I was asked by National Review Online last week for commentary on the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 “March on Washington” and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s culminating “I Have a Dream” speech there. Here they are.
Keeping Things in Perspective This Week:
So, how much of what Dr. King was asking for 50 years ago has been delivered?
Well, to help put things in perspective, here is the paragraph in his “I Have a Dream” speech where he spells out his movement’s agenda most specifically:
There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights: “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only”. We cannot be satisfied and we will not be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Now, seriously, how much of that is unattained? Yes, of course, we do not have complete justice and total righteousness yet, but the (supposedly) analogous complaints now are about voter ID and Trayvon Martin. A world of difference, thank goodness.
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Some Thoughts on the Run-Up to President Obama’s Speech:
1. Watching Al Sharpton speaking where Martin Luther King, Jr., once spoke, one sees a stark example of Marx’s observation that history repeats itself, but first as tragedy and then as farce.
2. I understand the political and fundraising reasons for claiming that America remains a country suffused in racism, but that has to have an enervating effect on African Americans’ willingness to seek out opportunities. So isn’t this sort of hyperbole (to put it mildly) irresponsible?
3. What’s at stake with voter ID, let alone Obamacare, is just not what was at stake in 1963 Mississippi.
4. Liberals and conservatives ought to be able to disagree about issues without insisting on a racial dimension to every disagreement. Jim Crow politicians used to do that; now [liberal] Democrats are the worst offenders.
5. Likewise, we don’t have to insist on the significance of race in every economic or social disparity.
6. We also don’t have to have a law or a lawsuit for every problem.
7. Maybe one problem is that the various organizations in the civil-rights establishment (e.g., the NAACP) are set up to lobby and litigate, and so it is institutionally hard for them to admit that laws and lawsuits are no longer what’s needed for the advancement of colored people. If all you have is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail and all that.
8. Part of this institutional inertia may be rooted in human nature, too. It’s hard to admit that your glory days are over and that you need to fight some other battle. And it’s worse if you have to admit that, this time, the battle will be to overcome problems largely of your own making.
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Commentary on President Obama’s Speech:
I watched not only the president’s speech but much of the run-up to it, and it was like watching speeches at a political convention. This was a relief, in some ways. There were no specific, ridiculous laws that were being proposed, but instead a diffuse and unfocused call for all kinds of policies, from healthcare to education to employment to welfare (and that was just in the president’s own speech).
The subtext, though, is troubling: that to be opposed to any of part of the standard, liberal program is to be opposed to Dr. King and his dream. Now, to be fair, Dr. King’s dream was not just about ending segregated drinking fountains, and before and after and sometimes even during his famous speech he was all in favor of much of the standard, liberal program himself. But he and his dream now have an iconic aura, and that makes it disturbing to invoke him and his dream for policies that have little to do with racial equality of opportunity.
It was good of the president (and John Lewis before him) to reject the notion that nothing much has changed since 1963. I was glad to hear him condemn those on his side of the aisle for excuse-making and self-defeating behavior, and to hear him making a call for responsibility in place of dependence and even emphasizing the importance of fathers’ being parents (though he didn’t use the “m” – for “marriage” – word). And it was quite charming how the president fell, as he does, into a black and/or southern dialect during parts of his speech.
But what began as a celebration of ending Jim Crow and racial disenfranchisement then slid into objections to voter-identification laws and then into a discussion of criminal-justice disparities – that is, from wanting equal opportunity to demanding that there be equal results. And then, from that, to demanding not just equality under and before the law, but economic equality, too. And soon we were hearing the standard Obama rhetoric about the middle class and gridlock and hope and change.
The low point for me was when he decried those (surely he had President Reagan in mind) who have argued that government is the problem, not the solution, as engaging in the “politics of division.” Oh, really – and it’s not divisive to say that critics of unlimited government are just demagogues and aren’t stating principles and truths in which they believe? Sheesh.
Anyway, it was just a political speech, and I’m okay with that – but, under the circumstances, it’s a little like giving a political speech in church and implying that those who don’t agree with you really lack the right kind of faith and don’t belong in the congregation.
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What Dr. King Might Say Today:
My fellow Americans, since I spoke to you last, we have seen America become increasingly a multiracial and multiethnic country. Over one in four Americans now say they are something other than simply “white.” Blacks are no longer the largest minority group: Latinos are.
And blacks and whites are the slowest growing populations. Since the last census, the Latino population has grown by 43 percent, and the Asian population has grown by 43 percent as well. What’s more, the number of Americans who identify themselves as belonging to “two or more races” has grown by 32 percent.
In such a nation, the principle of E pluribus unum becomes critical in two ways — one having to do with the color of our skin, and the other having to do with the content of our character.
First, we cannot have a legal regime in which government agencies, our great universities, and our other institutions sort people according to skin color and what country their ancestors came from, and treat some better and others worse depending on which silly little box they check.
Second, the character we as fellow citizens have in common must be cultivated and celebrated more than our “diversity.”
Character is cultivated first and foremost by family. As a Negro and a Christian minister, it saddens me to see that today more than 7 out of 10 African Americans are born out of wedlock, along with more than 6 out of 10 Native Americans, and more than 5 out of 10 Hispanics — versus fewer than 3 out of 10 whites and fewer than 2 out of 10 Asians and Pacific Islanders. That is too high for all groups, but who can fail to see the connection between these numbers and how each group is doing?
It breaks my heart to see so many children being raised without a father.
