Source of book: I own this
This is one of my official reads for Black History Month this year. You can read the whole list here. You can read my thoughts on Black History Month here.
I have been intentionally reading black authors this month for the past 16 years, and I have found that the eloquent voices of African-Americans have had a profound influence on my thinking. Many of the best writers of this century and the last and the one before that have indeed been black, and all of us would do well to listen to them.
I also read black authors throughout the year, and have included them on my list, because I think it is important to read broadly and find authors who are all too often overlooked.
My experience with Martin Luther King Jr. has been limited to his more famous shorter works - the “I have a Dream” speech, and the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” both of which I have read to my children as part of their education. I had not, before this, read any of his full-length books.
Where Do We Go From Here? is his last book, published soon before he was murdered. It is a truly outstanding book, eloquent, profound, thoughtful, and concrete. Our world would be such a better place had his policies been put into full effect.
In the light of the whitelash embodied in Trump, the book feels more relevant than ever. It also is so good-hearted and kind-spirited that I think it should serve well as an inspiration to us white folk who wish to be allies in the cause of anti-racism. This isn’t an anti-white book, but it is an anti-racism book and a bold call for true justice.
I took an absolute ton of notes, so I will be quoting extensively from the book. In many ways, the book says everything far better than I could. I strongly recommend that everyone should read it, and take its words to heart.
One thing that repeatedly came to mind is that this book is a far better writing of practical theology than the insipid spiritualization crap that white evangelicalism pushes. The Culture Wars™ were specifically created for racist purposes, of course, but they also are an intentional distraction from the cause of social justice - aka Christianity in action in our world.
By distracting well-meaning white religious people with manufactured panics about sex and culture and change, the momentum that MLK and other civil rights activists created in white communities was largely deflected. That is a total shame, but it is also a criminal level of spiritual malpractice.
If there is an afterlife, most American clergy are going to have a hell of a lot to answer for.
Because the book was written after the long-awaited passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, it is forward-looking: what comes next? What do we need to do to create a truly just society? What steps need to be taken to actually create equality, now that the obvious need to end government-sponsored and tolerated active discrimination has resulted in legal change?
The answer then and now is “a lot still needs to be done.” Exploring the facets of the continuing need for change is the subject of the book.
Within it, MLK starts with the United States, but expands by the end to the need for global action, and a view of our world as inherently interconnected and interdependent. The future thriving of anyone is dependent on the thriving of everyone.
With that, I will jump into the book, and the many quotes that I felt were necessary to explain its message.
I’ll start at the beginning, with his description of the aftermath - the “whitelash” against the passage of civil rights laws.
One year later, some of the people who had been brutalized in Selma and who were present at the Capitol ceremonies were leading marchers in the suburbs of Chicago amid a rain of rocks and bottles, among burning automobiles, to the thunder of jeering thousands, many of them waving Nazi flags.
Um, does that sound familiar? In explaining one reason why all too many white “allies” abandoned the cause, he explains that for many, they were on board with ending the worst evils, but were not comfortable with true equality.
But the absence of brutality and unregenerate evil is not the presence of justice. To stay murder is not the same thing as to ordain brotherhood.
And this one:
The real cost lies ahead. The stiffening of white resistance is a recognition of that fact. The discount education given Negroes will in the future have to be purchased at full price if quality education is to be realized. Jobs are harder and costlier to create than voting rolls. The eradication of slums housing millions is complex far beyond integrating buses and lunch counters.
MLK favorably quotes Hyman Bookbinder, then the assistant director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, as to how all of this is to be paid for. Again, this sure seems relevant today, when marginal tax rates on the obscenely rich are far lower than in MLK’s time.
“The poor can stop being poor if the rich are willing to become even richer at a slower rate.”
And, as MLK also points out, civil unrest is costly. Poverty is costly. A concerted effort to eliminate poverty would benefit everyone, including the rich.
