‘Evil must be attacked by a counteracting persistence, by the day-to-day assault of the battering rams of justice’
There’s this thing that probably always happens during big societal shifts, where for fleeting moments, the bulk of the public seems to share this remarkable clarity that something has to change. Injustice seems universally evident, and transformation unavoidable. But then there’s the backslide that happens either quickly or gradually, in which people become uncomfortable with how that change might affect them. For all of the people actively resisting, many others maybe don’t like the way the world is, but decide they are unwilling to risk disruption or the possibility of losing something to correct it.
Since the attack on the Capitol last week, this has shown up mostly in calls for unity and deescalation, which sound nice, but in practice equate anti-racist demonstrations with authoritarian violence, and demand coexistence with white supremacists. A lot of these calls are very obviously in bad faith, coming from people who stoked and enabled the attack. But in many cases we see Democrats who would just as soon not dwell on the violence and continued threat of violence—or correct the structures in our government that privilege white supremacy—because they are afraid doing so would sow further division or interfere with a particular legislative agenda.
Our annual remembrance of Martin Luther King, Jr. arrives this year against the backdrop of this discussion and King’s work feels especially relevant right now. He wrote some of the most powerful denouncements of white moderates demanding peace without justice, even though his legacy is often twisted to suggest the opposite.
So I thought this week I would do something a little different and revisit passages from a couple of King’s works that comment on unity in the sustained fight against white supremacy. I know I wrote about Where Do We Go From Here back in September, but these ideas have been on my mind lately as I think about the state of the world and whether I’m committed enough to anti-racism in my own life and work, and it feels worth bringing some of them up again.
King’s best-known criticism of moderate calls for peace is in 1963’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, in which he responds from his jail cell to white religious leaders of the South who criticized the nonviolent resistance he was organizing as “unwise and untimely.”
First, I must confess that over the last 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 the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor 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 can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until 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.
That sentiment only grew and King wrote at length in 1967’s Where Do We Go From Here about his disappointment with stalled progress as the fight for equality shifted beyond segregation in the South.
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.
And later:
Over the last few years many Negroes have felt that their most troublesome adversary was not the obvious bigot of the Ku Klux Klan or the John Birch Society, but the white liberal who is more devoted to “order” than to justice, who prefers tranquillity to equality. In a sense the white liberal has been victimized with some of the same ambivalence that has been a constant part of our national heritage.
King writes a lot about this American ambivalence, which he sees at the root of the kind of backsliding I mentioned at the top. It’s a loosely stated dissatisfaction with injustice, but a lack of commitment to dismantling it, which, to the extent that it can be overcome, is the key to making actual progress.
It would be grossly unfair to omit recognition of a minority of whites who genuinely want authentic equality. Their commitment is real, sincere, and is expressed in a thousand deeds. But they are balanced at the other end of the pole by the unregenerate segregationists who have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality. The segregationist goal is the total reversal of all reforms, with reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of fascism. America had a master race in the antebellum South. Reestablishing it with a resurgent Klan and a totally disenfranchised lower class would realize the dream of too many extremists on the right.
The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.
People who have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality is pretty on the nose, right? There’s endless discussion of polarization and the two sides of America right now, often framed as an evenly split breach that must be closed. King instead describes polarization of American opinion differently, in a way that feels more like where we are at in 2021, although you could argue about whether he’s being too generous in his assessment that a great majority are merely apathetic. But however you cut the percentages, you’ve got one camp actively pursuing equality, one camp seeking the “reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of fascism,” and some other swath of white Americans perhaps opposed to racism, but accepting it to varying degrees should it serve their interests.
The unity that King calls for is not some middle ground with extremists on the right, but drawing in more people from the middle to work toward shared ideals—“finding that creative minority of the concerned from the ofttimes apathetic majority” and forming a coalition working toward multiracial democracy. “America must be a nation in which its multiracial people are partners in power,” he writes.
But Americans must unite, not merely in working toward the goal of shared power, but also in the active weeding out of racism, expressly combatting people with evil purposes instead of merely waiting for their influence to pass like a thunderstorm.
The fourth challenge we face is to unite around powerful action programs to eradicate the last vestiges of racial injustice. 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. There is only one thing certain about time, and that is that it waits for no one. If it is not used constructively, it passes you by.
