King’s Dream: Shaking Our Ease in Conventional Bigotries
Everybody concerned about the history of post-World War Black American civil rights endeavors realizes at least these things. First Martin Luther King, Jr. was the greatest iconic leader of the movement which like all justice movements included representatives from throughout society concerned with ending Black exclusion and marginalization. Not just Black people were involved in the struggle. There were Asian, Latino, Native , and White Americans who also marched and even shredded blood and died and lost their jobs as well as Blacks. Second , King who became a devout Christian in his father’s Deep Southern Atlanta, Georgia Baptist church at age eight remained, as Jesus God Incarnate mandated,a lover of all peoples to the point that he did what all devout Christians do. Namely,King embraced all people irregardless of not only the color of their skin and ancestry but their religion. By the time he was assassinated at age 39 in 1968 after preaching in a Pentecostal church, a denomination traditionally adversarial to the Baptist Church,King had evolved into being ecumenical, that is crossing-Christian denominational lines.
And his embracing of Gandhi made him interfaith because Jesus loves everyone and so does anyone who lives the devout Christ-like life of sacrifice which is what King meant in the best book he ever wrote: The Strength to Love which was rarely read then and now since to love everyone despite the color of their skin, ancestry, and religion takes too much sacrifice for most of us. So most of we Christians in USA and elsewhere in the world remain, irrespective of the color of our skins and ancestories, in our prejudicial shells hidden behind smiles, politically correct language, and being pro or con DEI ( Diversity, Equality, Inclusion)or critical race theory rhetoric are comfortable where we are in our racist and religious bigoted societies and communities and institutions within them. We innocently or not too innocently feign helplessness and frustration of what we call the natural order or at best the gradualist pace of human rights change, opposing interventionist strategies. And I should quickly add, we are too often as church going good Christians too often in the same boat with our good Buddhist and Hindu temple going friends, our good Muslim mosque going friends, our good Jewish synagogue going friends, our good nature worshiping friends, and our good atheist golden rule friends who agree to remain in the comforting walls of racism and religious bigotry in their daily lives and life choices such as who they select for closest association in neighborhood choice, and choices in closest friendship, dating and marriage, work, and leisure and who we assume is the most smartest or will be in school. Though today in our multiracialized societies most of us smile so much and mingle so much in public places, most of us then return to our excluded private places of daily comfort.
What may not be all that well known about King is the reason why his 1963 “ I Have A Dream” Speech was so powerful and remains so inspiring even though not practiced very much in America and in other marginally transformed multiracialized societies is not only due to King’s extraordinary ringing preacher voice. And neither because it was the first and last such televised speech in post-World War II American history. But its passion came from King’ lived integrated inclusive experiences in an otherwise deeply segregated society , not just the hope of a Black man who never experienced and enjoyed inclusion in usually excluded white spaces and with close white associates.
Though not widely realized publicly, even by King historians, King had white childhood friends who used to sneak into his segregated Black Atlanta Auburn Avenue to play with him. Around 1945 or 1946, he wrote to his Mother shortly after he enrolled at age 16 in Morehouse ,the famous College for Black men while traveling north to work that summer on a tobacco farm in Connecticut to earn money for his school fees. Back in those days if you were a Black in the South, you were not allowed to walk on the same sidewalks as Whites or had to step aside to allow a White to pass you .Or you had to sit in a train car for Blacks only heading North only until you reached the Mason-Dixon Line separating the North from the South,and even beyond it until reaching a far northern State like the Northeastern State of Connecticut just east of New York City. King wrote to his Mother, amazed at the freedom of being able to walk around a Connecticut town without having to get off the sidewalk to allow a White to pass.
The 19 to 21 year old King did not go straight from segregated Atlanta and Morehouse to Boston ,another Northeastern city in the state of Massachusetts. He went to lily White Crozer Seminary in the small city of Chester ,Pennsylvania where he not only became President of the predominantly White student body but had a White girlfriend, Betty Moitz, the daughter of the campus dietitian. Only since 2018 through a newly published book offering unprecedented though too brief details about the matter, have we begun to learn more about the 1940s-1950s tragic taboo reasons why a forever broken hearted Martin never married Betty because she was White,though they were madly in love. But their dating around campus, town, and the nearby big city of Philadelphia was more than enough for King to learn to find integration norms and values attractive and segregation norms and values to be obsolete and dehumanizing in need of resistance and rejection..It would understandably create agony for any one like King or his older and peer advisers who counseled him not to marry a White woman in the 1950s planning to pursue being pastor of a Black church in the South or any kind of church or in any region in America . Indeed , only recently has interracial intimate relationships become publicly acceptable in some places in America as is the case in most multiracialized societies around the world Christian or otherwise religiously dominated.