After going through a list of areas in which black folk have significant economic disadvantages - jobs, wages, housing, mortality, unemployment, health care, military service - he tackles one of the favorite myths white people believe.
Depressed living standards for Negroes are not simply the consequence of neglect. Nor can they be explained by the myth of the Negro’s innate incapacities, or by the more sophisticated rationalization of his acquired infirmities (family disorganization, poor education, etc.). They are a structural part of the economic system in the United States. Certain industries and enterprises are based on a supply of low-paid, under-skilled and immobile nonwhite labor. Hand-assembly factories, hospitals, service industries, housework, agricultural operations using itinerant labor would suffer economic trauma, if not disaster, with a rise in wage scales.
This will be a theme throughout the book. Justice requires equal access to jobs with sufficient wages, and blaming the poor (and especially poor minorities) for the well-documented lack of access to these jobs is unfair, and indeed unjust. I’ll mention Albert Murray’s excellent takedown of this idea as well - that was a past BHM selection.
A significant factor in the change in my political views (which in turn drove changes in my religious views), was educating myself about the realities that people outside my subculture experience. MLK insists that this education is something that all white people owe others and themselves.
Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn. The reality of substantial investment to assist Negroes into the twentieth century, adjusting to Negro neighbors and genuine school integration, is still a nightmare for all too many white Americans.
There are so many amazing lines just in this first chapter.
The line of progress is never straight. For a period a movement may follow a straight line and then it encounters obstacles and the path bends. It is like curving around a mountain when you are approaching a city. Often it feels as though you were moving backward, and you lose sight of your goal; but in fact you are moving ahead, and soon you will see the city again, closer by.
This is the hope that many of us cherish during these dark and backward times.
A final victory is an accumulation of many short-term encounters. To lightly dismiss a success because it does not usher in a complete order of justice is to fail to comprehend the process of achieving full victory. It underestimates the value of confrontation and dissolves the confidence born of a partial victory by which new efforts are powered.
Another thing many of us white folk, unused to being activists, need to keep in mind. No victory is ever complete - the struggle for justice is eternal. But that doesn’t mean you don’t struggle, and celebrate incremental victories.
There is a good passage at the end of the chapter about the way white people tend to fear “riots” and protest generally. I have seen this in so many friends and family. There is a visceral sense of discomfort at other people displaying anger. (Women and minorities are supposed to be positive at all times, right?) MLK notes that there is actually a cure for all this.
Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention. There is no other answer. Constructive social change will bring certain tranquility; evasions will merely encourage turmoil.
If the first chapter is a general look at justice, the second is all about the inner disagreement over “black power” and the role of different forms of action within the civil rights movement. Here, MLK asserts his commitment to non-violence, in large part because he saw violence as counterproductive to the goal.
I think he is correct here. In fact, the power of the protests against ICE has been in their non-violence, putting on full display the moral depravity of ICE and its actions.
MLK does not dismiss the impetus behind the Black Power movement either - he assumes good and understandable motives, but pushes back on methods. He also notes that the movement itself is diverse, and many within it share his commitment to nonviolence, and to a multi-racial movement.
I should have been reminded that disappointment produces despair and despair produces bitterness, and that the one thing certain about bitterness is its blindness. Bitterness has not the capacity to make the distinction between some and all. When some members of the dominant group, particularly those in power, are racist in attitude and practice, bitterness accuses the whole group.
This is also a great line:
Like life, racial understanding is not something that we find but something that we must create. What we find when we enter these mortal plains is existence; but existence is the raw material out of which all life must be created. A productive and happy life is not something that you find; it is something you make. And so the ability of Negroes and whites to work together, to understand each other, will not be found ready-made; it must be created by the fact of contact.
I mentioned that this book sure seems a hell of a lot more Christian than white evangelicalism. Here is a great line about that, and it expresses my feelings here in the Trump Era perfectly.
