‘Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice’
The butterflies of the British Isles /.London :F. Warne,1906.
Well it has been another rough week and I will link to related stories below but I wanted to get down some more thoughts on Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, King’s classic 1967 book on racial and economic justice, which I finished reading a couple days ago. You will not be suprised to hear that so many of the book’s ideas on race and power remain extremely relevant, and I hope you find them as helpful as I do during these truly fucked up times.
Where Do We Go from Here is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s fourth and final book, published the year before he was assassinated. At this point in his life, King had seen nonviolent resistance achieve huge strides in fighting overt racism in the South, but felt momentum slowing as SCLC turned much of its attention to problems like labor rights, economic injustice, and urban segregation in the North. At the same time, he was responding to growing frustration and calls for violent revolution within the movement, which he disagreed with, but also sympathized with. As a result, it’s a book laced with a certain amount of disappointment, but King meets it with a recommitment to his practice of love and nonviolent resistance.
Last week, I talked a little about King’s dedication to these principles, but it’s also important to note that they sometimes get twisted up in America’s fraught relationship with his legacy. White people tend to extract King’s least challenging ideas of love and reconciliation, often using his words to call for deescalation of racial tension, running counter to King’s actual theory of change. I don’t think our tendency to cling to his sentiments about love and empathy is necessarily sinister, though, as they are extremely powerful. Take, for example, from Where Do We Go From Here: “The universe is so structured that things go awry if men are not diligent in their cultivation of the other-regarding dimension. ‘I’ cannot reach fulfillment without ‘thou.’ The self cannot be self without other selves.”
But make no mistake, King was a radical and harbored no rosy illusions about racism in America, or what it would take to overcome it. That comes across loud and clear here, a book that starts out being about love, but pivots into a book mostly about power, and then finally, about economic redistribution.
Here’s where he makes the first turn:
[P]ower is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love.
What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. There is nothing essentially wrong with power.
This focus on power emerges from King’s deep concerns over what he sees as stalled progress in advancing civil rights beyond ending Jim Crow and toward issues like housing, education, and labor. In a way, these are more difficult problems, but they are also battlegrounds that white liberals in the 1960s decided they were not willing to venture into.
White America was ready to demand that the Negro should be spared the lash of brutality and coarse degradation, but it had never been truly committed to helping him out of poverty, exploitation or all forms of discrimination. … White Americans left the Negro on the ground and in devastating numbers walked off with the aggressor. It appeared that the white segregationist and the ordinary white citizen had more in common with one another than either had with the Negro. When Negroes looked for the second phase, the realization of equality, they found that many of their white allies had quietly disappeared.
This feels relevant to today because, well, we have still not made a lot of progress on the realization of equality and have, by many measures, moved backwards. On racial justice specifically we are at a point when a resurgence or at least a renewed realization via smartphone videos of “brutality and coarse degradation” has drawn people of all races back into the streets in large numbers. But racial justice movements will learn soon enough if these allies have joined the fight for good this time.
King says that requires more than a surge of support in any one moment, and instead a multitiered building and leveraging of power—“a confrontation between the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to preserving the status quo. Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose.” For King, it’s not a birthright or some ethereal element, but a substance to acquire and use through many avenues.
The fact that justice is not achieved without relentless effort is a sentiment that is counter to a common misrepresentation of King, one often perpetuated, unfortunately, by President Obama, who leaned heavily on the Facebook-friendly quote, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Those close to King have pointed out that this quote is taken out of context, intended as a Christian sentiment of faith as opposed to a political mantra of preordained progress. Regardless, King makes it clear that justice is no inevitability (my emphasis):
We will be greatly misled if we feel that the problem will work itself out. Structures of evil do not crumble by passive waiting. If history teaches anything, it is that evil is recalcitrant and determined, and never voluntarily relinquishes its hold short of an almost fanatical resistance. Evil must be attacked by a counteracting persistence, by the day-to-day assault of the battering rams of justice. We must get rid of the false notion that there is some miraculous quality in the flow of time that inevitably heals all evils. …
Equally fallacious is the notion that ethical appeals and persuasion alone will bring about justice. This does not mean that ethical appeals must not be made. It simply means that those appeals must be undergirded by some form of constructive coercive power.
King here also revisits one of his most powerful ideas from 1963’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail, about the preference white moderates have for “negative peace which is the absence of tension” instead of “a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” Calling for escalation of constructive nonviolent tension, King writes, “The white liberal must rid himself of the notion that there can be a tensionless transition from the old order of injustice to the new order of justice.”
