by A Combustible Lemon » Mon Jan 15, 2018 11:10 pm
I don't often see this quote used to excuse extremism as much as a shallow understanding of how civil disobedience is supposed to work, twisted by years in which definitions of protest have been whitewashed slowly, Whether or not MLK meant it doesn't really matter, it's used as a club to beat white moderates over the head with if they ever show reluctance to follow the current trend in protest, no matter what their reasons are. It's like the idea of respectability politics being a bad thing.
Civil disobedience works because the institutional response to the disobedience is supposed to be completely disproportional. It's about how much punishment was visited on people doing something as simple as making their own salt or sitting in the wrong bus seat. Modern protests have been completely neutered so that civil disobedience won't work, because the current institutional response is to rope off an area so people can go protest in there without inconveniencing anyone, and anyone who tries to head outside that cordoned off area is very obviously doing something that can immediately be criticized.
Some people however think this means riots themselves can be now considered civil disobedience, as if the random destruction of other peoples' property is ever in any way justifiable. This is the rhetoric where MLK's idea that riots are the voiceless trying to make themselves heard becomes useful, completely ignoring the context that black people at that time were literally voiceless. Where completely victimless means of protest were also outlawable. That scene has completely changed, picketing is now so mundane people ignore it the same way they do internet ads.
I'm not saying there's absolutely no way civil disobedience works today, victimless protest of things that shouldn't be illegal can absolutely happen, say with transgender people using their preferred bathrooms. But it's been very very defanged. Today's injustices as protested by black people aren't as simple as some people being completely forbidden from paths others are allowed by virtue of their class, but more complex questions about how, for example to reduce the victimization of black people by the police when black people are more likely to commit crimes because of their historical oppression. It's a situation where if every black person was treated individually and objectively with respect to the law they'd still be disproportionately represented simply because poor people are also more likely to commit crime, and black people are much poorer on average than white people. How do you civilly protest racist statistics? If you view it without the collective lens, pretty much nothing wrong is happening. (Not to say "it's so easy, just stop looking at it collectively". Different lenses allow you to see different sides of a story, and multiple philosophical views are pretty essential to understand real topics and their various proponents and detractors)
That's my thoughts on the context around the quote, but as for the quote itself, I think he's just wrong. No one deserves the support of white moderates. You can of course shame them into behaving by pointing out how unjust your position is, but even the poorest poor person stealing a rich person's carrot is victimizing the rich person. It's not that fucking simple. Collective lens might make the rich person's class and poor person's class a good enough reason to justify it, maybe even explain why in truth, due to the balance of power and historical injustice, the rich person is victimizing the poor person by making him desperate enough to want to steal the carrot. Anyone who views this individually (or as collectivists would say, is situated in a position where they can view it individually, which of course they consider a position of ignorance) sees it as obvious that the poor man's taking something he doesn't own from a rich man who's done nothing to him.
All people are probably collectivist up to a point looking at this information, of course. Nothing's ever as simple as that and different people will have different responses to similar injustices. "Food stamps are only good as long as they have very strict limits on their usage, because if you're using them on luxuries you obviously can live without them", as opposed to "Poor people already have a shit life, why are you scrutinizing their budgeting when it's no longer your money but government money".
So like, fuck MLK if he thinks white moderates need to accept his protest and shut up and sit down. They're allowed to contribute. If they're not ashamed of in-words-only support, they're not that interested in your cause. The absence of tension is absolutely a worthy thing to want. They've weighed the absence of tension against the presence of justice and they've decided on the absence of tension. What part of this is them lying, exactly? Black people absolutely need the support of white moderates, it's literally the only way they will get institutional support. Rich people, people funded entirely by patrons and fucking Aristocrats made socialism, not workers. To think white people didn't at every step help provide institutional support to end every ended injustice is way too common nowadays, and it's fucking stupid. As conservatives often point out, White People didn't start slavery, but they sure as hell stopped it, to the point where every stable government today has an anti-slavery stance. And quotes like MLK's whitewash this away to make this idealized version of history where black people threw a country wide tantrum which magically got them civil rights despite literally every white person being against them.
(A related rant, there's so much fucking infantilization in white-guilt flavoured history, it's ridiculous. Most white people probably don't even know Gandhi was a fucking member of congress during the time he was protesting. India was already self-ruled to a large extent since about the early 19th century, slowly gaining more and more autonomous powers. Pakistan and India's partition is written of so often as if it was the British being dicks when Jinnah had been arguing for a seperate muslim nation for about 20 years at that point. Who's to say if partition hadn't happened, India wouldn't eventually go the way of Pakistan and become a theocratic shithole that declared hinduism the national religion and oppressed muslims?)
WE ARE ALL FLOATING IN THE WINDS OF TIME. BUT YOUR CANDLE WILL FLICKER FOR SOME TIME BEFORE IT GOES OUT -- A LITTLE REWARD FOR A LIFE WELL LIVED. FOR I CAN SEE THE BALANCE AND YOU HAVE LEFT THE WORLD MUCH BETTER THAN YOU FOUND IT, AND IF YOU ASK ME, said Death, NOBODY COULD DO ANY BETTER THAN THAT...