All of this represents disappointment lifted to astronomical proportions. It is disappointment with timid white moderates who feel that they can set the timetable for the Negro’s freedom. It is disappointment with a federal administration that seems to be more concerned about winning an ill-considered war in Vietnam than about winning the war against poverty here at home. It is disappointment with white legislators who pass laws on behalf of Negro rights that they never intended to implement. It is disappointment with the Christian church that appears to be more white than Christian, and with many white clergymen who prefer to remain silent behind the security of stained-glass windows. It is disappointment with some Negro clergymen who are more concerned about the size of the wheel base on their automobile than about the quality of their service to the Negro community.
The great trauma of my loss of religious community nearly a decade ago was the discovery that the core of the religion was whiteness, not Christ-following, and that white Evangelicals would gladly forsake even the pretense of Christian values in favor of racial hatred.
One of the most powerful passages in this chapter is one about the subordination of slavery. It wasn’t merely physical subjugation, but the demand of intellectual and moral servitude. He quotes earlier works on slavery regarding the attitudes that enslavers attempted to impose on the enslaved - attitudes which still reverberate today.
What caught my eye the most, however, were the quotes from enslavers that sounded eerily familiar, particularly these ones:
“Unconditional submission is the only footing upon which slavery should be placed.”
And:
“The slave must know that his master is to govern absolutely and he is to obey implicitly, that he is never, for a moment, to exercise either his will or judgment in opposition to a positive order.”
Ooof. That’s literally religious authoritarian parenting there, as taught by the unholy trinity of John MacArthur, James Dobson, and Bill Gothard. We children were to show unconditional submission. And we were never to exercise our own will or judgment. We were to outsource our morality and will to our parents.
MLK was a master of the metaphor, and one of my favorites in this book is his use of the wind. In aviation (as he points out), winds make a huge difference. The Jet Stream, for example, makes it quicker to fly east than to fly west - a flight from Europe to North America takes longer than one the other way. He uses this to encourage activism even when the winds are unfavorable.
In any social revolution there are times when the tail winds of triumph and fulfillment favor us, and other times when strong head winds of disappointment and setbacks beat against us relentlessly. We must not permit adverse winds to overwhelm us as we journey across life's mighty Atlantic; we must be sustained by our engines of courage in spite of the winds. This refusal to be stopped, this “courage to be,” this determination to go on “in spite of” is the hallmark of any great movement.
In this chapter as well, he speaks of the need for white allies. For those of us who wish to do good in the world, and who want our white children to see themselves positively in the story of history, the way forward is not to whitewash history, as the MAGA movement seeks to do, but to encourage ourselves and our children to identify with the white people who have been on the side of justice, of right, of equality.
Within the white majority there exists a substantial group who cherish democratic principles above privilege and who have demonstrated a will to fight side by side with the Negro against injustice.
I want to be part of this group and raise my children to be part of this group. He also notes, though, that there is another group of potential allies as well: those whose lives would be better if we eliminated poverty. After all, there are a lot more poor white people than poor black people, and raising up the poor would benefit them a hell of a lot.
(This is why the predator-capitalist class, both the enslavers of the past, and the billionaire oligarchs of today, are so intent on stirring up racism. If black and white united against the predator-capitalists, they would be forced out of existence.)
(This is also a good time to recommend Dying of Whiteness, which really shows how people let their racism overpower their rationality, and in essence kill themselves rather than let minorities thrive.)
There are several passages where MLK asserts the interconnectedness of the races in America (and around the world.) I believe he is spot on here.
In the final analysis the weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the black man needs the white man and the white man needs the black man. However much we may try to romanticize the slogan, there is no separate black path to power and fulfillment that does not intersect white paths, and there is no separate white path to power and fulfillment, short of social disaster, that does not share that power with black aspirations for freedom and human dignity. We are bound together in a single garment of destiny. The language, the cultural patterns, the music, the material prosperity and even the food of America are an amalgam of black and white.
