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I just don’t think it matters much what King thought. What matters is what America agreed to with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. My impression from school is what we achieved consensus on was “people should be judged based on the content of their character not the color of their skin”, but not any of King’s more radical views. That’s why this quote from King is so powerful, not because it accurately sums up his views on race, but because it accurately sums up America’s new consensus on race.

Even affirmative action IMO overextended past this consensus to the point of actually requiring “judging based on the color of skin”, which is why I don’t like it (and my impression is most Americans agree with me, because the consensus is that judging people on race is bad). That’s why prop 16 failed. That’s why the attempts to redefine “racism” as “power+privilege” or “structural racism” bother me, because they are attempts to take the hard-fought disgust at racism as interpersonal prejudice and transfer it to more contested concepts just by playing word games without doing any real persuasive work.

I would be interested in the actual history of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Did the legislators passing that bill think they were authorizing affirmative action? Given that the discriminatory measures in place were racially race-neutral already, what did they think they were banning?

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This is a good article with respect to King's actual thought - as you rightly say, King was a much more radical figure economically than he is popularly given credit for, and the conservative praise of King tends to wipe that out.

At the same time, I think you fail to give credit for what conservatives - and yes, conservatives like Tom Cotton - genuinely have learned from King's version of the Civil Rights movement, and why the "content of character" part genuinely is important to them, and to America as a whole.

The question is: WHY (as you note) were there no Black Fortune 500 CEOs before 1987, no Black university presidents of notionally integrated universities, no Black foreign service officer before the 1920s etc. etc., when there was no law forbidding it? It can't SOLELY be explained by "structural racism" - that might explain why there were fewer, but not why there were none. And the obvious, blatantly obvious answer as to why there were none, is that the large majority of people in charge of appointments and promotions within those institutions were personally racist, racist in a very simple and obvious and straightforward way. They were racist in the North, just like they were racist in the South, though in the North it didn't tend to express itself in legal segregation. White people simply didn't believe that Blacks were suited to positions of leadership, or capable of taking responsible high-prestige roles.

So when King talked of his dream about people being judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, that addresses something real, and something that everyone knew to be real - people were daily being judged in exactly that way, and that was a major thing (not the only thing, maybe not the most important thing, but still a major thing) that was holding Blacks back at the time.

And modern conservatives accept that - and, I think, in private as well as in public. And they have been convinced that it was wrong. You simply won't find someone who believes that Blacks are intrinsically unsuited for high office or responsible or prestigious roles in society. That is a huge, vast change from 50 years ago, and King's words in that speech, even if taken out of the context of his thought as a whole, are a major reason why. Those words, and the appeal to justice and common humanity in them, have won the day in modern America.

So it isn't true to say that "The conservative movement, at the time, opposed him in the name of federalism, free markets, and the idea that facially race-neutral laws are all that one can reasonably ask for. And the conservative movement today largely stands by those ideas." That is wrong. The modern conservative movement argues that Blacks asked something much more radical, and moreover that they were right to ask for it. Blacks like King demanded that people change their attitudes towards those of other races, that people recognize that a person's race does not affect their qualifications for a job, or their ability to perform well in any area of society. And that demand for a radical change of attitudes in the name of basic fairness has been accepted by the modern conservative movement.

Now, you're right that that isn't all that King demanded, it's not even perhaps the most important thing that he demanded, and that his thoughts on race and class and economics went well beyond that, into areas that neither the conservatives of his day nor modern conservatives accept. But King convinced conservatives, as he convinced liberals, on that one issue, and (I would argue) it's a really important issue, one which explains the iconic status that King has among conservatives as well as liberals in modern America.

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When should the first black Fortune 500 CEO have been instated?

Let's create an alternate history. In 1964, Martin Luther King casts a powerful spell that prevents all Americans from literally seeing skin color, or remembering their previous views on race and ethnicity. Everyone is unavoidably judged entirely on the content of their character, it becomes literally impossible to judge people on race or ethnicity.

At the same time, Congress passes some kind of technocratic law of the sort that Matt favors to help poor people, including poor children, and it goes great.

But otherwise, things remain the same. The Fortune 500 companies remain as they were, their executive ranks remain unchanged. There are no black CEOs. The next time a CEO retires, they do a job search and probably get someone who's currently a CEO of a Fortune 1000 company or a VP of a Fortune 500 company, and he's white too.

Black kids start going to selective schools in much greater numbers, since they have money to do so due to technocratic reforms and are not barred by racism since racism is abolished. But, realistically, the children of laborers, even with a lot of economic opportunity, and no racial animus against them, do not go to Harvard in the same numbers that do the children of doctors, lawyers, executives, academics, whose parents put their kids on railroad tracks to that life, who have connections and understand what those universities value, who tutor their children formally and informally and surround them with peers who get the same deal.

