On February 23, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., took to the stage at a sold-out Carnegie Hall. He had not come to rally the flagging spirits of bloodied civil rights demonstrators, shake loose the pennies of liberal philanthropists, or even to testify to God\u2019s grace. A more solemn task was at hand.<\/p>\n
King was the keynote speaker for a centennial celebration of W. E. B. Du Bois\u2019s birth, following remarks by Ossie Davis, James Baldwin, Jack O\u2019Dell, Cynthia Belgrave, Pete Seeger, and Eleanor McCoy. Arguably the greatest political thinker and propagandist black America ever produced, Du Bois spent his last days in relative ignominy in Ghana, his passport canceled by the U.S. State Department in retaliation for anti-nuclear, anti-racist, and socialist politics. Du Bois died on the eve of the 1963 March on Washington, denied the chance to witness the moral authority of the civil rights movement crystallize before the world.<\/p>\n
In his address, King nevertheless urged that Du Bois\u2019s life\u2014its \u201ccommitted empathy with all the oppressed and . . . divine dissatisfaction with all forms of injustice\u201d\u2014had the pedagogical power \u201cto teach us something about our tasks of emancipation.\u201d In King\u2019s judgment, Du Bois had combined the vocations of intellectual and organizer into \u201ca single unified force\u201d committed to the pursuit of justice, resisting both the temptations of wealth and renown that accrue to accommodationist politics, and the mystical authority and catharsis that give racial chauvinism its allure.<\/p>\n
Canonization presents an obstacle to an honest reckoning with King\u2019s legacy.<\/p>\n
King also admonished those who denied that Du Bois\u2014a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in his youth and a member of the Communist Party in his twilight\u2014was a \u201cradical all of his life.\u201d Stating that Du Bois was \u201ca genius and chose to be a Communist,\u201d King insinuated that Americans\u2019 reflexive aversion to political radicalism remained an obstacle to critical thinking and good judgment. Spoken barely forty days before King was shot dead on a Memphis motel balcony, the remarks honored Du Bois\u2019s trailblazing politics and, in hindsight, suggest worries King may have been harboring about his own legacy.<\/p>\n
Those worries are easy to understand. In the year before King\u2019s death, he faced intense isolation owing to his strident criticisms of the Vietnam War and the Democratic Party, his heated debates with black nationalists, and his headlong quest to mobilize the nation\u2019s poor against economic injustice. Abandoned by allies, fearing his death was near, King could only lament that his critics \u201chave never really known me, my commitment, or my calling.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fifty years after his death, we are perhaps subject to the same indictment. As we grasp for a proper accounting of King\u2019s intellectual, ethical, and political bequest, commemoration may present a greater obstacle to an honest reckoning with his legacy than disfavor did in the case of Du Bois. There are costs to canonization.<\/p>\n
The King now enshrined in popular sensibilities is not the King who spoke so powerfully and admiringly at Carnegie Hall about Du Bois. Instead, he is a mythic figure of consensus and conciliation, who sacrificed his life to defeat Jim Crow and place the United States on a path toward a \u201cmore perfect union.\u201d In this familiar view, King and the civil rights movement are rendered\u2014as Cass Sunstein approvingly put it\u2014\u201cbackward looking and even conservative.\u201d King deployed his rhetorical genius in the service of our country\u2019s deepest ideals\u2014the ostensible consensus at the heart of our civic culture\u2014and dramatized how Jim Crow racism violated these commitments. Heroically, through both word and deed, he called us to be true to who we\u00a0already<\/em>\u00a0are: \u201cto live out the true meaning\u201d of our founding creed. No surprise, then, that King is often draped in Christian symbolism redolent of these themes. He is a revered prophet of U.S. progress and redemption, Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land, or a Christ who sacrificed his life to redeem our nation from its original sin.<\/p>\n Such poetic renderings lead our political and moral judgment astray. Along with the conservative gaslighting that claims King\u2019s authority for \u201ccolorblind\u201d jurisprudence, they obscure King\u2019s persistent attempt to jar the United States out of its complacency and corruption. They ignore his indictment of the United States as the \u201cgreatest purveyor of violence in the world,\u201d his critique of a Constitution unjustly inattentive to economic rights and racial redress, and his condemnation of municipal boundaries that foster unfairness in housing and schooling. It is no wonder then that King\u2019s work is rarely on the reading lists of young activists. He has become an icon to quote, not a thinker and public philosopher to engage.<\/p>\n This is a tragedy, for King was a vital political thinker. Unadulterated, his ideas upset convention and pose radical challenges\u2014perhaps especially today, amidst a gathering storm of authoritarianism, racial chauvinism, and nihilism that threatens the future of democracy and the ideal of equality. What follows is an effort to recover those unsettling ideas by shedding light on three of the most important and misunderstood elements of King\u2019s mature thought: his analysis of racism; his political theory of direct action and civil disobedience; and his understanding of the place of ethical virtues in activism and social life.