MLK and the white moderate

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What do you think?

White people are bad
0
No votes
Orange people are bad
5
18%
Moderates are idiots
1
4%
Full House was a retarded TV show
8
29%
Communism is cool
1
4%
Only black people are moderatates
1
4%
Take out a third mortgage on your house to purchase Bitcoin
2
7%
MLK day is a day with no astrological significance whatsoever
6
21%
Buddha preached the middle path and he’s dead
4
14%
 
Total votes : 28

Re: MLK and the white moderate

Postby cmsellers » Tue Jan 16, 2018 7:16 am

A point worth mentioning is that white people in the US tend not to really think of ourselves as white most of the time. I want to believe that ultimately race shouldn't matter, and that's a goal we should strive for, which means only focusing on race when you're dealing with actual racism, with law enforcement for example. I went to a very liberal middle/high school and was taught that I should flagellate myself for being white, and I did at first, but then I came to reject that. Then when I saw people at my college insisting that I should support various stupid proposals by some minority students to benefit minorities at the expense of the college as a whole because they were minorities, I felt acutely white, and angry about it.

I ultimately settled on the liberal position of "we need to treat everyone equally," which I believe is still the consensus position in this country. But I'm sure it helped that I knew minority students and faculty who also took that position, and who actually stood up to the activists demanding absurd things. If I felt like all the minority members of my college were hostile, would I have harbored racial resentments, the way many Trump supporters seem to?

Now there are issues where racial awareness is important and those are worth calling out even if makes white people feel attacked. I'm always amazed at how many people don't believe the police and the courts have a racism problem, and I'm sure it makes a lot of them feel attacked. With these people you probably are exposing latent racism. Yet more Americans support Black Lives Matter (the modern equivalent of MLK) than oppose them, and this is despite the conservative media falsely portraying them as radicals who demonize white people and want special treatment. (MLK similarly suffered people falsely calling him a communist plant.) It shows that a reasonable message of "the playing field is slanted, we need to correct it" can reach people.

However the wrong strategy is to actually demonize white people and demand special treatment. This is what I often encountered in middle school through college. In the short term you may win over naive college students, Marxist professors, and timorous administrators, but in the long term you risk alienating people, people who actually do want to do right but don't see "doing right" as tilting the playing field against themselves. When you demand that white people look at everything through a racial lens and tilt the scales in your favor, you run the risk of achieving the first without the second.
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Re: MLK and the white moderate

Postby Lindvaettr » Tue Jan 16, 2018 5:39 pm

Moderates play a key role, as I see it, by slowing everyone down. They are obstacles, but not necessarily bad ones. Activists and counteractivists both tend to be very impassioned, and fairly biased. They want to fix the issue they're passionate about, but don't necessarily understand the complexities from a social, legal, or political level, and are likely to be heavily biased towards their own side.

If society was a parking lot, activists are kind of like drivers all trying to get the best spots. The best way to get the best spot is to drive straight at it, and if everyone's driving straight at the best spots, a lot of bad stuff is going to happen when they all get to the same spots and can't all park. Moderates, in this case, tend to serve as speed bumps and medians. Drivers can still get to the best spots, but they have to slow down and drive around in an orderly manner. Things can't be too disrupted, otherwise they become chaos. Sure, this means that the debates might be drawn out longer, and the activists might have more opposition, but I don't think that's a bad thing.

Additionally, the point of activism isn't to solve problems. It's to identify problems and get the attention of the people who can solve them. Racism, sexism, economics, whatever, the average person and the average activist are not equipped to deal with real world solutions to these problems. They're far too complex and involve far too many aspects to be solved by just saying, "Stop racism!" Moderates are often the ones to say, "Yes, let's solve racism, but let's do it in a way that works for as many people as possible, in the long term". Change doesn't happen overnight, and moderates are the key factor in holding back the people who want to solve it as fast as possible.
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Re: MLK and the white moderate

Postby Learned Nand » Thu Jan 18, 2018 1:43 am

A Combustible Lemon wrote:I'm saying it's not a very good response to criticisms of tone because it's not a response at all. It just blames white moderates for not caring more. As I mentioned, they don't care more and you can't make them. But every white moderate is a white not actively resisting the civil rights dialogue, a white ready to vote for the party that promotes better civil rights enforcement because it's not a dealbreaker for them. Even as apathetic as they are, they're important.

I don't blame him for lamenting apathy. I'm not blaming him at all, I just think his quotes are used to construct this fake civil rights history where even moderate white people were completely undependable cowards slaved to the status quo, as if calls for respectability and civility have no merit to them at all.


I can't really speak to how the quote is used by people, but in its original context, it's neither lamenting apathy nor responding to criticisms of tone. It's responding to criticisms of tactics and timing. MLK isn't asking the white moderate to care more, or to participate more. He just wants them to stop criticizing him for acting via protest, and acting now.
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Re: MLK and the white moderate

Postby A Combustible Lemon » Thu Jan 18, 2018 7:20 am

Tactics and timing are absolutely part of tone. Are the kneeling protests not being criticized for exactly timing and tactics right now?
And he is asking the white moderate to care more and participate more, only it's phrased as shaming them into action instead of actively telling them to act. His letter would mean absolutely nothing if it wasn't meant to reach the white moderate or lament their non-participation. And in what way would telling them how bad they're being at empathizing with the black man stop their criticisms?

You sound like he was just bragging about how he didn't need white liberal opinions instead of participating in dialogue.
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Re: MLK and the white moderate

Postby Learned Nand » Thu Jan 18, 2018 10:05 am

MLK isn't trying to shame the white moderate into action, nor is he bragging. He's not telling them they're bad at empathy. He's asking the white moderate to stop criticizing the methods and timing of the civil right's movement. Here's how the letter starts:

Letter from Birmingham Jail wrote:My Dear Fellow Clergymen:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.


Right from the opening paragraph, he makes clear that he's responding to specific criticisms. That's the purpose of the letter. He then spends several pages responding to particular criticisms. Here's the opening lines of several paragraphs:

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against "outsiders coming in."
...
You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham.
...
One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely.
...
In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence.
...
You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme.


The quote originally shared in the thread is buried within this section of the letter. It comes after a defense of civil disobedience, and he returns to that defense immediately afterwards.

It doesn't make sense to read the letter as a call to action for white moderates. The closest he gets to that is when he expresses disappointment in organized religion for ignoring or opposing the civil rights movement; but those criticisms remain specific to religious organizations throughout the letter, and are, regardless, not the primary issue.

In fact, at the end of the letter, he makes it clear that he doesn't want the reader to join in his activism because he doesn't want that to be necessary:

I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother.


MLK isn't shaming the white moderate, nor is he telling them that they're bad at empathy. Each of the criticisms mentioned in the quote is addressed at length in the letter. His arguments aren't bare appeals to empathy; they're substantially more philosophical than that. But I'd recommend reading the letter in it's entirety to get a better idea of them, because it's a bit too much to fully address here.
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He tested with Turing,
his circuits fried during,
and now we'll have peace for a spell.
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