Reading: by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from an essay entitled “A Testament of Hope,” which was written in 1968 and published after his death
Whenever I am asked my opinion of the current state of the civil rights movement, I am forced to pause; it is not easy to describe a crisis so profound that it has caused the most powerful nation in the world to stagger in confusion and bewilderment. Today’s problems are so acute because the tragic evasions and defaults of several centuries have accumulated to disaster proportions…
Why is the issue of equality still so far from solution in America, a nation that professes itself to be democratic, inventive, hospitable to new ideas, rich, productive and awesomely powerful? The problem is so tenacious because, despite its virtues and attributes, America is deeply racist and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially. All too many Americans believe justice will unfold painlessly or that its absence for black people will be tolerated tranquilly.
Justice for black people will not flow into society merely from court decisions nor from fountains of political oratory. Nor will a few token changes quell all the tempestuous yearnings of millions of black people. White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society…
When millions of people have been cheated for centuries, restitution is a costly process. Inferior education, poor housing, unemployment, inadequate health care - each is a bitter component of the oppression that has been our heritage. Each will require billions of dollars to correct. Justice so long deferred has accumulated interest and its cost for this society will be substantial in financial as well as human terms. This fact has not been fully grasped, because most of the gains of the past decade were obtained at bargain prices. The desegregation of public facilities cost nothing; neither did the election and appointment of a few black public officials….
It is time we stopped our blithe lip service to the guarantees of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. These fine sentiments are embodied in the Declaration of Independence, but that document was always a declaration of intent rather than of reality. There were slaves when it was written; there were slaves when it was adopted; and to this day, black Americans have not life, liberty, nor the privilege of pursuing happiness, and millions of white Americans are in economic bondage that is scarcely less oppressive…
Reading: from a piece by journalist Ira J. Hadnot in When Race Becomes Real - Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories (Edited by Bernestine Singley, p. 207)
I am tired of race. Bone-weary of thoughts about race. Fatigued by our society’s silence about race. Too broken down in spirit to shoulder the mantle of race. …
More than four decades after the sixties, we are still wearing race on our sleeves.
There is a pretense of understanding and of tolerance. Yet we have a black man chained and dragged to death on the Texas road where he once played as a child.
The spines of my white colleagues stiffen with the slightest reference to race. Black Americans are either “too sensitive” or “too angry” to sustain an intelligent debate. It seems, …race is still about us and them. It will always be about black and white.
Reading: by Tim Wise from Dear White America - Letter to a New Minority (p. 36). Tim Wise is a white author addressing white readers.
We have long been in denial about the reality of racism, even back in the day when, in retrospect, it was blatant. Even in the early 1960s, before the passage of civil rights legislation, most of us, according to Gallup polls, failed to see that the nation had a race problem. Even as African Americans were being hosed down and blown up in Birmingham, beaten in Selma, murdered in Mississippi and segregated and isolated up North, two-thirds of us said blacks had equal opportunity in employment, education and housing. In one 1962 survey, roughly 90 percent of [whites] said that we believed black children had just as good a chance to get a quality education as we or our children did. That we may see such beliefs as borderline delusional now does not change the fact that we believed them to be quite rational at the time.
Of Race and Rationality
A Sermon Delivered on January 15, 2012
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
It is hard to imagine what it was like to live in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1950s and 60s. Martin Luther King, Jr. was installed as minister at Dexter Avenue Church when he was only twenty-five years old. It was 1954, and earlier that year the Supreme Court had just ruled that racial segregation in public schools is illegal.
Just a year later, Rosa Park’s thoughtful act of civil disobedience provided the impetus for the Montgomery bus boycott, and King was elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association.
The story of King’s life in the years that follow can be told as a series of hard won victories and unprecedented social reform. The bus boycott, after all, was successful. The increased integration of public schools, of interstate buses, and of lunch counters were all steps toward fulfillment of civil rights demands. King played an important role in a movement that led to the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights act of 1968.
And yet in 1968, in King’s mind, the goals of the civil rights movement were still far out of reach. The crisis is still present, he says. The problems are still acute. The issue of equality is still far from solution. In 1968, Kings says, America is still deeply racist and its democracy deeply flawed, both economically and socially.
* * *
I doubt a majority of Americans - especially white Americans - shared King’s troubling view. After all, even before the civil rights legislation was passed in the 1960s, most white Americans didn’t think racism was a problem. As Tim Wise points out, at the time, the denial of racism seemed like a perfectly rational position to take.
Likewise, it may seem like a rational position today, to believe that great strides have been made since the days of the civil rights movement, and that racism is no longer a serious social problem. Segregation now seems like ancient history. And today we even have an African American president.
But Tim Wise offers some evidence that serious problems persist. For instance, as many of us know, a disparity of wealth has been growing within the country over the last decade. In recent years this has been apparent to millions of Americans, especially those who lost their homes or their jobs in the recent financial crisis.
An additional disparity of wealth has long existed between white and black Americans. Despite the advances of the civil rights movement, a few years ago the average white family still possessed about twelve times the net worth of the average black family. But now, in the wake of the financial crisis, the median worth of white families is twenty times that of black families. (p. 26)
Also discrimination in the work place is far from over. 1.2 million instances of job discrimination against people of color occur every year. A study from 2009 shows that even when a black person has a college degree, he or she is almost twice as likely as a white person with a degree to be unemployed. Even a white man with a criminal record is more likely to be called back for a job interview than a black man without one, even when their qualifications and credentials are identical. (p. 29)
When it comes to our criminal justice system, a lot has changed since the 1960s, but not the changes we might expect. In 1964, about two-thirds of people incarcerated in America were white, and one third were people of color. By the mid 1990s this had reversed. Now two-thirds of those locked up are black or brown, and one third is white - even though the relative rate of criminal offending hardly changed. (p. 34)
Bias in our justice system takes shape in remarkable ways. For instance, though whites account for about 70 percent of drug users, nine in ten people locked up for drug possession are people of color. And in the case of a first-time drug offense, with all other factors being equal, black youth are almost fifty times more likely to be incarcerated than white youth. (p. 36)
Facts and figures such as these do raise the question, how rational people today can tolerate such inequality.