<\/p>\n In King\u2019s work, the point of philosophical reflection on racism is\u00a0political<\/em>: \u201cthe prescription for the cure rests with the accurate diagnosis of the disease.\u201d Having the right theoretical understanding of racism\u2014one of the \u201ctriple evils\u201d of the United States, along with militarism and poverty\u2014is, in other words, a critical element of effective activism.<\/p>\n King\u2019s theory of racism has three main components. First, drawing on the insights of E. Franklin Frazier, King argued that racism is deeply entangled with \u201cirrational fears\u201d\u2014of losing economic or social standing, of contamination, of an unknown future, and, above all, of revenge and retaliation. The desire to escape or sublimate this fear, King reasoned, generates \u201cstrange psychoses and peculiar cases of paranoia.\u201d This account of the affective dimension of racism\u2014especially its entwinement with terror\u2014sharply diverges from models which contend that rational argumentation or moral suasion are sufficient tools to undermine racism.<\/p>\n The point of King\u2019s philosophical reflection on racism is\u00a0political<\/em>: \u2018the prescription for the cure rests with the accurate diagnosis of the disease.\u2019<\/p>\n The second element in King\u2019s understanding of racism is sociopolitical. King insisted that \u201cit is necessary to refute the idea that the dominant ideology in our country even today is freedom and equality while racism is just an occasional departure from the norm on the part of a few bigoted extremists.\u201d Instead, King rightly argued, the persistence of racial domination, and the resilience of white racial resentment, \u201clies in the \u2018congenital deformity\u2019 of racism that has crippled the nation from its inception.\u201d Yet, in King\u2019s mapping of U.S. political history, \u201cthe democratic spirit that has always faced [racism] is equally real\u201d and remains a source of hope and wisdom. King\u2019s unapologetic identification with this democratic spirit throws down a gauntlet of sorts. It still divides, as it did then, those who see the struggle for racial democracy as a series of exemplary strivings, partial victories, and genuine missed opportunities from those who see the U.S. racial order as originary and permanent, making every revolt, cynical or heroic, always already a gesture of futility.<\/p>\n The third element of King\u2019s understanding of racism is that it arises from cognitive and empathetic failures. The practices we associate with racism\u2014segregation, discrimination, exploitation, political subordination, and even genocide\u2014all, on King\u2019s account, express a \u201ccontempt for life.\u201d Indulging \u201cthe arrogant assertion that one race is the center of value,\u201d racism cultivates a habitual blindness to our fellows\u2019 capacities and even existence. Channeling Du Bois, King links this to an arrogance that precludes racists from believing stigmatized groups have contributed to \u201cthe progress of history\u201d or \u201ccan assure the progress of the future.\u201d As a practical matter, then, uprooting racial injustice entails critiquing its legitimating ideas. This means targeting the stereotypes, narratives, and stigmas that underpin racial domination, especially ones that espouse \u201cpassivity\u201d as a justification.<\/p>\n \u201cThe nation,\u201d King lamented in\u00a0Why We Can\u2019t Wait<\/em>\u00a0(1964), \u201chad come to count on [the Negro] as a creature who could quietly endure, silently suffer and patiently wait.\u201d It was, he insisted, only the spectacle of mass, disciplined, direct action that finally \u201cdissolved the stereotype of the grinning, submissive Uncle Tom\u201d and forced the country to see ordinary African Americans as \u201cactive organ[s] of change.\u201d While historians of African American politics have excavated the long history of struggle that belies the myth of black passivity, King was right to admit that enduring domination also extracts real submission. What mass protest enacts, on King\u2019s account, is the transformation of blacks\u2019 own self-respect, as well as a forceful push for the broader public to recognize blacks as co-creators of a democratic society.<\/p>\n What is especially critical about King\u2019s understanding of racism is the synergy of these three components. Debates about racism tend to either get mired in the search for intentional discrimination and malicious prejudice, or drawn into an all-too-easy equation of racial disparity with \u201cinstitutional\u201d racism or \u201cwhite supremacy.\u201d King, by contrast, tried to be precise about the various causes of black disadvantage while fashioning a conception of racism attentive to its multifaceted power and formative influence.