The following is the text of the remarks I gave at yesterday's King Day program on our campus hosted by the Arkansas Martin Luther King Commission.
The Prez
Philander Smith College is proud to once again host the vigil. This relationship with the King Commission dates back to the mid 1990s, so we are proud to play a minor role in this event. As president, I have used this time not to welcome you because as you know by now, you are always welcome here.
Instead of a welcome, let me call you to act. I submit to you that Dr. King’s legacy is being attacked, and we need to set the record straight. So what am I talking about? Ten years ago, Michael Eric Dyson wrote “I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.” In that text, he writes:
Terms like equal playing field, racial justice, equal opportunity, and most ominous, color-blind drip from the lips of formerly stalwart segregationist politicians, conservative policy wonks, and intellectual hired guns for deep-pocketed right-wing think tanks… Affirmative action is rendered as reverse racism, while goals and timetables are remade, in sinister fashion, into quotas.
These unscrupulous actors proclaim that King somehow advocated a color blind society, as evidenced by the 34 words in the I Have A Dream speech that spoke of the content of our character rather than color of our skin. Dyson writes, “If King’s hope for radical social change is to survive, we must wrest his complex meaning from their harmful embrace.”
This leads me to yesterday’s utterly ridiculous and blasphemous editorial by Paul Greenberg, entitled “Radical as conservative.” Predictably, he uses those 34 words Dyson points out that stalwart segregationists use. He writes:
Is any passage more frequently cited against the quota system called Affirmative Action? Is any passage so clear a call for what conservatives always seem to be calling for – a renewed faith in the American dream? A color-blind society in which we are judged on our individual merits, not group identity?
Greenberg then attacks with those familiar phrases. Equal-opportunity racism. The new racism. A new intolerance with social justice being any government program the speaker currently favors. Dyson clearly described what happens here all the time- the pimping of Martin Luther King to make a point that King would be flatly against.
So my challenge to you is to read King for yourself. Read one of the dozens of speeches, sermons, articles, and books that give you the broader range of King’s thinking, and then call out those who misuse King to support their personal ideology.
King Day 2010 for me is call out day, and I am calling out Paul Greenberg for shamelessly misrepresenting Dr. King. Every year that I have been here, the paper prints “I Have A Dream,” and then he writes some column telling marginalized people that everything is fair, and your attempt to even suggest it isn’t is racism on your part. He would say you’re hurting because you haven’t pulled yourself up by the boostraps, as he lays on top of you holding you down. To him, you’re racist if you suggest everything is not fair in America.
Greenberg either has never read King, or thinks you’re too stupid to go back and check the facts. Well, I have read King widely. I have read passages from the 1964 book “Why We Can’t Wait” where King writes “it is impossible to create a formula for the future which does not take into account that our society has been doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years” and he questions how could Blacks be “absorbed into the mainstream of American life if we do not do something special for him now, in order to balance the equation and equip him now to compete on a just and equal basis.”
King said “it is obvious that if a man is entered at the starting line in a race 300 years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up with his fellow runner.” In fact, King specifically wrote, the nation “must incorporate in its planning some compensatory consideration for the handicaps he has inherited from the past.”
All of this sounds like affirmative action to me. Sounds like reparations. It sounds like social justice, which for the record, promotes awareness of inequalities, action to redress inequalities, and ongoing habits of mind and actions that continue to redress inequalities. But Greenberg and those of his ilk never share these passages. But I am president of a college whose motto is ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free.
My point today is that we must protect Dr. King’s legacy as people constantly misuse his eloquence to say something that benefits their ideology. As the villain in the new movie, The Book of Eli stated, having the right words eloquently presented is a weapon. King’s words and legacy are a powerful weapon, but in the wrong hands are used to attack all people, especially those King sought to help the most.
We’ll see if they print my editorial destroying the predictable case Greenberg makes. I hope lots of you will join me. Write a letter to the editor challenging this foolishness. We have to fight to make sure King is presented accurately and fairly.
Like I said, I didn’t want to welcome you to your college. This is a community meeting, and we’ve got work to do. This meeting is officially called to order.