* * *
Racism was a problem, and racism is a problem. But it is a problem that has a solution. Dr. King firmly believed this. (The following ideas are drawn from King’s address “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience,” delivered on Nov. 16, 1961.)
Dr. King saw two main ways in which, throughout history, oppressed people dealt with their oppression. One is the path of acquiescence, the path of surrender. On this path people learn to adjust themselves to their predicament. They learn to live with discrimination, or segregation, or colonialism. They accept it as the inescapable status quo. The way of the world.
The second path is that of uprising, the path of bitter hatred and physical violence. It is the path by which the oppressed take up arms against their oppressor. And through physical force, at certain points in history, the oppressed have indeed overcome their oppressors through violence or warfare. But as King saw it, this path contains a fatal weakness. It ends up creating more social problems than it solves. And one kind of violence breads another.
But there is a third way to overcome oppression. And this is the path King studied and practiced and taught. It is the path of nonviolent resistance. It is a path that is grounded neither resignation nor hatred, but is grounded in a love ethic.
The love ethic is neither sentimental nor romantic. It is a powerful transformative love: creative, redemptive, and understanding. It is goodwill to all. Theologians call it “the love of God operating in the human heart.”
Another aspect of the nonviolent movement is the firm conviction that within human nature there is an amazing potential for goodness. There is something within each of us that can respond to goodness. Dr. King said, “I know somebody’s liable to say that this is an unrealistic movement if it goes on believing that all people are good. Well, I didn’t say that.”
What King said was that there is a “strange dichotomy,” a “disturbing dualism” within human nature. He agreed with Plato, who compared the human personality to a charioteer with two headstrong horses, each trying to go in a different direction. That’s the way it is in our individual lives, and that’s the way it is in the collective life of humanity. There is a “strange badness” within us. But in spite of this there is also something within us that can respond to goodness.
King said, “to put it in theological terms, the image of God is never totally gone. And so the individuals who believe in this movement… somehow believe that even the worst segregationist can become an integrationist.”
King said, “now sometimes it is hard to believe that this is what [the nonviolent] movement says, and it believes it firmly, that there is something within human nature that can be changed, and this stands at the [very] top of the whole philosophy of the […] movement and the philosophy of nonviolence.”
* * *
So there are three ways we can respond to oppression. There is resignation. There is hatred and physical force. And there is nonviolent resistance.
Nonviolent resistance is guided by a love ethic, which recognizes within every person an indestructible potential for goodness. And while every person is at times torn between doing good or doing bad - the potential to respond to goodness, and to pursue goodness, is always present.
King saw this love ethic as the essence of what Jesus taught, when he told his followers to love their enemies, and to turn the other cheek. And it is the same love ethic he saw put into practice most effectively by Mahatma Gandhi.
When put into practice, the love ethic takes the shape of a single, simple moral imperative. It says that we have a moral obligation to refuse to cooperate with evil, just as we have an obligation to cooperate with good. Sometimes this may mean disobeying the law. Sometimes this may mean challenging social conventions that some consider normal and rational, and yet which are morally wrong.
These are not always easy distinctions to make. Dr. King was well aware of that. He said, this point of the nonviolent philosophy “brings in the whole question of how you can be logically consistent when you advocate obeying some laws and disobeying other laws.” There are two types of laws: just laws and unjust laws. We have a moral obligation to obey one and resist the other.
Dr. King put it this way, he said, “a just law is a law that squares with moral law. …Any law that uplifts human personality is a just law. Whereas that law which is out of harmony with the moral is a law which does not square with the moral law of the universe. It does not square with the law of God.” This law is unjust.
So, for instance, King says, an unjust law is “a code that the majority inflicts on the minority and is not binding on itself. So that this becomes difference made legal.” I have to think of the sentencing for white collar crime, as opposed to blue collar crime. I have to think of the banker who steals millions and walks free, while the petty thief is put in jail.
But King continues: “an unjust law is a code with the majority inflicts upon the minority, which that minority had no part in enacting or creating, because that minority had no right to vote in many instances, so that the legislative bodies that made these laws were not democratically elected.”
A just law is just the opposite. It is saneness made legal. It is a law that applies equally to all, both the majority and the minority. It is a law both majority and minority played a part in creating.
* * *
King’s understanding of racism and injustice, and the path he proposed for overcoming both, is perfectly rational. It is rooted in ancient religious teaching. It is firmly grounded in the existential realities of human nature. It addresses the pragmatic realities political action and economic justice.
Kings brilliance, however, lies not in his superior powers of rational analysis. King’s brilliance lies in the fact that for him rationality is inseparable from morality. King knew the world itself hinges on moral foundations. And while the moral arc of universe is long, it bends toward justice.
Dr. King had a dream. It is hard to imagine what it will take to make that dream a reality. But this much we know: the dream will not flow into society merely from court decisions or from the fountains of political oratory. It will require radical changes in the very structure of our society. The cost will be substantial, both in financial and human terms. But there is no doubt that we can change.
May we honor the memory of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
By accepting the moral obligation he has placed squarely on our shoulders.
May we open our eyes to the troubling realities of race
May we dare to do the work, we know is required of us,
To create a world in which the love and justice we have known,
Is equally available to all people.
Amen.