<\/p>\n For example, if we downplay the role that irrational fears play in racism, we often leap abruptly to charges of intentional discrimination and ill will, and thus a consequent desire to punish racists. This fuels the mob mentality, virtue signaling, and scapegoating that dominate much of what passes now for discourse on racial justice. Or if we treat racism primarily as a question of ignorance without taking its intellectual content seriously, the cure becomes \u201cconsciousness-raising,\u201d a didactic, hierarchical, educative politics to reform the souls of fellow citizens. In its professional variant, this paradigm proliferates as \u201cdiversity\u201d training; in its protest strain, it is defended as having \u201cstarted a conversation,\u201d regardless of whether such politics are persuasive or polarizing.<\/p>\n Likewise, if we ignore the sociopolitical dimension, we may treat racism as near-immutable and overstate its explanatory effects. In treating anti-blackness, in Ta-Nehisi Coates\u2019s words, as \u201ca force of nature,\u201d one of \u201cour world\u2019s physical laws,\u201d it can become easy to lose track of the historical and present-day contingencies of race and racial hierarchy. The weight of the past, enormous as it is, must be an aid, not an obstacle, to understanding new features of our racial order. In addition to engaging questions of political economy and gender ideology, thinking about race today means grasping phenomena such as the unprecedented class differentiation among the African American population; the role Islamophobia, nativism, and anti-Latino attitudes play in U.S. politics; the opioid epidemic and life-expectancy decline among white Americans; and how the movement of Asian American men into the top income bracket has become a central concern of right-wing nativism and nationalism. A lack of precision impairs our ability to draw perceptive moral distinctions between different ills and injustices by treating everything\u2014from Hollywood awards and university syllabi to police violence and mass shootings\u2014as all part of a white supremacist totality, which finds full and complete expression in every social phenomenon.<\/p>\n For racial pessimists, the options are even worse. Hope itself becomes a foolish compulsion. Philosopher Calvin Warren, for example, argues that King\u2019s nonviolent politics and ethic of sacrifice offer only \u201cthe humiliated, incarcerated, mutilated, and terrorized black body\u201d as the \u201cvestibule\u201d for a democracy that will never come. In the face of this despair, pessimists console themselves with fugitive gestures of dissent and denunciation. Their view of racism is often so profoundly total that they cast black life in late capitalism as intrinsically heroic\u2014whether it takes the form of burdened endurance among the black poor, the mundane \u201cself-care\u201d indulgences of black elites, or the self-professed nihilism of black cultural critics.<\/p>\n King thought that direct action necessitated sacrifice. One could argue this is not just beyond the duties of the disadvantaged, but masochistic.<\/p>\n Finally, if we ignore the cognitive dimensions of racism, we miss King\u2019s contention, in\u00a0Where Do We Go from Here<\/em>\u00a0(1967), that \u201cthe value in pulling racism out of its obscurity and stripping it of its rationalizations lies in the confidence that it can be changed.\u201d We also fail to grasp the nature of his faith in political resistance, or the scale at which it aims. In \u201cThe Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King\u201d (1961), James Baldwin lauded King as the first \u201cblack leader\u201d able \u201cto carry the battle [over racial injustice] into the individual heart and make its resolution the province of the individual will.\u201d This misunderstands King, however, who seemed less interested in the \u201cracism of the individual heart\u201d than in unmasking the\u00a0ideas<\/em>\u00a0of black inferiority that served to rationalize oppression. King\u2019s interests in fear, ideology, and politics led him to believe, as he expressed in \u201cThe Power of Nonviolence\u201d (1958), that we must \u201cattack the evil system rather than individuals who happen to be caught up in the system.\u201d<\/p>\n This systemic focus, crucially, does not inflate \u201cracism\u201d to make it explain\u00a0all<\/em>racial disparities, but understands that such inequalities are outcomes of many phenomena that interact with racism,\u00a0yet cannot be reduced to<\/em>\u00a0only racism. These include technology, political economy, and cultural patterns. As early as 1964, for example, King presciently warned in\u00a0Why We Can\u2019t Wait<\/em>\u00a0that \u201cif automation is a threat to Negroes, it is equally a menace to organized labor.\u201d Arguing for an alliance between civil rights and labor activists, King foresaw how capital investments in \u201cefficiency\u201d would dislocate middle-class jobs, stagnate wages, and devastate unions\u2019 political power. Granted, discrimination and historical disadvantage would cause these burdens to fall\u00a0hardest<\/em>\u00a0on poor blacks\u2014yet it still opened the possibility of broader political alliances. Indeed, part of what made King worry in\u00a0Where Do We Go From Here<\/em>\u00a0that black nationalism was a dead end was that it seemed to give \u201cpriority to race precisely at a time when the impact of automation and other forces have made the economic question fundamental for blacks and whites alike.