Again, I should recommend Albert Murray’s wonderful The Omni-Americans for further discussion of how America isn’t separately black and white but instead blackandwhitetogether.
Later in the book, MLK talks about the inescapable reality of a multi-racial America - something we have been since the first Europeans and Africans set foot here.
But after reflection one has to face some inescapable facts about the Negro and American life. This is a multiracial nation where all groups are dependent on each other, whether they want to acknowledge it or not. In this vast interdependent nation no racial group can retreat to an island entire of itself.
This is a truth that MAGA refuses to understand.
When it comes to the issue of violence, MLK is thoroughly pragmatic.
In violent warfare one must be prepared to face the fact that there will be casualties by the thousands. Anyone leading a violent rebellion must be willing to make an honest assessment regarding the possible casualties to a minority population confronting a well-armed, wealthy majority with a fanatical right wing that would delight in exterminating thousands of black men, women and children.
This is to a degree what all of us humans of good will face right now. The fanatical right wing of our country would delight in seeing millions of men, women, and children dead. And not merely brown and black people, but anyone who stands up to them. (See: Renee Good and “fucking bitch.”)
Which is why, like MLK and the Civil Rights Movement, our power is not in starting a civil war, but in revealing the depravity of MAGA and thereby getting a large majority on our side. Which ICE thugs are certainly helping us with at this time. The history of revolutions and overthrow of tyranny demonstrate that creating that overwhelming majority is a key factor in toppling evil.
Nonviolence is power, but it is the right and good use of power. Constructively it can save the white man as well as the Negro. Racial segregation is buttressed by such irrational fears as loss of preferred economic privilege, altered social status, intermarriage and adjustment to new situations.
He then discusses the antisocial ways people are stirred up to address the fears in non-constructive ways.
But how futile are all these remedies! Instead of eliminating fear, they instill deeper and more pathological fears.
And this:
A guilt-ridden white minority fears that if the Negro attains power, he will without restraint or pity act to revenge the accumulated injustices and brutality of the years.
Does that sound familiar now? It sure does. And, I think MLK is right that non-violence is the most effective way to prove those fears to be mere paranoia.
There is also the central issue that we cannot kill our way out of hate and racism.
Are we seeking power for power’s sake? Or are we seeking to make the world and our nation better places to live. If we seek the latter, violence can never provide the answer. The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence only increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
Yep, that quote is often used, sometimes out of context. But it is still in many ways the core of the book and MLK’s prescription for action.
My favorite part of the idea is the truth that you cannot kill a lie by killing the liar. This is actually the big problem with the whole White Christian Nationalist project: it seeks to eliminate all those who have different points of view - and indeed all those brown skinned “contaminants” to our supposed national blood. But no amount of violence against “the other” will make a utopia.
The chapter on racism and the white backlash - the “whitelash” - is excellent, and unfortunately prescient about the white response to the Obama presidency - the whitelash embodied by Trump. The opening is outstanding.
It is time for all of us to tell each other the truth about who and what have brought the Negro to the condition of deprivation against which he struggles today. In human relations the truth is hard to come by, because most groups are deceived about themselves. 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. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing truth. “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”
He goes on:
It would be neither true nor honest to say that the Negro’s status is what it is because he is innately inferior or because he is basically lazy and listless or because he has not sought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. To find the origins of the Negro problem we must turn to the white man’s problem.
MLK notes that white America has always had a disconnect between its outward principles - the equality of humankind - and its determination to retain privilege and power. Which is why it has never made a true concerted effort toward righting the historic wrongs of slavery and segregation - undoing the damage done, making restitution. Instead, it is a step forward followed by a step back.
The step backward has a new name today. It is called the “white backlash.” But the white backlash is nothing new. It is the surfacing of old prejudices, hostilities, and ambivalences that have always been there.
Again, MLK is quick to note that white folk are not a unified bunch here. Rather the contrary.