In this generation the children of darkness are still shrewder than the children of light. They are always zealous and conscientious in using time for their evil purposes. If they want to preserve segregation and tyranny, they do not wait on time; they make time their fellow conspirator. If they want to defeat a fair housing bill, they don’t say to the public, “Be patient, wait on time, and our cause will win.” Rather, they use time to spend big money, to disseminate half-truths, to confuse the popular mind. But the forces of light cautiously wait, patiently pray and timidly act. So we end up with a double destruction: the destructive violence of the bad people and the destructive silence of the good people.
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.
So those are some of the passages that are on my mind as Monday approaches, and as we hear speeches about unity and witness a maddening urge to settle back into business as usual. In all of these moments in which we’re asked to reach across to the other side and get back to the project of America, I’m reminded to always ask, in pursuit of what, exactly? What are we meant to unite behind? And if it’s not multiracial democracy that serves all equally, then it’s not a unity we should be pursuing. It’s not unity at all.
Links
- The best, most clear-eyed response I’ve seen post Capitol attack. Waleed Shahid and Nelini Stamp on the structural flaws in our democratic systems that perpetuate Trumpism.
- Surprising nobody, participants and supporters of the Capitol mob include nearly 30 off duty cops from a dozen police departments, Republican attorneys general, several Republican state legislators, possibly Republican federal legislators, and an Olympic gold medalist who went to the same high school as my parents.
- Over 250 Black police have sued the Capitol Police since 2001 for allegations of racism. Also, Capitol police have absentmindedly left several loaded guns in multiple bathrooms, one of which was found by a small child. People also reported QAnon Shaman hanging around the Capitol a month ago and police said, eh he only has a spear seems fine.
- About half of Republicans polled dispute the election results. Almost a quarter of Republican elites also don’t accept Biden’s win, especially those who deny the existence of structural racism and are prone to conspiracy theories.
- The cosplay of the extreme right follows a long tradition of ridiculous symbols and dress up in political insurgencies.
- Trump did nothing during the Capitol attack and couldn’t even be reached because he was busy watching it on TV. “If it’s TiVo, he just hits pause and takes the calls. If it’s live TV, he watches it, and he was just watching it all unfold.”
- Historian Jill Lepore asks what we should call the sixth of January. One option? A race riot.
- You all saw that fucked up story about the Kushners not letting the secret service use their toilet, but Jamie pointed out the best part is that they were using the Obamas’ garage “until someone made a huge poop mess and the Obama secret service was like byeeee.”
- Ride hailing services increase car ownership.
- Even if you never get COVID, the pandemic is ruining your body.
- Do “elder Goths” hold the secret to aging successfully? Love the term elder goths, and also the answer is yes.
Listening
Let’s do one more this one is quieter.
Thank you for the nice feedback on last week’s issue. To be honest, responses to big awful news events are some of my least favorite things to write in the moment, but on the selfish side it can also be kind of therapeutic to work through them on the page.
Speaking of therapeutic, this has been a tough couple of weeks right? New strain, more cases, political violence looming.
I gotta say that article about how the pandemic is destroying all of our bodies (and minds!) really hit home for me. It was a tough read, but also kind of reassuring to see in print that, even for people like myself who are, relatively, extremely fortunate, what the world is going through has consequences for all, and they are not to be dismissed. It hurts everyone. Political violence, too, as AOC pointed out after the attack, has a way of stirring up personal trauma for many of us that we may not even realize.
I mentioned last week that I’m reading Zadie Smith’s Intimations, a series of essays written during the pandemic. She has this great part where she compares suffering to concepts like class and privilege, and the limits of mitigating suffering through awareness of others’ experiences. (My emphasis added)
Class is a bubble, formed by privilege, shaping and manipulating your conception of reality. But it can at least be brought to mind; acknowledged, comprehended, even atoned for through transformative action. By comparing your relative privilege with that of others you may be able to modify both your world and the worlds outside of your world—if the will is there to do it. Suffering is not like that. Suffering is not relative; it is absolute. Suffering has an absolute relation to the suffering individual—it cannot be easily mediated by a third term like “privilege.”
Not all of what we’re going through is necessarily suffering, as we know from reading Rebecca Solnit. There’s strength to be found, connections to be forged, joy to be experienced. But we are all experiencing pain on some level, and it’s important to remember that. And, of course, it’s also important to remember that it didn’t have to be this way.
Tate