\u201d<\/p>\n In King\u2019s recounting in\u00a0Why We Can\u2019t Wait<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Where Do We Go From Here<\/em>, the history of black politics included several crucial \u201cdiscoveries,\u201d such as the black nationalist turn toward black pride, or the litigation strategies of the NAACP. Despite these leaps forward, however, King saw the black political tradition as historically stuck in \u201cdead ends\u201d of accommodationist conservatism, elitism, separatism, and legal fetishism. What had allowed black politics to finally escape these doldrums, according to King, was the adoption and refinement of Gandhian nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience. Judging nonviolent resistance to be the \u201conly morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom,\u201d as he described it in\u00a0Stride Toward Freedom\u00a0<\/em>(1957), King came to appreciate its unique power to undermine racial domination and revitalize democratic politics from below.<\/p>\n Perhaps because of the outsized influence of his 1963 \u201cLetter from a Birmingham Jail,\u201d we tend to think of King\u2019s embrace of civil disobedience as a moral refusal to obey unjust laws that do not conform to higher, natural law. Rarely, however, does civil disobedience manifest this exceptional congruence\u2014nor should it need to. While Rosa Parks, student sit-ins, and Freedom Riders all transgressed particular laws or policies they hoped to overturn, it was more often the case that civil rights activists merely transgressed laws of public order. Thus, as King argued in front of the New York Bar Association in 1965, the justification of civil disobedience is not that it specifically targets an unjust law, but that it is a goad, \u201ccall[ing] attention to overall injustice\u201d in communities that \u201cdo not work with vigor and with determination to remove that injustice.\u201d<\/p>\n This is among the reasons why King, unlike many liberals of his generation (including John Rawls and later Bayard Rustin), was adamant that civil disobedience should be used to attack unjust economic inequalities as well as civil rights violations and conscription. Lacking faith that rights protections, union politics, and formal political participation were sufficient tools to spur economic justice (especially after the disappointments of the Johnson administration), King worried in\u00a0Why We Can\u2019t Wait<\/em>\u00a0that, without mass action, the poor would be left \u201con a lonely island of economic insecurity in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.\u201d In the face of accelerating automation and the elimination of living-wage jobs, King endorsed a number of egalitarian policies, including basic income and a full-employment guarantee, which have once again become rallying cries. Our present-day interest in these policies, however, remains too tethered to technocratic governance. King thought only mass civil disobedience would create, shape, and sustain such transformative goals.<\/p>\n Engaging King\u2019s ideas about racism, political action, and ethics is not the same as agreeing with him.<\/p>\n King\u2019s vision for civil disobedience cannot be separated from his concern with the \u201cevil\u201d of poverty. King argued that our species needs to undergo a dramatic ethical shift in how we think about our relationship to resources, now that we no longer face scarcity. \u201cThe contemporary tendency,\u201d King protested in\u00a0Where Do We Go From Here<\/em>, \u201cis to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity.\u201d As he wrote in\u00a0Strength to Love<\/em>\u00a0(1963), to countenance \u201ca gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty,\u201d or \u201ctake necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few,\u201d is to cultivate a citizenry of the \u201ccold and conscienceless.\u201d Near the end of his life, King hoped in\u00a0The Trumpet of Conscience<\/em>\u00a0(1968) that the \u201cNegro revolt\u201d would rescue democracy from this \u201carchaic\u201d cruelty by evolving into a full-fledged \u201cchallenge to a system that has created miracles of production and technology\u201d but had left many of scarcity\u2019s habits and hierarchies intact. For King, such persistent failures of reciprocity\u2014political, social, and economic\u2014made civil disobedience legitimate.<\/p>\n To be sure, civil disobedience raises questions beyond moral legitimacy. For King, civil disobedience and other forms of nonviolent direct action possess substantial political and ethical merits as well. They are needed to \u201csupplement\u201d procedural liberalism, resisting domination directly. Moreover, unlike the elite politics of lobbying, legislation, and litigation that preoccupied the midcentury NAACP, or the masculinist insurrection that briefly attracted the interest of Frantz Fanon\u2019s self-proclaimed disciples on the left, King noted in\u00a0Why We Can\u2019t Wait<\/em>\u00a0that \u201ca nonviolent army has a magnificent universal quality.\u201d It can transcend many of the kinds of exclusion that other forms of political action place on participation, including those of gender, age, physical disability, education, and wealth. The mass dimension of protest allows for people of all walks of life to be more than spectators, and instead be transformed by their resistance to oppression, rediscovering courage and self-respect in the face of assaults on their dignity.