This does not imply that all white Americans are racists - far from it. Many white people have, through a deep moral compulsion, fought long and hard for racial justice. Nor does it mean that America has made no progress in her attempt to cure the body politic of the disease of racism, or that the dogma of racism has not been considerably modified in recent years. However, for the good of America, it is 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.
I think MLK’s definition of racism is spot on - it gets to the heart of things, and also demonstrates that mere racial prejudice of the kind more universal, is not the same as the systemic white supremacy that plagues the United States.
If a man asserts that another man, because of his race, is not good enough to have a job equal to his, or to eat at a lunch counter next to him, or to have access to certain hotels, or to attend school with him, he is by implication affirming that the man does not deserve to exist. He does not deserve to exist because his existence is corrupt and defective.
You can see this throughout MAGA and throughout Trump’s rhetoric. Brown people are corrupting us, so we need to do mass deportations. Jobs should be for white males. Your life sucks because undeserving brown people have stolen your job, your taxes, your healthcare, your housing. And on it goes. MLK will explore this in more depth throughout the chapter. The core idea is one he nails:
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. It is the absurd dogma that one race is responsible for all the progress of history and alone can assure the progress of the future. 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.
That is so good. Again, it distills MAGA in a nutshell, from the lies about black accomplishments (which, like the accomplishments of women have often been stolen by white males) to the idea that only white males should be in leadership today.
I have mentioned it in other posts in the past, because it is a recurring truth that every black writer has proclaimed, but it is worth saying again:
Racism was created to justify economic exploitation, not the other way around.
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.
This then led to an utter corruption of white religion. Realizing this was a significant factor in my decision to leave organized religion nine years ago.
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 verve of religion was atrophied. This terrible distortion sullied the essential nature of Christianity.
There is indeed no greater heresy than white nationalism. It is from the pit of hell. Realizing that my faith tradition was in fact based on this was devastating, although not quite as much so seeing people like my parents, who literally taught me anti-racism, forsake that faith and instead embrace this filth.
I’ll also make a plug here for another excellent book, Reconstructing the Gospel by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.
Later, MLK notes that even well-intentioned white people have to fight against what is in essence an emotional difficulty. Our culture has inculcated us into certain ways of thinking, and led us to take for granted a certain position of perceived superiority. Even Lincoln struggled with this - but at least he admitted it.
Morally, Lincoln was for black emancipation, but emotionally, like most of his white contemporaries, he was for a long time unable to act in accordance with his conscience.
Next, he examines that myth that Emancipation was the end of oppression. He illustrates this with the example of how my own family came to be middle class. Simply setting the enslaved free without giving them land to farm or jobs to support themselves was just another form of bondage. What was needed was restitution - making right the wrong. (We might call this reparations, which as a legal matter, is undeniably appropriate.)
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. But in an agrarian economy he was given no land to make liberation concrete. After the war the government granted white settlers, without cost, millions of acres of land in the West, thus providing America’s new white peasants from Europe with an economic floor. But at the same time its oldest peasantry, the Negro, was denied everything but a legal status he could not use, could not consolidate, could not even defend.
We still owe those enslaved who built our country just compensation for their labor - and indeed for 150 years of continued exclusion from the economic mainstream of our nation. It is in the resistance to this that white racism is most apparent. Notice the hostility to “DEI” and “Woke” or anything that might seek to improve the status of marginalized groups. Racism hasn’t gone away, and it is endemic.
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.
Brownie points to MLK for using the Parable of the Prodigal Son here - as an example to white America that it too can return to its purported values of equality and the common welfare.
This chapter also has a clarion call to all of us humans of goodwill (now considered “liberals” in our current political climate):
When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men conspire to preserve an unjust status quo, good men must unite to bring about the birth of a society undergirded by justice. 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.
And also a reminder that “love” isn’t love at all, if it does not include justice as its core value. (Something I really wish my parents understood when it comes to family dynamics.)
