Understanding King's View of Affirmative Action
Tom Sugrue is right to note in his post, "Remembering and Misremembering King," that Martin Luther King Jr. supported "compensatory treatment" for this nation's history of discrimination against blacks, but the record is very clear that King wanted the compensatory remedy to be color-blind and to include poor whites.
In chapter 8 of Why We Can't Wait, King began with the sensible observation that passage of Civil Rights legislation would not wipe the slate clean of the historical legacy of discrimination. King says "compensatory or preferential treatment" is justified, making an analogy to a foot race. "For it is obvious that if a man is entered at the starting line in a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up with his fellow runner." King goes on to say, "America must seek its own ways of atoning for the injustices she has inflicted upon her Negro citizens."
It would appear that King is getting ready to propose what we now call affirmative action - a system of preferences in employment, education and contracting for black citizens. Instead, King proposes a "Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged." He explains, "While Negroes form the vast majority of America's disadvantaged, there are millions of white poor who would also benefit from such a bill...To this day the white poor also suffer deprivation and the humiliation of poverty if not color...It is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness, should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor."
Here, King had two insights. One is that a program aimed at economically disadvantaged people would - because of our nation's history - disproportionately benefit black people. While colorblind, the program would not be blind to history. Second, he saw that a program aimed specifically at blacks would sever the progressive coalition. In my book, The Remedy, I quote from a letter King wrote to the freelance editor for Why We Can't Wait:
"Any 'Negro Bill of Rights' based on the concept of compensatory treatment as a result of the years of cultural and economic deprivation resulting from racial discrimination must give greater emphasis to the alleviation of economic and cultural backwardness on the part of the so-called 'poor white.' It is my opinion that many white workers whose economic condition is not too far removed from the economic condition of his black brother, will find it difficult to accept a 'Negro Bill or Rights,' which seeks to give special consideration to the Negro in the context of unemployment, joblessness, etc and does not take into sufficient account their plight (that of the white worker)."
This thread of thinking was consistent with King's increasing attention to the Poor People's campaign, which sought to bring low income individuals of different races together in common purpose. In November 1967, King told leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, "Gentlemen, we are going to take this movement and we are going to reach out to the poor people in all directions in this country. We're going into the Southwest after the Indians, into the West after the Chicanos, into Appalachia after the poor whites, and into the ghettoes after Negroes and Puerto Ricans." He continued, "And we're going to bring them together and enlarge this campaign into something bigger than just a civil rights movement for Negroes."
King was headed in a very exciting direction. Today, his color-blind vision is labeled "conservative." but in fact it had a very progressive purpose. As Clay Risen notes, all of this changed when King's life was cut short - and when a serious of riots further divided the white and black working classes that King sought so hard to unite.
I think we may only now be starting to understand what we lost in that terrible year of 1968.
March 31, 2009 1:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Kahlenberg is attempting to squeeze King into a political box in which his ideas do not fit. King did not, as Kahlenberg does, see compensatory treatment and anti-poverty programs as a zero sum game. Both were, in his view, necessary. King built on a long tradition of black-labor organizing that recognized that it was necessary to give blacks a larger slice of the pie and, at the same time, increase the size of the pie so that black and white workers were not competing with each other for scarce resources and, most importantly, to expand economic opportunity for the underemployed and unemployed.
March 31, 2009 3:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
Squeezing King into that "box" is necessary for "conservatives" who view their continued embrace of color-blind racism as a positive thing.
Kahlenberg continues the fallacy of stressing poverty as the tie that bound whites and blacks. Any linkage of blacks and whites through poverty was fragile at best, certainly not lasting. The simple fact is that if -- and I stress if -- improving the lot of the poor was a goal worthy of the the attention of American conservatives, trickle-down economics would cease to be, as those conservatives policies would surely by now have rolled down like the mighty waters and would have lifted those poor whites out of the intractable poverty in which they still find themselves mired.
But since Mr. Kahlenberg chose to quote Dr. King, let me do the same, but from "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?" (Chapter One: Where Are We?, New York, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1967) [all emphasis mine]:
With Selma and the Voting Rights Act one phase of development in the civil rights revolution came to an end. A new phase opened, but few observers realized it or were prepared for its implications. For the vast majority of white Americans, the past decade -- the first phase -- had been a struggle to treat the Negro with a degree of decency, not of equality. White America was ready to demand that the Negro be should be spared the last of brutality and coarse degradation, but it had never been truly committed to helping him out of poverty, exploitation or all forms of discrimination. [...snip] 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 many of their white allies had quietly disappeared. [...snip...]The word was broken, and the free-running expectations of the Negro crashed into the stone walls of white resistance. [...snip...] The paths of Negro-white unity that had been converging cross at Selma and like a giant X began to diverge.
King continues:
A good many observers have remarked that if equality could come at once, the Negro would not be ready for it. I submit the white American is even more unprepared.
[...snip...]
White America would have liked to believe that in the past ten years a mechanism had somewhow been created that needed only ordery and smooth tending for the painless accomplishment of change. Yet this is precisely what has not been achieved. Every civil rights law is still substantially more dishonored than honored.
This is King writing in 1967 -- in contrast to "Why We Can't Wait," written in 1963.
To be blunt, the "conservative" idealism that Kahlenberg suggests is so admirable today for its color-blind embrace of all, has been exactly the opposite. It allows conservatives to pay cheap lip service to the goals of Dr. King while doing everything in their power to tear down that which has been built, and impede any and all progress in the name of "fairness" and "equality."
What Kahlenberg and conservatives do not want to admit is King was not just for "the decent treatment" of black Americans, but that the receive their full share of the blessings of this society, not 3/5ths and not half. And that to accomplish this goal, massive spending and job development -- to not only provide blacks with their fair share, but increase the size of the so whites would have nothing to complain about because their lot would improve as a consequence -- was critical to the success of the movement.
But look at what happened: no sooner than Johnson's Great Society, War on Poverty and civil rights offensives started, so did the white backlash to restore the status quo. The phony "color-blind" meritocracy conservatives pursue, is just license to overlook the fundamental problems that remain essentially unchanged today and dismantle what change had been put in place. It is conservatives who have fought to eliminate affirmative action programs in both employment and education, two of the linchpins of King's master plan.
We have progressed incrementally, and least of all because "conservatives" are doing anything constructive to move the country forward.
March 31, 2009 6:22 PM | Reply | Permalink