<\/p>\n Indeed, King\u2019s understanding of structural injustice\u2014and the importance of mass participation as a coercive countervailing force\u2014goes a long way toward explaining his radicalization over time. Early in his career, King\u2019s case for nonviolent protest turned primarily on its capacity to elicit shame and spiritual conversion. By 1963 in Birmingham, however, faced with the massive resistance of segregationists (manipulative court injunctions and evasive legal maneuvers, police brutality, surveillance, and outright terrorism), King began to embrace the coercive and realist dimensions of nonviolent direct action. \u201cThe purpose of our direct\u00adaction program,\u201d he proclaimed in \u201cLetter from a Birmingham Jail,\u201d \u201cis to create a situation so crisis\u00adpacked that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.\u201d<\/p>\n King\u2019s admission of the\u00a0coercive<\/em>\u00a0dimension of civil disobedience raises serious ethical quandaries about the exercise of such power. When should civil disobedients break the law? Or boycotts cripple a business? Or public space and public goods be occupied using intimidation? The hagiography around the civil rights movement has allowed Americans to mostly evade such questions, but the sublime and disruptive force of mass civil disobedience is still apparent wherever it topples a government overseas or invites police surveillance and suppression at home.<\/p>\n King, to his credit, was acutely aware of this and devoted enormous attention to theorizing the ways direct action could be ethically organized and sustained. Combining moral commitments with considerations of political efficacy, King thought that direct action needed to be disciplined and channeled through ideals of nonviolence and public appeal, love and sacrifice, integration and democracy. In our more secular and pluralist era, however, the roots of King\u2019s thinking in a knotty metaphysics of natural law and Christian ethics may invite suspicion. Indeed, given the ample historical record of unrequited love, unredeemed sacrifice, and failed integration, it is easily argued that such sacrifices are not just beyond the duties of the disadvantaged but indeed masochistic.<\/p>\n Yet we should not allow this suspicion of religion, or our era\u2019s narrow focus on duty at the expense of other ethical categories, to narrow our concerns. As philosopher Tommie Shelby has argued, drawing on Rawls, invocations of civic duty first require a serious confrontation with the unfairness of the basic structure of society. Moreover, ethical reflection does not simply concern duties and fairness. We must contend as well with the good, the virtuous, and the heroic. King\u2019s example teaches this, while also demonstrating that ethical judgments and convictions are strengthened, rather than diluted, by clear-eyed realism.<\/p>\n However, King\u2019s realism is easily misunderstood. His defenses of civil disobedience, particularly in his early career, are replete with exhortations to take on unearned suffering and voluntary sacrifice in order to win the \u201cfriendship and understanding\u201d of one\u2019s opponents. Psychologist Kenneth Clark, whose testimony played a key role in\u00a0Brown v. Board of Education\u00a0<\/em>(1954), told King that he felt it was \u201ctoo much\u201d to expect that \u201ca group of human beings who have been the victims of cruelty and flagrant injustice could actually love those who have been associated with the perpetrators, if not the perpetrators themselves.\u201d For Malcolm X, King\u2019s brotherly rhetoric was simply disingenuous because King actually\u00a0relied<\/em>\u00a0upon the threat of violent rebellion from below. It was only when \u201cNegroes took to the streets\u201d in the Birmingham riots following the bombing of King\u2019s brother\u2019s house, Malcolm proclaimed in \u201cMessage to the Grass Roots\u201d (1963), that \u201cKennedy sent in the troops . . . [and] put out a civil-rights bill.\u201d<\/p>\n King\u2019s blindness to the gendered dimensions of charismatic authority and hierarchical leadership is reason enough to be critical of his example. Any retrieval of King\u2019s legacy has to amend his triple evils to include a fourth: sexism.<\/p>\n These are still challenging contentions. If the threat of violence from below is part of what draws Americans\u2019 attention to protest, from Birmingham to Ferguson, what kind of \u201cnonviolence\u201d does this amount to? How should we, in our own time, account for the fact that the cameras disappeared in Missouri when the threat of violent rebellion subsided? Or, likewise, that Ferguson remains far more well known than the reliably peaceful Moral Mondays movement, in which protestors assembled at the North Carolina state legislature weekly for over a year (2013\u201314) to be arrested in protest of conservatives\u2019 assaults on voting rights, civil liberties, and social welfare?<\/p>\n Yet, for King, despite disobedience\u2019s complicated relationship with coercion, its nonviolent aspect remained crucial, in part because of its unique ability to throw racist ideology off balance. On King\u2019s account, the racist worldview predicts that the humiliation and disregard dispensed in its name will bring back more of the same. Thus, the longstanding obsession\u2014from Thomas Jefferson to Steve Bannon\u2014with the possible revenge of the world of color against the white world. This fear of anti-white reprisal inspires not only\u00a0backlash<\/em>, but\u00a0preemptive<\/em>suppression\u2014what Vesla Weaver has called \u201cfrontlash.