Love that does not satisfy justice is no love at all. It is merely a sentimental affection, little more than what one must have for a pet.
He goes on to explain what justice must look like, and I think this is the other core of the book. Justice has specific elements in our society, and they are not optional.
The white liberal must affirm that absolute justice for the Negro simply means, in the Aristotleian sense, that the Negro must have “his due.” There is nothing abstract about this. It is as concrete as having a good job, a good education, a decent house, and a share of power.
It isn’t enough for some abstract “equality of opportunity” - which does not and has never existed in the United States. What is needed is that floor of basic human needs. To the ones listed, I would add access to sufficient food and clothing, and healthcare.
In addition to calling out white liberals, MLK also talks directly to the white 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 it 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. It also cast the mangle of its sanctity over the system of segregation.
It is encouraging to see the Catholic Church, as well as the mainline denominations - Episcopal particularly - step up on the side of justice lately. May it continue. White Evangelicalism, unfortunately, seems to be a completely lost cause.
He ends the chapter with a note that while legal changes are indeed necessary and helpful, the ultimate change needs to come internally, in the hearts of men. (And this is where I feel that much of American white clergy has committed egregious spiritual malpractice during my lifetime, stirring up demonic impulses rather than exhorting people to good.)
A vigorous enforcement of civil rights will bring an end to segregated public facilities, but it cannot bring an end to fears, prejudice, pride and irrationality, which are the barriers to a truly integrated society. These dark and demonic responses will be removed only as men are possessed by the invisible inner law which etches on their hearts the conviction that all men are brothers and that love is mankind’s most potent weapon for personal and social transformation. True integration will be achieved by men who are willingly obedient to unenforceable obligations.
In stark contrast to the anti-christian rhetoric of all too many white theologians today, who claim that empathy is sinful, MLK notes that the root of goodness is in fact empathy.
What is needed today on the part of white America is a committed altruism which recognizes the 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.
Pity comes from a place of superiority and self-righteousness. Empathy recognizes we are all in this together and the pain of one is the pain of all.
The book then talks more directly to African Americans. To understand - to truly empathize - one needs to feel the suffering. MLK lays out the horrors of the slave trade, of slavery, of segregation. It’s painful but necessary. For this to have a positive result, however, the horror needs to be faced, and both blame and cure directed appropriately.
As public awareness of the predicament of the Negro family increases, there will be danger and opportunity. The opportunity will be to deal fully rather than haphazardly with the problem as a whole - to see it as a social catastrophe brought on by long years of brutality and oppression and to meet it as other disasters are met, with an adequacy of resources. The danger will be that the problems will be attributed to innate Negro weaknesses and used to justify further neglect and to rationalize continued oppression.
The most inspiring part of this chapter to me was MLK’s enthusiasm for diversity. To this end, he encourages black folk to stop trying to meet white cultural ideals, but to embrace themselves for who they are.
Whether some men, black and white, realize it or not, black people are very beautiful. Life’s piano can only produce the melodies of brotherhood when it is recognized that the black keys are as basic, necessary and beautiful as the white keys. The Negro, through self-acceptance and self-appreciation, will one day case white America to see that integration is not an obstacle, but an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity.
Another great insight in this chapter is that inequality in income has the effect of making honest labor seem insignificant, when the kinds of jobs that are low wage are usually the most important ones we can do. Giving dignity - and just compensation - for these jobs is crucial to a just society.
But no work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and worth and should be pursued with respect for excellence.
He also calls for continued effort. It has been all too easy for me as a white guy to assume that things will continue to get better by inertia. In reality, the struggle against evil and injustice never ends. It must be fought and refought for every generation.
We will be greatly misled if we feel that the problem will work itself out. Structures of evil do not crumble by passive waiting. If history teaches anything, it is that evil is recalcitrant and determined, and never voluntarily relinquishes its hold short of an almost fanatical resistance. Evil must be attacked by a counteracting persistence, by the day-to-day assault of the battering rams of justice.
