Today is MLK day 2021. Every year on this day, I try my best to sit down and give a profound reflection upon myself and if the content of my character would be judged favorably. I tend to automatically determine all judgments regarding me will be negative, but as we begin to emerge from a true dark age, I can take a broader approach. Dr. King wrote the following in his ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ in 1963, “First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached 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, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
This warning has stuck with me for ages. I’ve seen it in action time and again, people who are afraid of doing what is right because it might upset someone they know. Currently, we have people who actively supported a march to authoritarianism and an abandonment of everything the USA is supposed to stand for only to cry ‘Unity!’ now that the consequences of their actions may manifest into objective reality. They’re pleading for the white moderate to step aside once again and allow justice to go undone. Who is the white moderate? For so long, people have been focusing on the moderate part of the equation, but why not white?
What is the concept of ‘whiteness?’ What is it? Where does it come from, and who started it? At what point did white people understand they were white? For many ages, people were ‘English’ or ‘Russian,’ perhaps even identifying themselves even more narrowly as from a specific family lineage or region. At some point came an ideology that got people to think of themselves as ‘white.’ Previously, everyone was a collection of heritages who all had been fighting each other for generations. What could have been such a unifying force?
When the country was formed, black slaves and poor white people owned little to nothing. Through institutions such as the senate and the electoral college, the rich white men who sought to maintain their status understood they were drastically outnumbered. I would like to have given early colonists more credit but having experienced such a wealth of white American hatred in my time on earth, it probably wasn’t that difficult for the concept of ‘whiteness’ to take hold. Infused with a new enemy and a new sense of superiority, rich people had people who wouldn’t rebel, and poor whites had someone else to blame. Hundreds of years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson spelled it out for the audience, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” By then, the system was so entrenched; we can’t call it ‘broken’ because it was designed that way.
For hundreds of years, we learned about capitalists and people who continue the military-industrial complex. We vaguely know about a few names here and there, those who stood up to authority, but most of them were assassinated, beaten, jailed, or otherwise shown as an example not to fight the system. Where are all the names of people who fought for labor movements, freedom of the people, and wanted to address the destruction our system brings? If we stand up, we are abused by the police and labeled ‘radical’ by billionaire-owned networks. ‘Radical’ instead of what, the moderates who continue to sit in silence as the rich pillage the planet and those deemed unworthy rot in jail cells? Since Nixon, we’ve had open, escalating corruption, especially one side, in particular, culminating in an actual rejection of reality.
It isn’t bad enough the roaming bands of white supremacists; we’ve had them since the country’s foundation. They wouldn’t be tolerated if it wasn’t for the silent ‘moderates’ who let them operate. They wouldn’t have stormed the capitol building demanding the deaths of elected officials if white moderates had the quality of character to stand up and draw a line. At the ‘debates,’ a term used loosely, Biden said the now famous, “Will you shut up, man” line. It was a sentiment echoed by millions, perhaps billions, of people around the world. Instantly, people were clutching their pearls, shocked at the audacity of such a thing. Many of these same people clutch their pearls when kids ask not to be shot at schools or left a healthy planet. These same people have this ‘how dare you’ attitude when black people don’t want to be profiled and when women want to sit at leadership tables. It’s always ‘now isn’t the right time’ and ‘let’s not make this political’ when instead we should have been addressing the problem as soon as there was one.
Being labeled a ‘radical’ right now should be a badge of honor because the moderates’ silence never allowed the people to get up off their knees. Some have grown to like boot-licking, and those are the ones who often identify themselves rapidly, often through flag-waving hate symbology. The rest of everyone should understand that ‘the absence of tension’ is not progressing. It is not a solution. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” (Edmund Burke 1729-1797), and the white moderates penchant for doing nothing is a tragedy of American history.
Society requires more than just showing up to vote once every four years and calling it a day. Progress requires more than speaking in anguished tones behind closed doors to loved ones and then turning on the TV. Some of the problems we face are uniquely 21st-century challenges, but many of them aren’t. We bear the burdens given to us by the errors of those who came before, and we have a choice to pass them on. We do not have to continue to judge people by the color of their skin, the person(s) they love, the god(s) they worship, if any at all, or what other genetic variables they have and what paths led them down. We can strive to improve the content of our characters and work towards our more perfect union.
I hope that people will find the courage to be dedicated to progress, to justice, rather than conflict-avoidance. Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance shows us that when people are afraid to stand up and draw the line, afraid to be intolerant, extremists will continue to push the new boundaries until you no longer have a functioning system as they’ve taken it over. The extremists taking over is the story of America and white moderates are too afraid to be intolerant. Now, we have to fight a global pandemic, a detached economy that serves a select few, and an anti-intellectualist segment of the population that isn’t used to being told ‘no’ and wants to live in a world where they still get to write all the rules, simultaneously.
We must have the presence of justice, and so many peoples’ expectations are unsurprisingly low. Why would anyone trust a system that doesn’t trust them? It’s hard to love something that so openly, obviously, does not love you in return. People’s hopes right now are for the bare minimum, and as we have over one-hundred congresspeople proud of supporting the insurrection, the lowest of bars will be challenging to clear. Wounds like these are more than four-hundred years old, and they aren’t showing any signs of being closed soon, not unless we have fewer moderates and more radicals. Stand up and be radical.