\u201d For King, \u201cadherence to nonviolence\u2014which also means\u00a0love<\/em>\u00a0in its strong and commanding sense,\u201d politically performed a feat of redirection. By unsettling racist expectations and disclosing new possibilities for living together, nonviolence and an ethic of love became vehicles for staging grievance, disrupting distrust and retaliation, and envisioning new forms of cooperation.<\/p>\n This concept of love\u2014which King referred to as\u00a0agape<\/em>, to distinguish it from erotic or romantic love\u2014builds on an ethics distilled from the Parable of the Good Samaritan and Jesus\u2019 commandment to \u201clove thy neighbor as thyself.\u201d King\u2019s defense of love in contentious politics enjoins us to see even our political\u00a0enemies<\/em>\u00a0as moral equals whom we are interdependent with and vulnerable to, and whose needs and welfare we are obligated to consider. We deform the richness of human sociability, King insists, if we allow particularity, enmity, and anger to blind us to this.<\/p>\n While granting the legitimacy of black rage, King argued that it was best, both politically and for one\u2019s own flourishing, to channel anger into less corrosive emotions. Above all, one must avoid the slippage of anger into hatred, a disposition which \u201cdestroys a man\u2019s sense of values and his objectivity.\u201d Hatred blankets the world with suspicion, smothering our broad capacities for appreciation, analysis, and responsiveness. As King warned, it can lead us \u201cto describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.\u201d<\/p>\n For King, one of the great lessons of Du Bois\u2019s life was that \u201che did not content himself with hurling invectives for emotional release and then to retire into smug, passive satisfaction.\u201d \u201cIt is not enough for people to be angry,\u201d King argued; \u201cthe supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.\u201d Crucially, King never denied the existence of righteous anger or the threat of rebellion, but incorporated these passions into his political thinking as challenges to be redirected toward worthier ends.<\/p>\n One concrete implication of this view\u2014beyond curbing the impulse to mock and condemn on social media\u2014is to avoid forms of political resistance that seek to \u201chumiliate the opponent\u201d rather than \u201cwin his friendship and understanding.\u201d These vengeful approaches deny others the capacities for moral learning. They foreclose unanticipated forms of reconciliation and community, and judge, a priori, the life horizons of others based on their worst transgressions, cognitive mistakes, or group identities. Worse, the misguided notion that such practices build partisan solidarity and affirmation are woefully shortsighted. Inevitably, such passions turn inward, destroying organizations with recrimination, excommunications, and cynicism.<\/p>\n Importantly, however, King\u2019s demand cuts in two directions. His faith in redemptive possibility precludes embittered disengagement and spiteful retaliation,\u00a0but does not license complacency<\/em>. It instead demands unyielding confrontation in pursuit of the greater goods of a more just world. To exhort us to the former without insisting on the latter\u2014as many critics of the left continue to do\u2014is to settle for \u201ca negative peace which is the absence of tension\u201d rather than \u201ca positive peace which is the presence of justice.\u201d<\/p>\n In the decades following his death, cynical appropriations of King have become such a reliable feature of public discourse that many younger Americans greet his name with suspicion. Indeed, even those in the Movement for Black Lives, despite commitments to nonviolent direct action and democratic politics, have often sought ostensibly more \u201cradical\u201d ancestors to claim, such as Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, Fred Hampton, and Audre Lorde.<\/p>\n King never entertained the indefensible respectability-politics proposition that blacks must \u2018prove\u2019\u00a0themselves fit for equal\u00a0citizenship<\/em>. His politics are better described as\u00a0a politics of\u00a0character.<\/em><\/p>\n Perhaps this is penance that had to be paid. King\u2019s blindness to the gendered dimensions of charismatic authority and hierarchical leadership within protest organizations\u2014and the black church\u2014is surely reason enough to be critical of his example. And, as Shatema Threadcraft and I have written at length elsewhere, while King became intensely supportive of women-led welfare and tenants\u2019 unions, heralded the inclusive quality of civil disobedience, and promoted the guaranteed-income policy foundational to left feminism, his essentialist views on gender and normative views on the family suffer from severe logical and moral failures. This is the most glaring weakness in King\u2019s thought and the piece that, rightly, has received the most thorough contemporary critique. Any retrieval of King\u2019s legacy has to amend his triple evils to include a fourth: sexism.<\/p>\n Moreover, the black church\u2014which in the nineteenth century Martin Delany called the \u201cAlpha and Omega\u201d in black communities\u2014is today a profoundly weakened institution. The church faces many challenges in our era of political and social integration, prosperity theology, political party clientelism, social conservatism, and heavily publicized sexual and financial corruption. King\u2019s theological commitments were once part of his allure. Now they present an impediment to his embrace among the \u201cunchurched.