In this world, I don't think that there's a black Fortune 500 CEO a ton before 1987. And I think that it'd be probably at least three generations before you couldn't find a statistically significant link between being black and being of lower socioeconomic status. Maybe more that three generations!

Obviously, in the real world, we did not abolish racism in the 60s, and real racism does slow the upward mobility of blacks. And we also don't have great technocratic laws giving everyone a lot of opportunity, and that also means upward mobility is limited.

But I've long understood late 20th and 21st century liberals' racial policies as being about frustration with how long organic upward mobility takes even when it's not really held back by racism or economic opportunity. I think conservatives tend to feel comfortable saying, "if it's getting better, there are natural limits to how fast it can get better and that's okay," while liberals tend to say, "if it hasn't gotten to such and such a point already we need to force it to that point."

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I think a lot of conservatives get a free pass on racial issues because they claim simultaneously that their guiding principle is laissez-faire •and• that it's equality of opportunity. The two things aren't compatible. The 1964 Civil Rights Act creates equal opportunity by restricting the freedom of private businesses to employ whomever they choose.

Obviously conservatives are free to argue that too much redistribution is bad for efficiency. But when they argue that redistribution is wrong in principle, even though anti-discrimination laws are fine, they're trying to occupy a middle ground that doesn't exist. If you really don't believe property rights should be restricted to reduce market-generated inequalities then you can't.support civil rights laws, because that's just what those laws do.

I'm not sure how helpful it is to point this out, though, because under Trump it seems the GOP is dropping its rhetorical comment to equal opportunity in any case. You never hear conservatives arguing that gay people should have equal opportunity to buy a wedding cake; it's all about the baker's exercise of property rights in accordance with her religious beliefs. They still aren't claiming that anyone has a religious right to refuse service to black people, but I can see it going in that direction. Maybe it was better when they were logically inconsistent.

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I genuinely find it striking how derided micro aggressions are and how they are so often put in opposition to materialist politics.

I am pro like more materialist improvements in people’s lives. I make a good living but the ways in which I have to mask my autistic traits still hurts. The way that I can’t be honest in all dealings with people that I’m bisexual or an atheist still hurts.

I don’t see any conflict in these things. We need both materialist improvements and a more accepting world.

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“Equality of opportunity” is a horrible phrase. If a group of 40 million truly enjoyed opportunities equal to those of a group of 190 million, average outcomes for the two groups would be very, very similar. That’s math, specifically the central limit theorem.

If one group systematically has lower wealth and income, shorter life spans, and higher incarceration and illegitimacy rates, it follows that opportunities are unequal.

The problem is it’s hard to formulate any politically or even materially feasible notion of equality. Putting a stiff tax on incomes amplifies the inertial power of wealth. Tax inheritances, and those most able to build wealth in a single lifetime will rise. Eliminate all economic distinctions (far chance) and beauty and charisma would dominate. Mandate that all children attend public schools and children with better genes and/or better parents will get the best grades. As long as people are free to accept and reject intimate partners, some people will have and others will covet.

The overarching goal should be human happiness. The basic problem with massive economic inequality is that it prioritizes the whims of the rich over the basic needs of the poor, the affluence of relatively few over the security of the bottom half or three quarters. Hollow phrases like equality of opportunity or even “equality” lead in incoherent directions.

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founding

Wonderful post. Your grandfather would be very proud! And this bit below is an elegant and moving summary of the whole:

In the “I Have a Dream Speech,” he refers to the Declaration of Independence as a “promissory note” on which “America has defaulted … insofar as her citizens of color are concerned” but also that “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.”

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For full social equality we need to abandon the very idea and terminology of "race" which is inescapably tied to archaic 19th century notions of meaningful innate differences between groups of humans. It's linguistically impossible to continue talking about "race" without perpetuating those ideas that are embedded in the very terminology itself.

There's little more cringe-inducing than listening to well-meaning progressive people earnestly try to explain the difference between a "race" and a the more modern idea of "ethnicity" in an attempt to salvage the outdated concept of race into something that isn't offensive yet provides some meaning that isn't provided by the more modern term "ethnicity."

As King recognized, it's easier to move past the idea there are innate differences between groups of people when one group isn't mired in generational poverty, hence the need for uniform economic redistribution to put everyone on some basic common level.

