The dream still matters

The right likes to invoke colorblindness but won’t live by it.

Martin Luther King Jr. said a lot of things in his speeches and writings, but among the most famous is his line about a dream that his children would “one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

There was a time five to 10 years ago when this line was often quoted by conservatives who intended it as a critique of progressive diversity initiatives, affirmative action, and other measures that tended to reify racial categories in the name of progress and equality.

And progressives would often push back, noting that watering down King’s ideas — or even just the “I Have a Dream” speech — to this point about individualism is robbing the vision of much of its content.

That is correct. King’s dream includes the notion “that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together” — a transformative economic vision and not just a kind of liberal minimalism.

But I think the events of the past year should remind us that the liberal minimalism is not trivial.

There’s a lot going on in Minnesota right now, but at the core is the Trump administration’s embrace of the collective guilt of all Somali Americans. And that’s in the context of the Trump administration directing federal law-enforcement personnel to engage in racial and ethnic profiling of working-class Hispanics, with the conservative justices of the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that such Kavanaugh Stops are legitimate under American law.

This sort of discrimination was a frequent topic of conversation in the period of American life directly before the peak woke era. In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, many conservatives argued that airport security should be stepped up, but in a way that just targeted people who were (or seemed to be) Arab or Muslim. The standard conservative view about such matters was that, while it was wrong to act on the basis of an inaccurate stereotype, as long as you could establish that it was factually true that young men of color were responsible for the preponderance of shootings in New York City, it was fine to implement a “stop and frisk” regime that singled them out for stops.

I do not think that these policies are fine.

I agree with King’s view that we should judge people based on their individual attributes rather than statistical inferences based on their skin color. If you want to argue that visas should be allocated on the basis of skills or human capital rather than to refugees or through the current family reunification paradigm, that’s fine. But it should require an individualized assessment of the aspiring immigrant.

To understand the import of what King is saying, I think you have to acknowledge that the right-wing view of this is not unusual. Most people’s interest in politics is somewhat selfish. Most policy choices involve tradeoffs. If you’re a white person, perhaps it’s tempting to argue in favor of extremely intrusive security measures that you are personally exempted from. Since most people are white, you can probably assemble a self-interested coalition on that basis. Congressional Republicans are fighting to force D.C. to stop using cameras to catch speeding drivers in the city because a lot of people who are tough on crime suddenly become hardcore civil libertarians when it comes to enforcement measures that might affect them.

The call to actually treat people as individuals with the same rights as everyone else and to calibrate tradeoffs that are acceptable on a non-discriminatory basis is a genuinely meaningful call for political and moral change, not a vacuous slogan. And it’s one Republicans are utterly failing to live up to.