\u201d One wonders whether the Christian roots of King\u2019s political and ethical vision, and the incredible tradition of church-based organizing that brought it to life, can be suitably rethought in other institutions and traditions, or revived at all in its home.<\/p>\n Some of the present eschewal of King, however, seems less fair and more superficial. In a world irrevocably transformed by the sexual revolution and secularism\u2014not to mention urbanity, black street culture, and the ascendancy of ironic art and self-expression\u2014King can appear both terribly staid and uncomfortably earnest. Burdened with utterly unique political responsibility and his own impossible standards of ethical excellence, King\u2019s words and persona seem weighed down, even beyond the grave, with a self-restraint that can make him feel older, less \u201ccool,\u201d and more distant than black male contemporaries such as Malcolm X or Baldwin.<\/p>\n These qualities lead some to associate King with what has come to be called \u201crespectability politics.\u201d Such critics fail to note, though, that historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham introduced the concept to mark out a\u00a0dual<\/em>\u00a0concern among black activists. The first kind of respectability politics, the version that young activists rightly skewer, is concerned with undermining, through personal conduct, stereotypes about blacks\u2019 deviance from social norms of public comportment, sexual mores, and socioeconomic achievement. This politics is justified only insofar as it works, and, consequently, contemporary debates quickly degenerate into competing judgments of efficacy and how to weigh the worth against the indignity of supplicative appeals to white sufferance.<\/p>\n King can fairly be criticized for not fully interrogating, for example, why Montgomery was able to summon enthusiastic solidarity for Rosa Parks but not for less \u201creputable\u201d victims of Jim Crow. But he never entertained the indefensible respectability-politics proposition that blacks must \u201cprove\u201d themselves fit for equal\u00a0citizenship<\/em>. Even early in his career, when often writing of the need for blacks to improve personal standards, King criticized the cruelty and irrationality of the ostracism and economic burdens visited upon unmarried parents and the incarcerated. Later, King would declare ghetto crime to be \u201cderivative\u201d of \u201cthe greater crimes of white society\u201d in housing, policing, employment, and education. And it is absurd to ascribe to King\u2014a prominent defender of a coercive, confrontational politics of civil disobedience with a sophisticated theory of racism\u2014the anodyne view that \u201crespectable\u201d personal conduct would ever be sufficient to cripple racist ideology.<\/p>\n That said, King did articulate strong convictions about certain standards of personal conduct and comportment. But the justifications he offered were more in line with Higginbotham\u2019s\u00a0second<\/em>\u00a0version of a politics of respectability: the age-old concern with the social bases of ethical virtues. King\u2019s interest in compassion, humility, generosity, courage, thrift, and magnanimity was animated by the judgment that these virtues are essential to one\u2019s own dignity and self-respect, and ultimately to the\u00a0goodness<\/em>\u00a0of one\u2019s life. Perhaps better described as a politics of\u00a0character<\/em>, King\u2019s standards of personal excellence; his warnings against anger, racial chauvinism, and bitterness; and his overriding emphasis on nonviolence and love are part of this ethical tradition.<\/p>\n If oppression sabotages the oppressed\u2019s strivings to live well mainly through a subtle, pernicious evil that suffuses daily life, then the struggle to cultivate and sustain ethical virtues becomes its own battlefront. To ignore that emancipatory struggle demands certain virtues, or to deny that these virtues have significance for the good life, is self-defeating. Even more ignoble is to present such virtues of character as efforts to imitate whites\u2014thus equating whiteness with virtue and flattering perhaps the silliest, most self-deluded and analytically bankrupt conceit of white supremacy.<\/p>\n Now, one may insist (implausibly, I think) that rage is not corrosive to our judgments of beauty and truth, or of the good and the right. Or one may assail the conception of human flourishing on which rests King\u2019s claims about personal standards (his approach to gender would be a great place to start). One may even reject particular virtues, such as humility or magnanimity, as originating in false consciousness or ressentiment. But these concerns at least engage with King as a serious thinker, rather than reduce these commitments to a certain kind of respectability.<\/p>\n King teaches us that the morphology of protest should be treated as a perpetual question, one experimentally and imaginatively rethought in light of technological, cultural, political changes.