Welcome to Martin Luther King’s Racial Nightmare
The enemies of Dr. King’s message have appropriated his image for their own agenda
Here’s a troubling observation: Great political victories are often followed by philosophical defeat. For example, although we “won” the Cold War, the Marxism of Soviet Russia has now infected many American institutions.
The same phenomenon applies to the internal war of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. Martin Luther King, Jr. may have outwardly “won” with specific legislative victories, but Malcolm X has won the minds of successive generations. While King is celebrated with memorials and a holiday, his legacy is tarnished by the growing vitriol and racial animus that Malcolm X made famous. In a tragic irony, contemporary rhetoric uses King’s image to promote the ideology of his enemies.
Consider how the swelling of the Black Lives Matter movement has been made possible by countless whites finding out that Martin Luther King Jr. once scolded white clergymen with “the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate.”
To avoid being seen as an evil white moderate, whites are told they must become an “ally,” which means you must be willing “to let [People of Color] lead and not try to be at the center.” Given the last month, though, many allies might be wondering if they’re even allowed to caution against rioting, looting, and toppling statues of our forebears.
But how many have actually read King’s entire letter from a Birmingham jail, the text from which his admonishment of white moderates comes? If you have, you know King condemns another political faction, “one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence.” He speaks of “black nationalist” groups in general, and mentions the Nation of Islam, headed by Elijah Muhammad and promoted by Malcolm X, in particular.
Black Lives Matter Is Dr. King’s Enemy
That Black Lives Matter and the protests-turned-riots are in the spirit of King’s ideological enemies and not King’s own Christian metaphysics should be clear to anyone willing to move beyond the emotive posturing that has come to take the place of rational politics.
Martin Luther King, Jr. describes how the black nationalists “have lost faith in America.” Instead of finding American history as a wellspring of hope, as King did, today’s activists hate their American heritage. On the base of a recently toppled statue of George Washington, someone tagged “BLM” and “1619,” clues for who to blame for the hatred towards the father of our country and the republic he helped establish. The New York Times’ 1619 project is not just an attempt to “reframe” America’s story as one hopelessly and irreparable racists. It encapsulates the ideology promulgated for decades by elite institutions, which have persuaded many that America is nothing more than a county “founded on the genocide of one race and the enslavement of another,” a common and unquestioned mantra among our elite institutions.
The key author of the 1619 project recently said it would be “an honor” if the riots were named “The 1619 Riots.” Just to keep everyone up to date: the riots haven’t led just to the toppling of monuments and defacing of churches and synagogues, but also (so far) to at least seventeen deaths and thousands of businesses destroyed.
What would the protesters make of the fact that King legitimizes his movement by appealing to the American founding?
He doesn’t advocate toppling monuments to our founding fathers. In front of the Washington monument, King declared “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. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
King understood that from the self-governing republic predicated on the proposition that “all men are created equal” does any person of any race have hope for political liberty.
King understood slavery and segregation were violations of American principles and that there was no greater hope for political equality than holding America up to its own standards. He doesn’t castigate Jefferson for owning slaves; he appeals to Jefferson’s revolutionary words at the base of the American project, seeing his own movement as a fulfillment of Jefferson’s ideals.
And what would the protesters make of the fact that King roots his activism in Christian natural law?
Natural Law and Christianity in the Civil Rights Movement
Whereas today’s protesters desecrate statues of saints, King’s political activism cannot be divorced from his Christianity: “I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’…To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”
But the “eternal and natural law” upon which King built his movement is anathema to Black Lives Matter. According to this “eternal and natural law,” the segregation laws King fought to overturn were unjust because they made an invalid political distinction: There is no metaphysical difference between a black man and a white man. Before God and according to His created order, all men are equal, possessing the same nature.
Therefore, to make one set of laws for one race and one for another violates what the Declaration of Independence calls “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” The Natural Law legitimizes political equality because it de-legitimizes the very concept of race: The value of a man does not depend on a category that is metaphysically accidental, like race.
Because Christian metaphysics is essential to political equality, King warns that black nationalists “have absolutely repudiated Christianity.” He saw that without Christianity, there is no hope for the “race problem” because Christianity dissolves the very concept of “race” itself, revealing it as a malevolent lie. In the conclusion to his “I Have a Dream Speech,” King highlights this basic Christian truth:
…when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
To be free at last is to be free of racial categories.
So when Black Lives Matter says, “We are unapologetically Black in our positioning,” they shatter the metaphysical foundation for political equality. They assume that there is a fundamental difference between the races: a “Black” position as opposed to a “White” position.
Christianity pulled the human race out of centuries of tribal warfare by revealing our inherent equality as created persons. Our common nature marked by reason sets us apart from the beasts. We are capable of knowing ourselves, the created order, and our Creator. We can know Truth, and this Truth is the same for all people no matter the color of skin. There is no “Black” position. There is no “White” position. But there is Truth, and there are Lies. All men, whether black or white, can and should distinguish the two.