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I really liked this article. The ending paragraph made me think, “Have I ever actually heard a BLM activist lecture lower class white people about how they need to view their class oppression through an intersectional matrix?”

I don’t think so. This lecturing is almost uniformly never directed at lower class white people themselves. Anyone doing such lecturing is most of the time part of a largely upper class white power structure with power and wealth, who is working to re-direct anger towards lower class white people.

Whether or not such anger is totally undeserved, or whether this power structure will actually make a lot of people’s lives better remains to be seen. I’m not ready to go “Dismantle the elites and give power to society’s most radical elements” just yet.

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Matt’s argument often boils down to “act like a politician not like an activist”

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Matt,

I think you are missing the appeal of the concept of Privilege. You keep making the strong point that the DEI/privilege approach to issues around race in this country is inferior to a more economic approach. Yes, strong point that I am not going to rehash.

But why don't you steel man the privilege point? WHY is it that it is so appealing to some people?

I think that it is appealing because is a good theory, in the ways that we judge theories. It is simple (i.e., parsimonious) while still having great explanatory power. It seems to be broadly applicable. And there doesn't seem to be much evidence against it.

Obviously, it doesn't profess to be the only issue, so there's room for other things. But it gets us pretty far.

The concept of privilege seems to work well for racial issues. It works well for class. It works well for gender. Sexual orientation. ELL status. Immigrant status. It's a concept that really can be broadly applied

So, it's easy to build (lefty) coalitions around it. It's tempting to talk about because it seems to explain so much of what we see.

Now, I know that you are not suggesting that it is wrong. Rather, you keep pointing out that evangelizing this theory and making it the center of an even broader discourse is not EFFECTIVE, politically. And you make that point well.

But rather than simply yelling/snapping/whining, "Stop doing that," it might be more effective to meet those you presumably wish to convince where they are more carefully (i.e., with care) help them to get where you want them to be (i.e., a place where you think they actually more will progress on their goals -- goals that you generally believe in).

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I will say that I feel like your comment thread used to be more interesting.

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Lots of really good points here, and I love the choice of subject matter, but I feel like MY is missing key parts of MLK's public arguments.

First, he was willing to take on populism directly, as in his "Letter From Birmingham Jail": "First, I must confess that over the past few years 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 White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice."

Second, while MLK didn't use the term "microaggressions," he talked about things that we would call that. He repeatedly refers to "dignity," as in "Birmingham Jail": "a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality . . . who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses." He connects the use of words with the growth of people's fear: "your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness.""

So while I think all the points about MLK's belief in redistribution are excellent and worth shouting from the rooftops, I do not think it's accurate to suggest that MLK was a believer in pure populism (he took on white moderates explicitly), nor does it seem accurate to say that his major works didn't talk about things that today we would call "microaggressions."

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Matt writes:

'But if you want to understand why racial justice advocates aren’t satisfied with the “judge by the content of character” nostrum, it’s because King’s version of that dream was the endpoint of a program of massive material redistribution to build a radically more egalitarian society.'

I mean, it's true that racial justice advocates aren't satisfied by that, and it's true that many also favour economic redistribution, but I'm really not sure that's the *reason* they're going in the direction they're going. If so, why not just advocate for a radically more egalitarian society in economic terms?

That's not what they're doing, or I think what they would view themselves as doing.

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I think the thing about King's thought which you indirectly note a few times, including in the sub-head, is that it was drawing on a very clear tradition, namely radical Christianity. He was a preacher, a doctor of theology and he drew enormously from that well, in his oratory but also in his thinking. He's very much challenging along the same lines along which Jesus is reported to have challenged: what does it mean, to leave your fellow man in the dust? It seems pretty clear that the biblical Jesus would have as a starting point not focusing on someone's skin colour, but that is very clearly only the beginning of a very long list of increasingly difficult moral demands. And it's very obviously that tradition, that belief that inspired Rev King.

And while it's obvious and reasonable why agnostic (or Jewish, or atheist) leftists gloss over that source and focus on what the impact would be of King's approach, I do wonder why self-proclaimed Christian conservatives (like Tom Cotton) don't want to engage with King's thoughts as Christians, given that's the cornerstone of what King was saying (and as you note, he buttressed it with a *lot* of Scripture)

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One move I’ve observed is people agreeing that we need a more material focus and then going to reparations or other race-specific programs as the strategy for doing this. In the economic/material lane you can either push universal redistribution that is still racially leveling in practice (baby bonds some such) or race specific ones like UBI only for black residents or economic development grants for Black/Latino entrepreneurs or reparations for slavery, etc. where would King/Rustin fall on this one? Racially universal but targeted by income/class right?

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