctrine of a very few is to disarm us in fighting it frontally as scientifically unsound, morally repugnant and socially destructive.”
“The prescription for the cure rests with the accurate diagnosis of the disease. A people who began a national life inspired by a vision of a society of brotherhood can redeem itself. But redemption can come only though a humble acknowledgement of guilt and an honest knowledge of self.
“[The Story of the Prodigal Son] is an analogy to what white America confronts today. Like all human analogies, it is imperfect, but it does suggest some parallels worth considering. America has strayed to the far country of racism. The home that all too many Americans left was solidly structured idealistically. Its pillars were soundly grounded in the insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage: all men are made in the image of God; all men are brothers; all men are created equal; every man is heir to a legacy of dignity and worth; every man has rights that are neither conferred by nor derived from the state, they are God-given.”
“What a marvelous foundation for any home! What a glorious place to inhabit! But America strayed away; and this excursion has brought only confusion and bewilderment.”
“The Negro problem is not only America’s greatest failure but also America’s incomparably great opportunity for the future. If America should follow its own deepest convictions, its well-being at home would be increased directly. At the same time America’s prestige and power abroad would rise immensely.”
America’s most urgent challenge is a question of priorities
“This is America’s most urgent challenge today. If America is to respond creatively to the challenge, many individuals, groups and agencies must rise above the hypocrisies of the past and begin to take an immediate and determined part in changing the face of their nation. If the country has not yet emerged with a massive program to end the blight surrounding the life of the Negro, one is forced to believe that the answers have not been forthcoming because there is as yet no genuine and widespread conviction that such fundamental changes are needed, and needed now.”
“As a first step on the journey home, the journey to full equality, we will have to engage in a radical reordering of national priorities.”
“This is a question of the allocation of money, which means the establishment of priorities.”
“All too many of those who live in affluent America ignore those who exist in poor America; in doing so, the affluent Americans will eventually have to face themselves with the question that Eichmann chose to ignore: how responsible am I for the well-being of my fellows? To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.”
“Without denying the value scientific endeavor, there is a striking absurdity in committing billions to reach the moon where no people live, while only a fraction of that amount is appropriated to service the densely populated slums. If these strange values persist, in a few years we can be assured that when we set a man on the moon, with an adequate telescope he will be able to see the slums on earth with their intensified congestion, decay and turbulence. On what scale of values is this a program of progress?”
“If this society changes its concepts by placing the responsibility on its system, not on the individual, and guarantees secure employment or a minimum income, dignity will come within reach for all. “
“It is disquieting to note that President Johnson in his message to Congress on the demonstration Cities programs stated, ‘If we can begin now the planning from which action will flow, the hopes of the twentieth century will become the realities of the twenty-first.’ On this timetable many Negroes not yet born and virtually all now alive will not experience equality. The virtue of patience will become a vice if it accepts so leisurely an approach to social change.”
White liberals must rid themselves of latent prejudice, and demand justice for the American Negro.
“Over the last few years many Negroes have felt that their most troublesome adversary was not the obvious bigot of the Ku Klux Klan or the John Birch Society, but the white liberal who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice, who prefers tranquility to equality.”
“..Many liberals have fallen into the trap of seeing integration in merely aesthetic terms, where a token number of Negroes adds color to a white-dominated power structure. They say, ‘Our union is integrated from top to bottom, we even have one Negro on the executive board.’ or ‘Our neighborhood is making great progress in integrated housing, we now have two Negro families!’
“Often white liberals are unaware of their latent prejudices…..yet in spite of latent prejudice, in spite of the hard reality that many blatant forms of injustice could not exist without the acquiescence of white liberals, the fact remains that a sound resolution of the race problem in America will rest with those white men and women who consider themselves as generous and decent human beings.”
“Nothing can be more detrimental to the health of America at this time than for liberals to sink into a state of apathy and indifference.”
“The white liberal must see that the Negro needs not only love but also justice. It is not enough to say ‘We love Negroes, we have many Negro friends.’ They must demand justice for Negroes. Love that does not satisfy justice is no love at all. It is merely a sentimental affection, little more than what one would have for a pet. Love at its best is justice concretized. Love is unconditional. It is not conditional upon one’s staying in his place or watering down his demands in order to be considered respectable. He who contents that he ‘used to love the Negro, but…’ did not truly love him in the beginning, because his love was conditioned upon the Negroes’ limited demands for justice.”
“The white liberal must affirm that absolute justice for the Negro simply means, in the Aristotelian sense, that the Negro must have ‘his due.’
“It is, however, important to understand that giving a man his due may often mean giving him special treatment. I am aware of the fact that this has been a troublesome concept for many liberals, since it conflicts with their traditional ideal of equal opportunity and equal treatment of people according to their individual merits. But this is a day which demands new thinking and the reevaluation of old concepts. A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.
“The white liberal must rid himself of the notion that there can be a tensionless transition from the old order of injustice to the new order of justice. Two things are clear to me, and I hope they are clear to white liberals. One is that the Negro cannot achieve emancipation through violent rebellion. The other is that the Negro cannot achieve emancipation by passively waiting for the white race voluntarily to grant it to him. The Negro has not gained a single right in America without persistent pressure and agitation.”
The role of Nonviolent coercion in bringing tension to the surface
“Nonviolent coercion always brings tension to the surface. This tension, however, must not be seen as destructive. There is a kind of tension that is both healthy and necessary for growth.”