But what these intimate experiences in spaces with white people during King’s childhood through late adolescence led to was the spiritual foundation and emotional basis for his seeing a “Negro and White children walking hand in hand” imagery in his spellbinding “ I Have A Dream” prophecy still with extreme difficulty in an American society and world still in hegemonic grip with leaders and followers still at ease in their bigotries with their platitudes of rationales, excuses, and double talks. Shamefully talking about diversity, equality, and inclusion but living what Jesus called hypocrisy ,what Nietzsche called the Big Lie, and what Carl Jung called, The Shadow.
And as we sit or stand in the ease of our conventional racial and religious bigotries in America and in other multiracialized democracies and authoritarian states which have long stopped well functioning with such low quality of life, with such serious mental and physical health problems derived from the dysfunctional dynamics of living in degrading environments dehumanizing both the dominant and oppressed, we wonder why our societal miseries are so dismal. We are never taught in such societies to be transparent about the bigotries grounding our identities and lives or to struggle against it until it is no more in society. In fact from the cradle forward, we are usually taught to deny such crimes to humanity while growing up thinking we are OK, normal, and good. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man in Immoral Society rings a good bell here; we are people of fine character as long as it pertains to people who are like us, that is, share our ancestry, our skin color; otherwise only God knows the limitless ways we will exclude, degrade, exploit, and eliminate those who are not like us. We see nothing wrong with the comforts we get from the demeaning extraction from the dignity of others like those who do our dirty work subjected to dangerous work environments so we can have restful lives of easily giving our charity donations to the undeserved . We see nothing wrong with the impoverished communities in our societies and careless about the community of origins like those were people who serve us like in hotels, stores,and our private homes. All we care about are our nice cozy places of ease crumbling under the weight of the bigotries defining the multiracialized societies that limit access to decent food, water, housing, education, and health to so many because they have the wrong color, ancestry, religion, language, and gender. When one group is privileged and other groups are underprivileged, we all lose no matter the excuses for why some have more or less than others.
Rather than putting up with discrimination, exclusion, and tokenism or claiming it is the best for now we can do, we need to shake ourselves out of our ease and oppose such and speak up against such dehumanizations.It is not funny or acceptable to see people exclude others on the premises of color, ancestry, and religion in areas such as entertainment, work, leisure, and neighborhoods. There is no such things as harmless humor about some one’s color, ancestry, culture, nationality, class ,or genderAnd neither is it moral to use the intellectual property of others without acknowledgement, such as White Americans as members of a historically dominant group singing and dancing to songs written by Blacks and not giving them credit realizing such racist stealing from Blacks and other Non-Whites and women from all cultural and status backgrounds is a long disgraceful legacy. This is especially the case for male White Americans in all White male musical groups traveling the world to showcase “ American culture, an obsolete portrayal of America though still representing Whites, especially males,trying to remain relevant to the point of looking and sounding ridiculous. But this is still widely done as we continue towards 2030.
Though widely denied by Whites and even not a few Non-Whites clinging on to White Supremacy beliefs, this is a time of dramatic demographic changes going on in America and especially in Europe, Africa, Asia, and in Australia in which non-White people are becoming politically and economically influential if not dominant. Rather than accepting this as a fact of current and future global life and Whites negotiating with NonWhites for an equitable power-sharing sustaining peaceful world, there are unfortunately, powerful corners of White Supremacy in America such as the Biden and Trump sides of the aisle in their support for a genocidal gone Israel and disinterest if not ignorance about multicultural restorative justice engagement measures to bring forth a unified nation and the right fight against DEI and critical race theory, the European right-wing parties, and the teetering of the South African ANC and DA parties with persistent deep white dominance behind the scenes both domestically and abroad.
Sometimes we human beings as individuals and societies have to hit rock bottom before we get knocked out of our beds of ease. That might have to be the USA 2024 Presidential election. The choice really makes no difference between Biden and Trump, the last of the older White guys who will ever reach that pinnacle of societal and global power. Two older White men who see the world through obsolete White Supremacy lenses, one from the populist right and one from the moderate right with the same patronizing views about Blacks and ineffectual remedies to racial inequalities in general. After them, after we go through the agony of either of them, even hitting rock bottom or below, perhaps we well come together and rebuild an America. An America that respects and does something positive to utilize the rich multiracialized human experiences that King probably began fantasizing about well before he stood up in the August 28, 1963 March on Washington. King stood up there before a historic crowd of at least 250,000 peoples with with his heroine , iconic gospel singer Mahila Jackson standing behind him egging him on to put away the boring notes he was about to speak from, “ Martin, Tell them about the Dream.”
Professor John Huston Stanfield,
Director
ASARPI: Advanced Study of African Renaissance Policies Ideas
Quatre Bornes, Mauritius