The 2008 presidential election was a near textbook example of how you can win an election, and still lose a key voting bloc, in this case white voters. The deck was horribly stacked against the GOP. It had a failed, flawed George W. Bush presidency. It was plagued by corruption and sex scandals. It was widely blamed for crashing the economy. It had an aged, politically disheveled, presidential candidate, and a laughingstock vice presidential candidate. It lugged the baggage of two unpopular wars. Yet, its presidential standard bearer, John McCain still got nearly sixty percent of the overall white vote. In each of the three major elections since 2008 — the GOP’s wins in the 2009 New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races and Republican Scott Brown’s stunning upset victory in the Massachusetts Senate contest — the GOP candidate ran far better among whites in their state than McCain did against Obama in 2008. Beck knows that history and the political mood of the majority of white voters well. He’s stoked it for months on his TV show and he stoked it again at the Lincoln Mall and mocked Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement along the way. He speaks for the white majority in America. Earl Ofari Hutchinson ☀
The civil rights movement, as King understood it, was an attempt to construct a new kind of Christian nation - a beloved community of love and equality.
But here’s the rub, and where King parts strongly from Beck. It is important to remember that “King’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail” was written to clergy who believed that segregation was an issue that needed to be dealt with locally. They did not want “outside agitators,” such as King or the federal government, intruding in their local affairs. They did not want the government taking away their liberties, even if it was the liberty to uphold segregation.
As the “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” makes clear, and the entire civil rights movement confirms, churches and local municipalities did little to stop the violation of the human and civil rights of blacks in the South. It was up to the federal government to step in - with a show of force in some cases - to take away the liberty of some (segregationists, who in some cases were in the majority) so that the liberty of all (including a minority, blacks) could be preserved.
It is hard to imagine the civil rights movement without government intervention. The Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) integrated schools. In 1957, the 101st Airborne Division made sure that Brown vs. Board was implemented in Little Rock, Ark. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 reaffirmed rights that blacks were already supposed to have received under the 14th and 15th amendments.
This is why a massive rally of libertarian Tea Partyers commemorating King and claiming his legacy is so ironic. I am not saying here that the Tea Partyers are racist, but I am pointing out the fact that there have been times in American history - the civil rights movement being one of them - when local initiative has failed and the only way to bring justice, including “Christian” justice, has been through “outside agitators” such as the federal government.
What we saw on Saturday was a group of anti-big government Tea Party libertarians trying to reclaim the civil rights movement - an initiative whose success ultimately required one of the most forceful and moral acts of federal power in American history.
We” is Emmett Till, tied to a cotton gin fan in the murky waters of the Tallahatchie River. “We” is Rosa Parks telling the bus driver no. “We” is Diane Nash on a sleepless night waiting for missing Freedom Riders to check in. “We” is Charles Sherrod, husband of Shirley, gingerly testing desegregation compliance in an Albany, Ga., bus station. “We” is a sharecropper making his X on a form held by a white college student from the North. “We” is celebrities like Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando and Pernell Roberts of Bonanza, lending their names, their wealth and their labor to the cause of freedom. “We” is Medgar Evers, Michael Schwerner, Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo, Cynthia Wesley, Andrew Goodman, Denise McNair, James Chaney, Addie Mae Collins and Carole Robertson, shot, beaten and blown to death for that cause. “We” is Lyndon Johnson, building a legislative coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats to defeat intransigent Southern Democratic conservatives and enshrine that cause into law. And “we” is Martin Luther King, giving voice and moral clarity to the cause — and paying for it with his life. The we to which Glenn Beck belongs is the we that said no, the we that cried “socialism!” “communism!” “tyranny!” whenever black people and their allies cried freedom. The fatuous and dishonorable attempt to posit conservatives as the prime engine of civil rights depends for success on the ignorance of the American people. Leonard Pitts Jr. ☀
This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind … When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I’m not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another (Yes), for love is God. (Yes) And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love … If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.” Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. Martin Luther King ☀
Americans talk about race when somebody like Dr. Laura transgresses the boundaries, when Henry Luis Gates reacts harshly to a police officer in his kitchen or when the Jena 6 are charged with attempted murder. We choose up sides and say our piece. I’m not sure if anything positive is accomplished by these occasional shouting matches beyond a fleeting opportunity to blow off a little steam. Dr. Laura is free to say pretty much anything she wants to say. Nobody is talking about filing a lawsuit. The First Amendment remains in full force. But we have the right to be offended by offensive talk. We are free to say what we will, but we’ve got to live with the consequences. I can’t remember a period in my adult life when so many people felt the need to engage in crude and intolerant rants. Things were worse in the late 50s and early 60s when I was a kid. But back then we had folks like Martin Luther King talking about a Beloved Community marked by compassion, mutual respect and radical inclusion. Hardly anyone talks that way in our brave new twenty-first-century world. That needs to change. Dr. Laura’s racial meltdown ☀
Our job as progressives is to never be satisfied, to always be impatient with the pace of change. Frederick Douglass, Alice Paul, Walter Reuther, Martin Luther King, Jr.- none of them were ever satisfied with the progress being made, and the Presidents they worked with were constantly aggravated at the pressure they received. But big changes got done when Presidents understood the importance of working effectively with them and the movements they represented. It is time for Obama (and his staff) to understand this and make the effort. Even when we are being irritating, even when you think we are being unfair, the White House needs to reach out their hand to progressives and work with us instead of venting about us to the media. FDR understood that and got re-elected by landslides with enthusiastic base support in the toughest of times. LBJ understood that in 1964, got re-elected in a landslide with progressives happily behind him, but then forgot it and let Vietnam break his party in the ‘68 election. Bill Clinton understood that, avoided a primary in tough political circumstances, and won re-election easily with a pumped up progressive community strongly behind him. I hope President Obama comes to understand that it is your base, including the professional left, that can sustain you in tough economic and political times, but that you need to reach out to them rather than complain about them. Mike Lux ☀
Just to drive the point home, here’s a third number: 1.3
That’s the percentage likelihood that a bottom 10 percenter will ever make it to the top 10 percent. For 99 out of 100 people, rags never lead to riches.
