The Tragic Abuse of King’s Famous 34 Words

CHICAGO —  Some conservatives must be applauded for their ingenuity in co-opting Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy and the rhetoric of the civil rights movement. They speak of race in moral terms gleaned from the black-freedom struggle. They pretend to embrace a revolution they bitterly opposed, which is especially troubling in light of their moral assault on civil-rights activists who believe that affirmative action is part of a continuing attack on discrimination. These same conservatives rarely target the real enemies of racial equality: newfangled racists who drape their bigotry in scientific jargon or political demagoguery. Perhaps most insidiously, they seldom admit that whatever racial enlightenment they possess likely came from blacks and their allies who opposed the conservative ideology of race.

When the civil rights movement reached its zenith and accomplished some of its goals, many conservatives recovered from the shock to their belief system by going on the offensive. After eroding the spirit of liberal racial reform, they breathed new life into the racial rhetoric that liberals abandoned. Now, terms like “equal playing field” “racial justice,” “equal opportunity” and, most ominously, “colorblind” drip from the lips of former segregationist politicians, conservative policy wonks and intellectual hired guns for deep-pocketed right-wing think tanks. Crucial concepts are turned inside out. Affirmative action is rendered as reverse racism; goals and timetables are remade into “quotas.”

This linguistic achievement allows many conservatives to claim they oppose the wrong-headed results of the civil rights movement even as they uphold its intent: racial equality. Conservatives thereby appear calm and reasonable on issues of race.

At the heart of conservatives’ appropriation of King’s vision is his notion of a colorblind society. This taking enables conservatives to use King’s philosophy to condemn any policy that promotes color consciousness. Affirmative action, for example, supposedly violates King’s insistence that merit, not race, should determine educational rewards and employment.

The wellspring of such beliefs about King is a golden phrase lifted from his “I Have a Dream” speech’: “I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content or their character.” Of all the words King spoke, few have had more impact than these 34. Tragically, a group of conservatives, whose forbears and ideology have trampled King’s legacy, has used these words to seize and distort King’s American dream. If King’s hope for radical social change is to survive, we must wrest his complex meaning from their harmful embrace.

Even black conservatives have attempted to wedge themselves between King and affirmative action in the name of colorblindness. Shelby Steele wins the symbolic sweepstakes hands down. His book “Content of Our Character” lifts King’s phrase both as title and basis of his vigorous attack on affirmative action. But perhaps the most controversial and bitterly contested appropriation of King’s legacy by a black conservative is that by Ward Connerly, businessman and University of California regent.

Connerly gained national attention for his successful efforts to end affirmative action in the UC system in 1995 and in California by pushing Proposition 209 the next year. Besides his anti-affirmative-action forays into Washington state and Florida, Connerly officially opened his National Campaign Against Affirmative Action on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1997. He defended his choice of the holiday to announce his campaign by declaring that his actions were consistent with King’s goals. He meant “no disrespect to [King] by acknowledging what he wanted this nation to become, and we’re going to fight to get the nation back on the journey that Dr. King laid out.” Connerly believes that preferential treatment for minorities in college admissions policies and in the workplace undermines King’s dream of a colorblind society.

Connerly regards Proposition 209 as the natural extension of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Deviously, the ballot measure pilfered language directly from the 1964 bill, holding that “the state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.”

Never mind that when those word were written, racial presumptions and practices were radically different. For example, the 1964 bill was designed to combat the segregationist laws of white supremacy in the South and de facto segregation in the North. To reaffirm the legal and civil rights of black citizens, such protection had to be cast in language that suggested universal application. But everyone associated with the struggle for black rights understood three facts about this universality: 1) it had to be fought for; 2) it was not self-evident; and 3) it was not inalienable. In other words, there was more than one version of “universal.” The trick was to incorporate the version of universalism recognizing black rights into that legitimizing white privilege, while preserving the illusion of neutrality on which such rights theoretically rested. Hence, a philosophical principle was transformed into a political strategy, enabling both whites and blacks to preserve each’s stake in an universal value: democracy.

The great mistake of Connerly and his conservative colleagues is to think that American ideals, and the politics that support them, possess a neutral, universal meaning when, in truth, they are made up of specific, interest-driven priorities and arguments. We are on firm footing as long as we remember that ideals govern political and social life or, more realistically, provide an intellectual leg to stand on. But if we conflate ideals and practices, if we mistake our views as eternal and complete, and the next person’s or group’s as imperfect and partial, we are on dangerous ground.

Conservatives of Connerly’s ilk rarely make such distinctions when it comes to race. They are often bewitched by a stultifying literalism that leads them to embrace bizarre, reversal-of-fortune scenarios, like the one that Connerly painted when he imagined that opponents of his tactics would “stand in the doorways like the segregationists did in the ‘60s.”

Similar thinking led California’s Republican Party to adopt a devious plan to use an image of King delivering his line about content of character in a 1996 political ad urging voters to support Proposition 209. When civil rights leaders protested and the King estate threatened a lawsuit, the party relented but not before damage was done. Not even Connerly could stomach his comrades’ display of ideological immaturity: He claimed he would have never used King in this way, since a backlash was predictable. Yet, he fired his political consultant, Arnold Steinberg, when Steinberg said “the use of King was juvenile, at best, and counterproductive, at worst.”

King has wrongly been made the poster boy for opposition to affirmative action. His glittering moral authority has been liberally sprinkled on conservative assaults on civil-rights communities and progressive black interests, all because of 34 words. Rarely has so much depended on so little. If conservatives were to read and listen to King carefully, they would find little basis in his writings to justify their assaults in his name. Moreover, they would be brought up short by his vision of racial compensation and racial reparations, a vision far more radical than most current views of affirmative action.

It is fitting that King have the last word. He argued that it “is impossible to create a formula for the future that does not take into account that our society has been doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years.” King went on to question how the Negro “could 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.” *