The next chapter, Where are We Going? takes a look at practical goals and policies, and it really does read like a road map for a society that is more just for all of us, black, white, and brown.
One line that stood out is the observation that parties change. The Republican Party had (at that point) coasted on “the illustrious ghost of Abraham Lincoln” but had failed to “shrink the influence of its ultra-right wing.
The book was written before Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” started the process of making the ultra-right wing the core of the GOP, a process which became complete with Trump.
He likewise warns against taking coalitions for granted.
The art of alliance politics is more complex and more intricate than it is generally pictured. It is easy to put exciting combinations on paper. It evokes happy memories to recall that our victories in the past decade were won with a broad coalition of organizations representing a wide variety of interests.
Instead, it is important to build coalitions that share the same goals. This is something that the Democratic Party has forgotten too much lately. There is no point in trying to get the xenophobic crowd on board. You can never out-Trump Trump. Likewise, pandering to the transphobes will never end well. The coalition needs to consist of those who wish to make a more just society for all, not just their tribe. And those people are enough to win with and to create positive change.
To that end, MLK notes that there are twice as many impoverished white people as impoverished black people. Addressing poverty - inequality, jobs, housing, healthcare - should be the goal, and getting those who are needy of any race on board is necessary.
Up to recently we have proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils: lack of education restricting job opportunities; poor housing which stultified home life and suppressed initiative; fragile family relationships which distorted personality development. The logic of this approach suggested that each of these causes be attacked one by one.
Instead, he argues that the common issue in all of these is a lack of income. Full stop. Yes, work on the other things, but money, while it cannot solve every problem, its lack causes most problems.
Because of this, he argues for a universal basic income.
I have come around to this idea, in no small part because jobs these days are mostly doled out at the whim of the oligarchs, who are working desperately to replace humans with technology. Because humans are needed, noisy, and demand things like living wages and humane work hours. A world in which most “work” is done by machines, and machines owned by the very few, is not a just world. Thus, maintaining the funds necessary to live needs to be the priority, not maximizing profits for the oligarchs.
The last chapter takes the ideas global. The whole world is interconnected, and any true sense of justice needs to include the entire planet.
Some years ago a famous novelist died. Among his papers was found a list of suggested plots for future stories, most prominently underscored being this one: “A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together.” This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great “world house” in which we have to live together - black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu - a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.
To illustrate this, he mentions the story of Rip Van Winkle. The point of the story isn’t that he fell asleep, but that the world had changed, and he had missed it.
The most striking thing about this story is not that Rip slept twenty years, but that he slept through a revolution that would alter the course of human history.
The point for us today?
One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain away through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of the status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change. The large house in which we live demands that we transform this worldwide neighborhood into a worldwide brotherhood. Together we must learn to live as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools.
The term “woke” originated in the Civil Rights Movement, and MLK uses it here in that sense. We must stay away, vigilant, and committed to justice. This is why I take it as an honor to be accused of being “woke.”
Obviously, the bait that Trump and MAGA dangle is that we do not have to be “woke,” that we do not have to adapt to a changing world. Everything will go back to the imaginary past, if we just brutalize enough immigrants and LGBTQ people and force the rest of the world to kow tow as they should.
But it doesn’t work that way, and all we do is make things worse by trying to ignore the world as it is. And the thing is, white supremacy has always worked against our national interest.
Nothing provides the Communists with a better climate for expansion and infiltration than the continued alliance of our nation with racism and exploitation throughout the world. And if we are not diligent in our determination to root out the last vestiges of racism in our dealings with the rest of the world, we may soon see the sins of our fathers visited upon ours and succeeding generations.
This is coming true in our day, as Trump takes a bulldozer to our country’s reputation and further isolates us. We are all paying for the racism and hate of MAGA.
