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Happy Birthday, Dr. King
To Write Off the South is to Surrender to Bigots
By GREG MOSES
January 14, 2004
It is the day before Martin Luther King’s birthday,
2004, and I am reading with great sadness reports of a
recent political analysis that says to Democratic
candidates for president, "forget the South, white
voters will not be coming back to you this year."
From my home base in Texas, I cannot disagree with the
report. I have watched the new racism and the new
Repulbicanism rise together in close collaboration for
the past twenty years. I have seen it up close.
I was there in a small Texas town 20 years ago when a
rising political star told a frail and elderly black
woman to get herself a new husband. And I was in that
room when the room burst into laughter. The paradigm of
racist Republicanism was born that day, and it has been
winning votes ever since.
For me, the culmination of the process was exemplified
by December’s announcement that Texas A&M University
would drop its 20-year-old commitment to affirmative
action. The major players in the decision have solid
credentials in the Republican establishment, including
the corporate leader of Clear Channel who acts as
chairman of the board of regents, the former director
of the CIA who serves as president of the university,
and a Republican Governor who quietly sits and watches
this experiment in backlash, without saying anything at
all.
Not to mention a president, whose influence over
federal civil rights policy can be palpably felt by the
absolute silence from the Office for Civil Rights.
According to promises that George W. Bush himself made
in writing as Governor of Texas, the OCR is supposed to
be an active partner in the civil rights policies of
Texas higher education, but OCR looks more like a
silent partner these days.
All this is sad enough for the South that produced the
great Civil Rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s,
but it is doubly sad during these days of national
tribute to King.
There are white voters who have not gone over to
Republican racism. For this reason, we do find some
relatively progressive representatives. But progressive
white voices have been deliberately targeted for
removal by a redistricting battle that proved the
Republican Governor could speak quite a lot when he
wanted to.
Where white Democrats are supposed to find a future in
this mess is a question as nasty as the recent
political analysis indicates.
Yet, during this commemoration of King’s birthday, we
can review what he said in his chapter about "Racism
and the White Backlash" when he wrote his final book in
1967.
In Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? King
argued that, "we must turn to the white man’s problem."
That problem, argued King, could be diagnosed in a
contradictory personality that always takes something
back for everything it gives.
The Texas A&M decision would be a classic illustration
of this "strange indecisiveness and ambivalence". The
university president promises to add new resources for
marketing and recruitment. But since something has been
given, something else must be taken away. Gone now is
affirmative action in admissions.
Backlash in America, King reminds us, is the norm
rather than the exception. The Civil Rights Movement
was the exception in American history, so far as white
America is concerned.
Not all white America, of course. But white America as
a whole has a predictable pattern of behaving as if
white America as a whole were the most important people
in history.
King’s frankness about white racism is eloquent.
"Racism is a philosophy based on a contempt for
life.... Racism is total estrangement.... Inevitably it
descends to inflicting spiritual or physical homicide
upon the out-group."
Today, you can hear the pain of Texas leaders who stand
bewildered before the Texas A&M decision. Leaders who
were never consulted, advised, or warned about the
surprising turn of policy, because why? Because they
were not enough respected. And in the aftermath of
their well-organized and collective complaint, we hear
silence. The voices that THEY represent need not be
heard.
In light of President Bush’s recent declarations that
we must return to outer space with gusto, we may note
what King wrote in 1967, that the nation’s enthusiasm
for solving great problems was curiously selective. "No
such fervor or exhilaration attends the war on
poverty."
Or in light of the billions that have been budgeted for
global war, we might again attend to King’s
observations, "In the wasteland of war, the expenditure
of resources knows no restraints; here our abundance is
fully recognized and enthusiastically squandrered." And
King was talking about war budget that amounted to a
mere $10 billion per year.
As we drift in the direction of Republican racism,
outer space enthusiasm, and big bucks for war, it would
serve us well to consider what our great national
philosopher counseled us in 1967. American progress has
always been in the hands of dedicated minorities who
resisted that drift.
"That creative minority of whites absolutely committed
to civil rights can make it clear to the larger society
that vacillation and procrastination on the question of
racial justice can no longer be tolerated." What we can
do is never give up.
Greg Moses writes for the Texas Civil Rights Review,
where this essay originally appeared. He can be reached
at: gmosesx@prodigy.net