MLK Day, 2018

Monday, January 15, 2018.  It is a sub-zero day here in Boston, the kind of raw winter day that has you going outside only if you have access to fun things like skiing or skating or snowshoeing.  Otherwise, a good day for books and newspapers and grading exams from my law students.  And for thinking about where we are these days.

It’s MLK day, and in this household we often try to take some time to reflect — on what his words and life meant, on the courage it took to look into the face of hatred not with anger or submission but with love and commitment.  The courage to insist, as Lincoln did, that the country live up to its founding ideals, knowing that such insistence would someday cost him his life, as it did for Lincoln.

King’s legacy gets dumbed down just a little bit each year, so that we risk losing not only the power of his message but also its breadth.  How many of us know what he said about the Vietnam War?  Or about poverty?  How many of us know what J.Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. did to him over decades of surveillance and subterfuge?  Have you read Letter from Birmingham Jail?  (If not, give it a try; you’ll be surprised to learn how much of it still applies, still resonates.)  Can any of us fully understand what it took to adhere to non-violence when the white backlash turned so violent, and so many other black leaders called for different means?  I am forever astounded at the man’s courage, and the intellectual coherence of the different strands of his thinking.

It has taken MLK Day to get me back to writing.  In this age of Twitter, with President Trump issuing as many as sixteen Tweets per day, many false, many non-sensical, all distracting, it becomes difficult to know what to take on.  Engaging in serious discussion seems not to be what this is all about — but in the meantime some serious things are happening while we’re distracted by the latest #shithole assertion.  So my apologies for taking a break from the psychological grind of the Trump Presidency.  I’m still here doing what I can; I just haven’t been writing in this space.  I intend to resume, starting today.

We are close to the one year anniversary of the Trump Presidency.  Those who thought he might change for the better after taking office are either disappointed or in denial.  He is, to quote David Remnick, “chaotic, corrupt, incurious, infantile, grandiose, … and of a Neronic temperament.”  (See https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/15/the-increasing-unfitness-of-donald-trump).   The settled practices of republican democracy are under constant and daily assault in ways too numerous to count.  The only core principle that can be discerned from this Administration is that if former President Obama had anything to do with it, it must be destroyed.

Anyone who still thinks that the election of 2016 was mostly about the Democrats’ inability to connect with white working class voters has his head in the sand.  As Ta-Nehisi Coates lays out so brilliantly in his new book “We Were Eight Years in Power, An American Tragedy,” one cannot understand Trump without understanding his explicit tapping into white resentment of perceived marginalization at the hands of “others,” and Trump’s intentional fanning the flames of racism and bigotry.  Obama, immigrants, smart women, people of color — these are all what is wrong with America, the narrative goes, all that must be undone or at least put in its place in order to Make America Great Again.   Back to the good old days when women wouldn’t speak up about sexual assault, when blacks knew to lay low and keep their mouths shut, when “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.”   (Andrew Jackson’s portrait has been moved to the Oval Office, for symbolic emphasis.)

Which brings us back to MLK Day.  One of the clear truths that emerges from King’s work is the clarity that America has never been great for everyone.  It has often been great for some people, but it has been downright awful for many.  He asked us to face the truth that this structural awfulness has not been accidental.   Why is this so hard to accept?  Can we please forgive those people who shake their heads in frustration when another rich white man says what a great country this is?  Great for whom? At our founding, only white men of property were eligible to participate politically, about ten percent of the population.  The rhetoric of equality was placed on top of a foundation of inequality, for future generations to make “more perfect.”

The first part of King’s address from the Lincoln Memorial — the part we don’t listen to as much — was the formal demand that we close the gap between the American promise and the American reality.  He asked us to recognize that we held certain truths to be self-evident, and that among them was that all men are created equal.  So why exactly is it that blacks can’t cash that same check, he asked.

 

To read Letter from Birmingham Jail today is to be struck by how little has changed, despite the fact that we’ve now had a popular and thoughtful African-American President for eight years.  We still suffer from the legacy of what Bryan Stevenson calls our dual national sins:  genocide and slavery.  To which we can add their  progeny:  Jim Crow and mass incarceration.

Some big social changes have happened since King was killed in April 1968, fifty  years ago.  Gay people can now marry, an unthinkable thought twenty years ago.  Marijuana is now legal in many states, and simple possession is not considered worthy of law enforcement attention.   Once these walls started to crumble, they fell quickly.

But not so with race.  Having never done the hard work of truth and reconciliation, the nation remains weighted down by the sea anchor of white indifference, the very same indifference of which King spoke so eloquently from the Birmingham Jail.

He said:  “I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate.  I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not … the Ku Klux Klan … 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.”

He was speaking to all of us, no?

Whether it is speaking truth to power and resisting our American Nero, or reaching out across difference, we have no choice to keep fighting for justice.   As King so eloquently said to a group of middle schoolers in 1967:  “We must keep going.  If you can’t fly, run.  If you can’t run, walk.  If you can’t walk, crawl.  But by all means, keep moving.”

If we are to emerge successfully from this great stress test of our republican form of democracy, it will be because each of us, each in her own way, has kept moving, kept reaching for a future more true to our professed ideals.