These estimates come from research by one of Bowles’ former students, American University economist Tom Hertz, published in Unequal Chances, a 2004 book co-edited by Bowles. To arrive at these figures, Hertz mined the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a survey of 4,800 American families that’s been updated each year since it began in 1968, the year Martin Luther King inspired Bowles to study inequality.
It may not come as a shock that rich kids who grow up learning to sail eventually buy yachts, while the offspring of burger-flippers might hope to rise to be the night managers for whole crews of burger-flippers. What’s troubling about this research is that poverty tends to persist through generations, no matter how individuals try to improve their circumstances.
So, much of what Americans tell their children is wrong. It doesn’t really matter how long you go to school or even necessarily how hard you work. The single most important factor to success in America is “one’s choice of parents,” as a contributor to Unequal Chances wryly put it.
What about natural intelligence? “The problem with IQ is that it’s just not very important in determining who’s rich and who’s poor. And most people don’t believe that,” Bowles says.
What about education?
“Being willing to sit in a boring classroom for 12 years, and then sign up for four more years and then sign up for three or more years after that—well, that’s a pretty good measure of your willingness to essentially do what you’re told,” Bowles says.
This bodes ill for the American Dream of upward mobility. It also puts the lie to a can-do cliché underpinning much US economic policy: namely, that people in need should get a “hand up” rather than a “hand out.”
The economic rationale for putting a cap on unemployment benefits and severely restricting welfare, even for the poorest Americans, is that people won’t look for work if the government is too generous.
If Bowles is right, however, the answer is more handouts, not less.
The other difficulty we all know too well is the human tendency to insist that some are not worthy of respect, that dignity doesn’t apply to the poor, or to immigrants, or to women, or Muslims, or gay and lesbian people. Prophetic work is about challenging human systems that ignore or deny the innate dignity of all of God’s creation. That’s the aspect of prophetic work that’s dangerous, for those systems often respond with violence – the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, the disappearance of righteous gentiles who rescued Jews during the Second World War, or the expulsion of a Ugandan bishop because he asked the church to treat the gay and lesbian members of his society with dignity. Katharine Jefferts Schori ☀
At the end of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, he was in the midst of organizing a Poor People’s March on Washington. He had come to recognize that poor people of every race were suffering the same injustices and living economically marginal lives. It is time to begin again where King ended and refuse to let race divide us as we work for economic justice in the United States and in the world. Valerie Elverton Dixon ☀
…King’s words these days are treated with the kind of disingenuous but-of-course lip service usually reserved for the Bible or the Constitution. Martin Luther King Jr. is frequently cited as something like a talisman — as an invocation and a protective inoculation. King is invoked most often these days defensively, as a counter-balance to some statement or stance that would otherwise seem to contradict the great revival of civil rights that King the preacher and person and actual historical figure embodied. slacktivist ☀
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Martin Luther King Jr. ☀
…in a pluralist society such as ours, bringing morality and religion into politics does carry certain risks. But these risks are unavoidable in democratic politics. Liberals in recent decades have made the mistake of ceding to religious conservatives a monopoly on some of the most potent sources of political argument. It hasn’t always been this way. Think back to the abolitionists, some of whom were evangelical Christians, who argued that slavery is a sin; or to Martin Luther King, who drew on religious arguments against segregation. While it’s true that some people use religion cynically, it’s also the case that, on many political issues, it’s not possible to be neutral on the underlying moral question. I think liberals should engage rather than avoid the moral and religious convictions that citizens bring to public life—whether the issue is abortion, same-sex marriage, poverty, health care, or the environment. Michael Sandel ☀
[Nonviolence] is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil. It is evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil. Martin Luther King Jr. ☀
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