“It is important for the liberal to see that the oppressed person who agitates for his rights is not the creator of tension. He merely brings out the hidden tension that is already alive.”
“Last summer, many of our white liberal friends cried our in horror and dismay: ‘You are creating hatred and hostility in the white communities in which you are marching. You are only developing a white backlash.’ I never could understand this logic. They failed to realize that the hatred and the hostility were already latently or subconsciously present. Our marches merely brought them to the surface.”
“How strange would it be to condemn the physician who, through persistent work and the ingenuity of his medical skills, discovered cancer in a patient. Would anyone be so ignorant as to say he caused the cancer? Through the skills and discipline of direct action we reveal that there is a dangerous cancer of hatred and racism in our society. We did not cause the cancer; we merely exposed it. Only though this kind of exposure will the cancer ever be cured. The committed white liberal must see the need for powerful antidotes to combat the disease of racism.”
The obligation of the Church
“Among the forces of white liberalism the church has a special obligation. It is the voice of moral and spiritual authority on earth. Yet no one observing the history of the church in America can deny the shameful fact that is has been an accomplice in structuring racism into the architecture of American society. The church, by and large, sanctioned slavery and surrounded it with the halo of moral respectability.”
“The unpardonable sin, thought the poet Milton, was when a man so repeatedly said, ‘Evil, be thou my good,’ so consistently lived a lie, that he lost the capacity to distinguish between good and evil. America’s segregated churches come dangerously close to being in that position.”
“Of course, there have been marvelous Exceptions…But the church, as a whole has been all too negligent on the question of civil rights. It has too often blessed a status quo that needed to be blasted, and reassured a social order that needed to be reformed.”
“If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.”
The immorality of Segregation is rooted in its inability to see men in the Image of God
Deeply rooted in our religious heritage is the conviction that every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Our Judeo-Christian tradition refers to this inherent dignity of man in the Biblical term ‘the Image of God.’
“‘The image of God’ is universally shared in equal portions by all men. There is no graded scale of essential worth. Every human being has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the Creator. Every man must be respected because God loves him. The worth of an individual does not lie in the measure of his intellect, his racial origin or his social position. Human worth lies in relatedness to God. An individual has value because he has value to God. Whenever this is recognized, ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ pass away as determinants in a relationship and ‘son’ and ‘brother’ are substituted.”
“The immorality of segregation is that it treats men as means rather than ends, and thereby reduces them to things rather than persons.”
“But man is not a thing. He must be dealt with not as an ‘animated tool’ but as a person sacred in himself. To do otherwise is to depersonalize the potential person and desecrate what he is. So long as the Negro or any other member of a minority group is treated as a means to an end, the image of God is abused in him and consequently and proportionately lost by those who inflict the abuse.”
The immorality of Segregation is rooted in its deprivation of man’s freedom
“Segregation is also morally wrong because it deprives man of freedom, that quality that makes him man.”
“What is freedom? Is it, first, the capacity to deliberate or to weight alternatives. ‘Shall I be a doctor or a lawyer?’ ‘Shall I be a Democrat, Republican, Socialist?’ ‘Shall I be a humanist or a theist?’
‘Second, freedom expresses itself in decision. The word decision, like the word incision, involves the image of cutting. Incision means to cut in, Decision means to cut off. When I make a decision, I cut off alternatives and make a choice.’
‘A third expression of freedom is responsibility. This is the obligation of the person to respond if he is questioned about his decisions.’
“The immorality of segregation is that it is a selfishly contrived system which cuts off one’s capacity to deliberate, decide, and respond.”
“When I cannot choose what I shall do or where I shall live, it means in fact that someone or some system has already made these decisions for me., and I am reduced to an animal. Then the only resemblance I have to a man is in my motor responses and functions. I cannot adequately assume responsibility as a person because I have been made the victim of a decision in which i played no part.”
The duty of the church is to affirm the image of God in all humanity.
“The church has an opportunity and a duty to lift up its voice like a trumpet and declare unto the people the immorality of segregation. It must affirm that every human life is a reflection of divinity, and that every act of injustice mars and defaces the image of God in man.”
“But declarations against segregation, however sincere, are not enough. The church must take the lead in social reform. It must move out into the arena of life and do battle for the sanctity of religious commitments. And it must lead men along the path of true integration, something the law cannot do”
The solution to the race problem lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable
“The ultimate solution to the race problem lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable. Court orders and federal enforcements agencies are of inestimable value in achieving desegregation, but desegregation is only a partial, though necessary, step toward the final goal which we seek to realize, genuine intergroup and interpersonal living. Desegregation will break down the legal barriers and bring men together physically, but something must touch the hearts and souls of men so that they will come together spiritually because it is natural and right. A vigorous enforcement of civil rights will bring an end to segregated public facilities, but it cannot bring an end to fears, prejudice, and irrationality, which are the barriers to a truly integrated society.”
“What is needed today on the part of white America is a committed altruism which recognized this truth. True altruism is more than the capacity to pity; it is the capacity to empathize. Pity is feeling sorry for someone; empathy is feeling sorry with someone. Empathy is fellow feeling for the person in need — his pain, agony, and burdens. I doubt if the problems of our teeming ghettos will have a great chance to be solved until the white majority, through genuine empathy, comes to feel the ache and anguish of the Negroes’ daily life.”