In the letter from a Birmingham jail, King warns the white moderates that if they don’t support his activism rooted in Christian love, “millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies — a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.” King rightly saw that racial ideologies provide no hope, thrusting us back into tribalism, where some men must bend a knee to other men on the basis of accidental, unimportant categories like race, instead of all men bending a knee before one God.
Contemporary civil rights activist and Christian minister John Perkins shows that he understands King far better than BLM does. While speaking at a progressive Christian conference run by the Sojourners organization, he shocked his audience by calling the goal of “racial reconciliation” a lie from the “devil’s workshop.” Why?
Because theologically “there is one human race.” He explained that “racial reconciliation” makes a “wrong assumption,” namely, that there are different races. In other words, the problem of racism cannot be solved while holding onto the concept of race. We must repent of racism and racialism. Instead of “racial reconciliation” we need to talk about human sin and divine reconciliation.
There can be no “Black” position. To affirm Black Lives Matter’s belief in a fundamental “Black” position will only lead to more animus and more tribal warfare. And just as Ta-Nehisi Coates fuels Richard Spencer’s fire, as Thomas Chatterton Williams has shown, so BLM mainstreams the racialized metaphysical framework that White Nationalists adopt. The White Nationalists simply opt for the “White position.” And why not? They are white, after all.
Furthermore, affirming the existence of a “Black” or “White” position marks the end of rational politics, whereby our differences are resolved through discourse. Imagine how easily what I’ve said thus far can and will be dismissed simply as coming from a “white” man. Where do we go from there?
Welcome to the Nightmare
If rational discourse is replaced by preferences for various tribal “positions,” then the question of peacefully resolving differences through dialogue is out the window — politics merely becomes a question of which tribe is stronger. Politics becomes violent power struggles. Each position must battle the other. America’s gift to the world was the proof that ballots, as the consummation of rational discourse, could replace bullets as a means of resolving political questions. America has also been described as an “experiment.” And if this “experiment” is declared a “failure,” history tells us what to expect.
In his letter from the Birmingham Jail, King understands why blacks may be tempted by black nationalism: It is “nourished by the Negro’s frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination,” a frustration once provoked, in part, by segregation laws and disenfranchisment. The situation, however, is much different today than it was at mid-century.
The driving force of Black Lives Matter is the belief that “Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise,” particularly by police. Of course, if blacks were intentionally targeted for demise, there should be massive political orchestration to stop it. If it were true, though, evidence would be plentiful.
Fortunately for us (but unfortunately for activists who make careers off racial politics), there is no such evidence. Black bodies are safer than they’ve ever been. I won’t rehash the data but direct you to Coleman Hughes’ overview of the mismatch between popular narratives and empirical evidence. You would think such news would be celebrated, but it is often censored for it proves incompatible with the ideology dependent on belief in “systemic racism” (and thus threatens activists’ careers).
The argument for systemic racism consists of pointing to data revealing discrepancies among the races, but not to evidence that such discrepancies are caused by racism. The same inept reasoning could prove systemic sexism against men, who are incarcerated at rates higher than women, or for systemic ageism, for the elderly die at a rate higher than the young.
Sadly, activists are propelled by emotions untethered from reality. In their fantasies they are championing racial justice, but, in reality, they are hurting the very people they think they’re helping. After BLM protests, cops in high-crime areas become less likely to engage with black criminals, leading to more crime in those communities. (The phenomenon has been dubbed “The Ferguson Effect.”) Do those black lives matter any less than George Floyd’s?
Ironically, what is proven to help black communities are policies that Black Lives Matter and their white liberal supporters are least likely to support: expanding school choice which affords black kids greater access to better schools, and more law and order so that black businesses in the inner-city can thrive free of crime (which across the world is probably the most critical obstacle facing people trying to pull themselves out of poverty).
As John McWhorter points out in his analysis of Malcolm X’s legacy: “There is a tacit sense that the kind of anger Malcolm became famous for, with the upheld fist and the menacing ‘By Any Means Necessary,’ is portentous, the start of something. But in real life, what Starts Things now is not going to be black America rising up in anger. The community isn’t cohesive enough, and the problems today aren’t simple enough.”
The degree of rational discourse needed to solve complicated problems — the stuff of true politics — is near impossible now thanks to the anger stoked by false narratives and now engulfing the nation. It will be made more difficult the more influence BLM gains, for BLM’s ideology precludes rational discourse and guarantees more violence.
BLM is founded on a dangerous metaphysics and an empirical lie. Yet it is now endorsed by seemingly every major multinational corporation and has received millions of dollars in donations.
If King was right that Black nationalism will lead to a racial nightmare, then a new American nightmare is beginning in earnest.
Can anything wake us up?
