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- How King’s Philosophy Is (Mis) Used
- Additional Important Things King Said: Economics
Answering KingIntroduction If there is such a thing as a universally recognized and respected civil rights icon, it has to be Martin Luther King, Jr. Aside from racist neo-confederate types, King is generally admitted to that hallowed pantheon of admiration reserved for true American heroes. In fact, he just received the highest honor this bastion of international capitalism can bestow – having his image exploited for use in an advertisement. What makes the adulation so strange is that King was a quite radical individual. He condemned capitalism, preached peace at home and abroad (including stinging criticisms of the Vietnam War, a very controversial position at the time), and was far ahead of his time in terms of understanding racism and its interplay with class analysis. Today, though, we get a sanitized version of Dr. King. “He just wanted everyone to be equal,” we’re told. While true, it misses a lot of the steps he thought were necessary to achieve that goal – a significantly restructured economic system, more opportunities for the disadvantaged, and a fundamental shift in the way Americans think about race. Why do we get the sanitized version of Dr. King? Well, if you ask me, it’s because most people recognize horror only in retrospect. It took Americans a long time (and a bloody war) to purge the evil of slavery. It took us a long time (and a lot of people dead in riots, from bombings, from police beatings and, like King, from assassin’s bullets) to get basic rights like voting for African Americans. That’s horror. It’s a lot easier to believe that the horror is behind us than to admit that many of its underlying causes still persist. By promoting the image of a King that would be SATISFIED with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we are saying that we’ve gone as far as we can – and we’ve got this great leader (conveniently dead, so he can’t contradict us) to prove it. This kind of thinking allows privileged folks to think that we’ve solved all of this country’s problems with race and class – something King wouldn’t support at all. The secret to answering Martin Luther King (and really, philosophers in general) is to read the original works. Know more about the philosopher than your opponent does. Because chances are, they’ll leave something out that you can use to your advantage. OK, so it’s not a secret on the order of the allied plans to invade Normandy. Come to think of it, it’s not a secret at all – work harder, know more, and you’ll be successful. But it’s true. So in order to answer Martin Luther King, we'll need to examine exactly what he said. Let's start by exploding a pernicious and pervasive distortion of what he said about affirmative action, then move on to his thoughts on other matters. How King’s Philosophy Is (Mis) UsedI really did have a reason for explaining why I think King’s philosophy gets watered down. The reason is that it’s a small step from “watered down” to “fundamentally misrepresented for political purposes.” This last happens all too often in America. Lately, the right has been using King as a spokesperson AGAINST AFFIRMATIVE ACTION (!) By taking one line from one speech (his famous “I Have A Dream” speech) and trying to make it seem like he would oppose pro-active measures to promote equality. The truth, of course, is that King was calling for “Affirmative Action” long before the program even had the name, calling for "preferential treatment" programs in employment and education. Ahead of his time, King also called for boosting educational and job opportunity programs for the poor regardless of skin color. Nashville-based activist Tim Wise of the Association for White Anti-Racist Education (AWARE) has written the definitive response to this argument, documenting some of the more high-profile instances where King himself directly anticipated and refuted that claim. These should be readily apparent to even the most casual reader of Dr. King’s work, and I highly encourage you to tackle the original material that Wise suggests. This knowledge will be key on topics about race. It will also help you understand when someone is trying to slip the sanitized version of King past you. At this point, I can hear the heads start scratching: "Won't I debate the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. ONLY on race topics?," I hear you ask. Au contraire, mes freres et mes souers. That’s another misconception that needs exploding about the good doctor. So who's got the dynamite? Additional Important Things King Said: EconomicsAnother casualty of the sound bite culture is that King's thought is often reduced to "he wanted white people and black people to be equal." Well, again, that's true ‑‑ but he also had forward‑thinking view on economics, both at home and internationally. Again, when you think of King, you usually think of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But after that was accomplished, King kept fighting. He insisted that the very notion of civil rights was bankrupt without "human rights," which included certain “economic rights.” It’s great to win non-discrimination laws which allow black families to eat at the same restaurants and stay at the same hotels as white families – but what good is that to those many black AND white families who can’t afford to eat out or stay in hotels at all? What about the homeless populations of black and white America, where there exists an equal right to live on the street? He actually called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth, saying that "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." This wasn’t limited to the West. Though King was extremely concerned with poverty and misery in America, he also was a harsh critic of investment speculation in Third World nations, decrying the “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.” This was a huge priority to King. In fact, when he was assassinated, King was in the process of organizing a Poor People's March on Washington, D.C. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a fine media watch organization at www.fair.org, has compiled a host of these types of remarks. You can check them out in the work of Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, who have written about the King you don’t get from the evening news. Depending on your judge’s political affiliation, you will want to take one of two different tacks in answering King’s economic views. The first way (from the left) is arguing that your opponent fails to take into account the full richness of King’s philosophy, Clearly, he would say that certain measures are needed to truly achieve racial and economic justice. If your opponent does not provide for those measures, then there’s no way she or he can lay claim to the advocacy (or solvency) of King. If your judge is a right-wing type, there’s always red-baiting. Hey, J. Edgar Hoover did it. Seriously: many judges don’t know how radical King was. He defended “a democratic socialism” in certain speeches. In more speeches than you can count, he railed against capitalism with a fiery fervor. To a conservative person, this type of rhetoric is scary: you can utilize that in refuting King. Of course, you’ll have to look at yourself in the mirror knowing that this same tactic justified FBI surveillance on King – and just about every other progressive figure of that era. Moving right along, it’s much more likely that you’ll have to debate another branch of his philosophy – like race or, of course, nonviolence. 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