The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (56 page)

King’s advocacy of nonviolence was deeply anchored in an African-American religious ethic of love that promoted the fundamental dignity of all creatures because of their relationship to a loving, all-powerful God. As I have already indicated, norms and values developed in the black church influenced King’s theological ideals, but they also shaped his strategies of social reform and his beliefs about human potential for progress and change. What is crucial for the AfricanAmerican religious ethic of love in relation to nonviolent means to attain social, economic, and political freedom is that in King’s worldview, nonviolence was a
way of life
and not simply a strategy of social transformation.

This distinction is key to understanding how King maintained a consistent moral stance toward various forms of violence, including war and domestic policies that reinforced poverty and classism. King saw nonviolent resistance to oppressive social structures, policies, and persons as a means of acquiring basic necessities such as food, clothing, and shelter, as well as being the only viable and ethically legitimate way to obtain freedom, justice, and equality. Although the destruction of racism was a major goal of African-American nonviolent resistance, it was only one goal of the nonviolent lifestyle. As King matured politically, he began to expand his field of moral vision to include classism, poverty, and militarism as legitimate objects of social protest. He believed that conceiving of nonviolence as both a lifestyle and a means of resisting a variety of social and moral problems was consonant with the affirmation of life, liberty, and equality in the black religious experience.

But King’s advocacy of nonviolence was also the result of disciplined study of its applications in a variety of national, social, and moral contexts. He examined the principled resistance to taxpaying advocated by Henry David Thoreau, as well as his seminal essay on civil disobedience. It is widely known that King also diligently studied the principles, methods, and lifestyle of Mohandas Gandhi, whose “experiments with truth” had a powerful impact on King’s thinking.
Gandhi’s leadership of millions of Indians to resist the systemic social oppression of British colonialism inspired King to adapt Gandhi’s methods of nonviolent resistance to American society.

Second, King’s advocacy of nonviolence presumed the heroic character of everyday black people. Although this presumption contained romantic notions of black self-identity, it also located forms of transformative agency within the grasp of often powerless ordinary black folk. It is important to remember that at the beginning of the civil rights movement the lot of everyday black people remained even more circumscribed by the forces of segregation, race hatred, and class inequality from which the black middle class had only occasionally, and precariously, escaped. The civil rights movement provided an enormous boost to the self-identity of black people who had long believed that they were relatively powerless to change their condition.

However, Cornel West points out that King’s presumption that black people could wield nonviolence as a means to social liberation contained a romantic notion of superiority over other racial groups, particularly white Americans. West also contends that King’s doctrine of nonviolence

While I think West’s assessment is just, there is another dimension to King’s assumption that must not be overlooked: his belief in the moral heroism of black people also assumed that the power to affect their destiny and to exercise transformative moral agency was achievable by ordinary black folk. Like that of Marcus Garvey before him and Malcolm X during his own day, the genius of King resided in the ability to appeal to his followers’ heroic potentials by placing strict demands on their shoulders, challenging them to live up to a standard of moral excellence that neither they nor their opponents realized they possessed. King believed that black people could muster the resources they already had at their disposal, such as moral authority and a limited but significant economic base, to foster legitimate claims to social goods like education, housing, and enfranchisement.

Moreover, the standards of moral excellence that King expected through disciplined participation in nonviolent demonstrations, which included rites of selfexamination and purification, were of inestimable worth not only in fighting for
denied social privileges and rights, but in the healthy enlargement of crucial narratives of racial self-esteem. King understood the virtues of “everyday forms of resistance,” and appealed to the “weapons of the weak” in opposing unjust social forces.
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While the above discussion specifies how it makes sense to call King a hero, now I want to explore two tensions that flow from the assertion of King’s ambiguous heroism, which may be summed up in the following way: while King’s contributions were heroic and significant, many African-Americans, particularly the working poor and the underclass, still suffer in important ways; and while King deserves great honor and praise of a particular sort, he is indebted to traditions of African-American religious protest, social criticism, and progressive democracy.

It must be conceded that despite the significant basic changes that King helped bring about, the present status of poor black Americans in particular presents little cause for celebration. Their situation does not mean that King’s achievements were not substantial. Rather it reflects the deep structures of persistent racism and classism that have not yet yielded to sustained levels of protest and resistance.

In order to judge King’s career, we must imagine what American society would be for blacks without his historic achievements. Without basic rights to vote, desegregated public transportation and accommodations, equal housing legislation, and the like, American society would more radically reflect what Gunnar Myrdal termed the “American Dilemma.” King and other participants in the civil rights movement wrought heroic change, but that change was a partial movement toward real liberation.

If it was once believed that King’s vision was only a beginning, a mere foot in the door of civil rights, political empowerment, and economic equality, the tragic reality now is that the door has been shut fast in the face of many AfroAmericans. This is displayed particularly in two areas: the persistence of racism and the disintegration of postindustrial urban life.

It is fair to say that a climate of hostility has been generated toward those who assert that this country has not achieved the ideals of freedom, justice, and equality in any significant structural manner, as envisioned by the mature Martin Luther King Jr. The early Martin Luther King was preoccupied with securing inclusion in American society as it is, without questioning the means by which wealth is distributed; without probing the mechanisms that determine privilege, prestige, and status; and without challenging the growing classism that shattered the notion of a monolithic black community.