<\/p>\n Developing a richer understanding of King\u2019s commitments helps us to better appreciate his\u00a0departures<\/em>\u00a0from conventional markers of respectability, including his qualified support of hippie pacifism as well as his celebration of black student protestors who \u201cthrew off their middle-class values\u201d and ceased imitating whites in \u201cdress, conduct and thought.\u201d It also helps us grasp why, when King spent much of 1966 in Chicago\u2019s slums attempting to galvanize a protest movement against ghettoization, he sought to organize gang members, to the consternation of many. Transgressing the norms of a Southern Baptist preacher, King recruited gang affiliates in pool halls and on street corners, and even invited them into his home, engaging them in long debates and training them in nonviolent methods. Such efforts, which have been obscured in King\u2019s legacy, sit provocatively alongside the work of the Black Panthers and Nation of Islam, and anticipate efforts of present-day organizers in Baltimore, St. Louis, and elsewhere.<\/p>\n Engaging King\u2019s ideas about racism, political action, and ethics is, of course, not the same as agreeing with him, much less treating him as the object of uncritical adulation. It is simply to treat him as a profound interlocutor and model of political judgment. King teaches us that the morphology of protest should be treated as a perpetual question, one experimentally and imaginatively rethought in light of technological, cultural, political changes.<\/p>\n This learning will not be easy. Our saturation with images of suffering (black and otherwise) and the balkanization of the media have altered how we respond to documentary images, raising doubts about whether we remain as receptive to King\u2019s strategies of public spectacle. Racial stereotypes have also transformed. Few would now identify blacks with passivity; on the contrary, black protestors are regularly labeled as aggressive, ungrateful, and dangerous. Social media has created a low-cost outlet for every utterance of resentment to gain a hearing. The practice of public assembly has been forever altered by the possibility of terrorism. And nonviolent resistance has become ritualized, with police trained in forms of protest management that rob civil disobedience of the drama of punishment and sacrifice that once gave it gravitas. Street marches, as King predicted, now need to reach massive levels of participation and organization if they are not to be \u201cmere transitory drama\u201d absorbed by \u201cthe normal turbulence of city life.\u201d<\/p>\n Even the geopolitics of protest has changed. Authoritarian rulers are ascendant at home and abroad, European liberals are in retreat, and Donald Trump (as Barack Obama did before him) issues unilateral, global assassination orders from an office decorated with King\u2019s bust. The idea that Americans will be ashamed in the eyes of the world, central to King\u2019s Cold War\u2013era politics, now seems quaint. In recognition of this shift, the longstanding interest among black activists in symbolic appeals to the United Nations and human rights forums has been eclipsed by a mix of domestic protest and electoral politics.<\/p>\n Still King\u2019s call to internationalize nonviolent social justice movements continues to matter in at least one important respect. We face global existential challenges of climate change, nuclear weaponry, war and terrorism, and wealth inequality (abetted by offshore tax havens and attacks on capital controls). Yet the institutions that exercise the most power over these circumstances remain insulated from democratic action and accountability to citizens. If there is any hope to prevent disempowered citizens\u2019 rage and resentment from being exploited by demagogues and reactionaries, it must be channeled into coordinated, enduring social movements that force electoral and economic reckonings while fostering respect for our shared \u201cgarment of destiny.\u201d<\/p>\n King was hopeful, but not blind to the difficulty and costs of these aspirations. Members of such movements will face repression, scorn, prison, and sacrifice. Racism and sexism will threaten solidarity, violence will injure our faith in cooperation, and inequality will breed its rationalizations. But when threats are mortal, retreat and accommodation are avenues to self-destruction. As we scour for exemplars of struggle, we must not write off the United States\u2019 most peculiar radical and his enduring intellectual and political challenge. King calls on us to think and argue publicly about the crises of our present, and collectively determine the broadest range of nonviolent coercive powers at our disposal. \u201cOur very survival,\u201d King wrote in\u00a0Where Do We Go From Here<\/em>, \u201cdepends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.\u201d The spirit of King is most alive when we embrace these challenges and endeavor, with courage, humility, and a sense of the great sacrifices ahead, to shape a new world out of divine dissatisfaction with injustice.<\/p>\n This essay is featured in\u00a0<\/em>Boston Review\u2019s\u00a0print issue,\u00a0<\/em>Fifty Years Since MLK<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Brandon Terry On February 23, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., took to the stage at a sold-out Carnegie Hall. He had not come to rally the flagging spirits of bloodied civil rights demonstrators, shake loose the pennies of liberal… Continue Reading
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