I love his call to action, which actually echoes the words of Alexis de Tocqueville.
The time has come for an all-out war against poverty. The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled and feed the unfed. The well-off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst. The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds, and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for “the least of these.”
Preach!
We are all interconnected.
From time immemorial men have lived by the principle that “self-preservation is the first law of life.” But this is a false assumption. I would say that other-preservation is the first law of life. IT is the first law of life precisely because we cannot preserve self without being concerned about preserving other selves. The universe is so structured that things go awry if men are not diligent in their cultivation of the other-regarding dimension.
This goes double for the spiritual dimension.
Deeply woven into the fiber of our religious tradition is the conviction that men are made in the image of God, and that they are souls of infinite metaphysical value. If we accept this as a profound moral fact, we cannot be content to see men hungry, to see men victimized with ill-health, when we have the means to help them. In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied together. They entered the same mysterious gateway of human birth, into the same adventure of mortal life.
This is how I was raised. And how I still believe. I was also raised to believe in the following:
We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing”-oriented society to a “person”-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can founder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.
So relevant today. MLK also notes that both capitalism and communism suffer from this same moral bankruptcy.
This revolution of values must go beyond traditional capitalism and communism. We must honestly admit that capitalism has often left a gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, has created conditions permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few, and has encouraged smallhearted men to become cold and conscienceless so that, like Dives before Lazarus, they are unmoved by suffering, poverty-stricken humanity. The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspire men to be more I-centered than thou-centered. Equally, Communism reduces men to a cog in the wheel of the state.
True justice doesn’t come from ideologies on either side, but on a commitment to make sure everyone has what they need, and none are allowed to become obscenely rich. To that end, slogans are useless.
The problems we now face must take us beyond slogans for their solution. In the final analysis, the right-wing slogans on “government control” and “creeping socialism” are as meaningless and adolescent as the Chinese Red Guard slogans against “bourgeois revisionism.” An intelligent approach to the problems of poverty and racism will cause us to see that the words of the Psalmist - “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” - are still a judgment upon our use and abuse of the wealth and resources with which we have been endowed.
This is one reason I stopped discussing politics and religion with my parents even before our estrangement. It devolved into their recycling the same right-wing slogans as if they were irrefutable arguments rather than campaign signs. We were never able to actually address the question of how we keep people from dying of starvation or disease due to lack of money.
MLK argues that our approach to communism has been largely futile, because of this. Communism got a foothold because of a genuine problem. And even worse is calling everyone who disagrees a Communist. (Hello, Trump administration…) In reality, Communism is a symptom.
Communism is a judgment on our failure to make democracy real and to follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.”
As the chapter - and the book - come to an end, MLK’s ideas rise to a crescendo of inspiration, a vision of a possible future that so many of us desire. One hinted at in the apocalyptic literature of the Bible.
This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men.
MLK asserts - and I have come to understand over the last few decades - that this love transcends religious dogma, political ideology, and tribal affiliation. It is the love Christ taught - and humans of goodwill around the world have always embraced.
The book has a brief appendix where MLK discusses some specific issues, such as education and housing. I thought I might mention a point he makes in the section on employment. In his view, providing “job training” is misguided. It all too often means training for jobs that do not exist. (A great example is the Navajo program for training welders. There are literally only a handful of welding jobs on the reservation. What is needed are jobs.) MLK asserts that providing jobs first is the way to go. Training can be done on the job as needed. First employment and income, then additional training. I agree with this, particularly watching my children struggle to find employment while in college. There are too few to go around that work with class schedules and a lack of a car (which is expensive!)
This book is truly excellent, and I highly recommend everyone read it. Particularly us white folk. MLK was more than just a historical figure, he was a true prophet of his time. Which is, of course, why he was murdered. The defenders of the status quo have always murdered the prophets.
The book is thoughtful, inspiring, and shows a path for white people of good will to follow. Stay woke.
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