The book continues with a concrete application of these ideas, outlining the avenues for building power in American society—ideological, economic, and political. The modern experession of King’s ideological power might best be viewed through the way the concept of Black Lives Matter has reshaped much of white America’s thinking on policing. He describes economic power in terms of the effectiveness of boycotts and purchasing power, along with an intersectional view of economic justice, particularly through building powerful multiracial labor unions. And finally, political power, which includes voting, forming organizations and alliances, and developing leaders.
Toward the end, the book gives much weight to economic justice, calling for a universal income that tracks with the median income of society, as a way to overcome the failure of piecemeal policy changes. This section feels heavily influential on modern thought about the devastations of poverty, the failure of work to provide our lives with meaning, and even recognition that technology will not set us free. On the cruelty of inequality, he laments that we “compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity.”
King champions redistribution and federal spending programs, leveling unflinching blows to capitalism, and in the depths of the Cold War and Vietnam War, castigates American military action against communist nations. But he also makes clear that he’s not a Marxist either, in one section that I found illuminating and will close with. This reminds me of adrienne maree brown’s thoughts on capitalism and the need to break free of the economic molds of the past. King writes:
Truth is found neither in traditional capitalism nor in classical Communism. Each represents a partial truth. Capitalism fails to see the truth in collectivism. Communism fails to see the truth in individualism. Capitalism fails to realize that life is social. Communism fails to realize that life is personal. The good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of Communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism.
Links
- The men who killed a person named Breonna Taylor in her own home will face no charges, except for one of them because bullets from his gun hit a neighbor’s wall. Rep. Attica Scott, the only Black woman in the Kentucky legislature, who is pursuing subtantive police reform, was arrested while protesting the decision. She faces felony charges.
- Trump is laying the groundwork to declare an American presidential election illegitimate if he loses, and not just in his statements to the press. This Atlantic article makes the case that the problem is less about whether he concedes (which he never will) and more about all the hand grenades the administration is throwing into the election process to build a legal case for dismissing its results. This is a very real possibility, beyond the fact that it is already trashing our remaining democratic institutions. You can read more takes on this here, here, and here.
- If this is an outcome that you would like to avoid, vote in person or hand deliver your mail in ballot as early as possible and do not vote for Donald Trump obviously, and then get ready for sustained protest.
- Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan says Chris Wallace should rewrite his list of debate topics and put climate change right at the top.
- Jeff Bezos committed $10 billion for climate change but has given all of about jack and shit so far.
- Another consequence of climate change-related flooding is shifting polling stations, which disproportionately affects Black voters in Louisiana.
- Young women are leading a protest movement against patriarchy in Thailand.
- Deciding that “conspiracy theory” is insufficient, Buzzfeed News’ copy desk now refers to QAnon as a “collective delusion.”
- The construction of a new “mini-city” in Boston, with a population that will rival Back Bay’s, is set to move forward, despite ongoing protests over lack of affordable housing. Related: Raze and rebuild redux
- Where have old men been drinking coffee?
Watching
Breaking Bad was a masterpiece of character study and serial storytelling, but it always felt a little light to me on larger themes beyond those inside Walter White’s head. In season four of Better Call Saul, the prequel spinoff might have outpaced the source material by taking on a sharper social critique, particularly of the legal system. It’s also just super funny and suspenseful and a great show. It’s all good man.
Listening
Vin Diesel just dropped a pop song.
And that’s what I got this week, a review of a 53-year-old book hope you enjoyed it. Not a lot of jokes. Not many jokes coming out of the old jokatron 2000 this round.
I do want to talk about walking around my neighborhood at night again. Something about this time of year means that while I don’t see a ton of stars, I can see three planets very clearly: Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. I’m not really into astrology, but for some reason seeing them every night like this makes it really clear to me why there is this whole life philosophy that has developed over millennia based on these sparkly thingys that hang in sky and move ever so gradually into different formations as the seasons change. Anyway, I enjoy seeing them, hello planets, how is Sagittarius treating you tonight glad to hear it.
I also enjoy seeing weird behavior in the neighborhood after dark, like the other day I stumbled upon a grown adult tightly bundled in a mummy sleeping bag on their front lawn, having a conversation with someone else sitting on the porch.
Also a lot of hanging strings of lights are going up in back and front yards throughout the neighborhood, I imagine to brace for the long march into darkness. We’re going to put a string of solar-powered cafe lights up over our own back porch this weekend, joining the club. Whatever unique chaos is happening in the moment, here we are all sitting under these sparkly things hanging in the sky, going through it separately but together.
Tate