To honor Martin Luther King today, I thought I would post some of his own words, particularly those that are new to me and probably to many others as well. They may be surprising as many of us really didn’t know him well, with our experience limited to a few quotes and a general understanding of his life’s work. His books though are easy to read as he was a good writer. And given the current debate about “wokeness,” structural racism, and critical race theory, its important for us to hear his voice once again as MLK had much to say about systemic racism and justice.
On America’s “Congenital Deformity”
“Ever since the birth of our nation, white America has had a schizophrenic personality of 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, to be at once attracted to the Negro and repelled by him, to love and to hate him.”
“What is the source of this perennial indecision and vacillations? It lies in the “congenital deformity” of racism that has crippled the nation from its inception.” -MLK Where Do We Go From Here
Over 100 years earlier, De Tocqueville saw the United States as composed of two foreign communities, one white and the other black. And if slaves were freed, he predicted that this divide would just grow deeper, a conflict that “perpetually haunts the imagination of Americans, like painful dream.”
On “A Few Bad Apples”
“It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of American believe they have so little to learn. 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.”
“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.”
“To live with the pretense that racism is a doctrine of a very few is to disarm us in fighting it frontally as scientific 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 through a humble acknowledgment of guilt and an honest knowledge of self.” -MLK Where Do We Go From Here
Decades earlier Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish scholar studying race in America, found honest, hardworking Americans to be relatively satisfied with race relations. Yes, there were a few bad apples they said, but relations between races were good and improving across the majority population. When pressed by the gross inequalities and oppression highly visible during Jim Crow, they were surprised and taken back by the question. They weren’t aware there was a problem.
On “A Nation’s Scorn and Contempt”
“when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.” – MLK Letter from a Birmingham jail
“All too many Americans are horrified not with conditions of Negro life but with the product of these conditions – the Negro himself.” – The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement (1967)
Over 100 years earlier Frederick Douglass said: “A heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon us. As a people, we feel ourselves to be not only deeply injured, but grossly misunderstood. Our white countrymen do not know us. They are strangers to our character, ignorant of our capacity, oblivious to our history and progress, and are misinformed as to the principles and ideas that control and guide us as a people. The great mass of American citizens estimates us as being a characterless and purposeless people; and hence we hold up our heads, if at all, against the withering influence of a nation’s scorn and contempt.”
On “Systemic” Prejudice
“The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American Society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth towards a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately, this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.”
“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.”
“years of struggle have sensitized the Negro’s eyes…[they] have become aware of the deeper causes for the crudity and cruelty that governed white society’s responses to their needs They discovered that their plight was not a consequence of superficial prejudice but was systemic.” -MLK Where Do We Go From Here
One Final Thought
Most of us are unaware of MLK’s story at least in its fullest telling. We have not been taught the extent of the sin, the depravity, against African Americans over the past 400 years. What we were taught, at least in my experience, was about a womanizing communist and an embarrassment to this nation.
Fortunately much of this has changed in the last 50 years. But that doesn’t mean that we are out of the woods as a nation. The racialization of America functions as a variable in history. And we fail to understand it when we treat it as a constant, viewed through the lens of an era preceding ours. Our ignorance, misunderstandings, and/or distorted education makes it easy for us to hide behind a self-described “colorblindness,” unwilling to accept that there is sustained systemic and structural prejudice in our society. But the data shows it’s still here.
This is a huge and fascinating study showing racial/ethnic discrimination be a continuing and significant problem in America. It shows how such discrimination continues to impact many core parts of the lives of Black Americans while reinforcing and exacerbating existing inequalities.
The church has the tools to correct this. Orthodox theology demands it. But when Christianity is fused with a mythical understanding of history the call of the gospel becomes corrupted. I’ll be writing more about this in coming weeks and months. Until then, here’s some data showing how present-day Christian Nationalism is associated with the perpetuation of the “congenital deformity” of racism that continues to harm our nation.