The mature Martin Luther King Jr., however, understood that economic injustice was just as great an impediment to black liberation as racial injustice. As I will show later, King’s mature career was spent in attempting to draw out the implications of a coalition politics that transcended race to speak of economic injustice and class oppression. His Poor People’s March was the first real attempt to enact a coalition politics that bound together the interests of various marginalized groups, including Latinos, poor blacks and whites, and peace activists.

Part of King’s great frustration resulted from the fact that racism was much more complex and multifaceted than he realized at the beginning of his career, and he sought to educate himself and his colleagues about the structural, socially embedded nature of institutional racism and the structural nature of class oppression. This accounts in part for how we can claim that King’s contributions were heroic while acknowledging that they were neither perfect nor permanent. Some of the gains King helped secure were structurally permanent, such as legally desegregated public housing and transportation. Other gains must be continually ratified by law, such as the civil rights bill, which must be renegotiated through legislation. Moreover, the logic of racial progress is subject to perennial reexamination and justification.

The project to make King a particular sort of hero has often presented a picture of completion and satisfaction with regard to the structural obstacles to AfricanAmerican racial progress. However, a suggestive and subversive side of King’s heroism views him as an iconic figure who inspires continued battle to implement the goals and dreams for which he gave his life. It is consistent to suggest that although the general perception of blacks has changed, the actual legal barriers to social mobility have been removed, and particular categories of blacks have made substantial gains economically, King’s life equally symbolizes the continued battle for the truly disadvantaged, the ghetto poor. It is heroic in a distinctly Kingian sense to resist official efforts at King canonization that both whitewash actual racial history and deny the work that remains, and to support the belief that much more progress must be made before real liberation can be achieved.

To suggest this, however, is to counter the self-image of the reigning political view of things that is the framework of contemporary conservative and liberal American sociopolitical ideology. Conservative political thought as construed here maintains that the struggle for black self-determination is largely over and that sufficient energy has been devoted to the eradication of racism in American life. Liberal political thought, even when it acknowledges the continuing expression of certain forms of racial and economic inequality, rarely effectively examines the reasons for their malignant persistence.

The predominant political ideology shrinks space for radical dissent and marginalizes, absorbs, or excludes voices asserting that the American condition is in terrible disarray. In short, the ideological horizon and sociopolitical landscape have been dominated by conservative and liberal visions that constitute political realism, effectively preventing radical alternatives to their often mundane and pedestrian achievements.

Conservative ideology and politics have the effect of both offering limited and narrowly conceived options to Afro-American suffering and ensuring the continued hegemony of white, upper-middle-class politics. Liberal alternatives, while certainly an improvement, are nevertheless plagued by an inability to move beyond a provincial vision of what economic and political measures are necessary to better Afro-American life. Liberalism attends to symptoms rather than to root causes.

The tragic reality of the Afro-American condition is that, while in many respects blacks are certainly better off, in other respects many blacks continue to suffer. For instance, the disintegration of the moral, economic, and civic fabric of poor black communities is stunning and entails lethal social consequences. The arising of a subculture of crime, which thrives on the political economy of crack, is threatening to destroy the inner city. Also the gentrification of black urban living space means that inner-city residents are being squeezed out of marginal neighborhoods by an escalating tax rate that forces the working poor into even poorer neighborhoods.

Poverty, for example, affects black people in an especially pernicious manner. Since the 1970s, there has been an enormous increase in poverty in America. In 1970, 14.9 percent of all children were poor. Today the figure is almost 21 percent. For minorities, it is even worse. Two out of every five Hispanic children are poor, and almost one out of every two black children is poor. For black children under six, the poverty rate is a record high 51.1 percent. There is a continually widening gap between the wealthy and the poor in America, and this year it is the highest ever since the Census Bureau began collecting statistics in 1947. Last year, twofifths of the population received 67 percent of all national income, the highest ever recorded. The poorest two-fifths, on the other hand, received only 15.7 percent of all income, the lowest ever recorded. Even worse, one-third of all black America remains below the poverty line.
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Another factor that has contributed to the current condition of black America for the better part of the eighties is the legacy of the Reagan era. The Reagan administration symbolized, and ominously expressed, a new breed of racism, generating policies pervaded by subtle forms of discrimination and prejudice that have had a devastating impact on black America. The Reagan administration’s laissez-faire attitude toward the enforcement of laws and governmental policies that protect minorities and its outright attack on the hard-won rights of America’s poor and dispossessed helped set the tone for an almost unmitigated viciousness toward these groups.
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The Reagan years have fueled a subversive shift in the modus operandi of American racism. Often no longer able to openly express racial hatred through barbaric deeds, racists have found subtle and insidious forms of expression.

This racism not only is evident in upper-middle-class America, with its staunchly conservative values and sensibilities that problematize Afro-American progress, and in the white working and underclass, with its tightly turfed communities that cling to racial and ethnic identification as a means of exclusion and survival (e.g., Howard Beach and Bensonhurst);
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but it also has, in a cruelly ironic twist, engendered a new reactionary group of black neoconservative political and intellectual figures. This group rejects civil rights as a means to black progress and naively contends that such measures as affirmative action cripple rather than aid black freedom by creating negative stereotypes about inferior black performance in education and employment. All of this suggests the deep dimensions of our current crisis.