Civic CipherHow Did MLK Feel About Today’s Political Issues (Part 2)
In the second half of the show, we discuss what MLK’s thoughts would be on hot-button issues of today based on his actual words. We discuss what his views would be on equity vs equality, the teaching of CRT/American history, and Affirmative Action.
Keep on riding with us as we continue to broadcast, balance, and defend the discourse from the Hip Hop Weekly Studios. Welcome back to Civic Cipher. I'm your host, Rams's job.
He is Ramsy's John. I am q Ward. You are tuned into Civic Cipher, Yes.
You are, and we want you to stay tuned because we are going to be sharing, in his own words, doctor King's thoughts on concepts that were around when he was around. But later we're named affirmative Action. Later they were named critical race theory. Later they were named uh, you know, equity versus equality. And we think that this is critically important because again, oftentimes we see doctor King's legacy co opted and whitewashed and sanitized to fit a narrative that he did not stand for. And we're here to set the record straight. Yeah, a lot to stay tuned for. But before we get there, let's discuss the ABA becoming a better Allied BABA and Today's BOBA. Sponsored by Friends of the Movement. You can sign up for the free voter wallet from fotmglobal dot com to support black businesses and allied businesses as well as make an impact with your spending Again that's Fotmglobal dot com. And today we want you to check out the Kingcenter dot org. That's fitting and I'm going to share a bit from their website. Our mission is to empower people to create a just, humane, equitable, and peaceful world world by applying doctor King's nonviolent philosophy and methodology nonviolence through sixty five. As our nation faces unprecedented turmoil in economic instability and uncertainty, and the ongoing struggle for global freedom and equality, we at the King Center remain committed to proactively educating and training individuals and leaders across all sectors in nonviolence three sixty five to influence equitable change in our national and global infrastructure. I'll join us in creating a more just, humane, peaceful, and equitable society where opportunity isn't limited by race, income, gender, age, orientation or zip code. Again, i want you to check out the Kingcenter dot org. Uh, if you want to contact them directly, you can do so, and it's contact at the Kingcenter dot org. So that's the email address again, that's contact at the Kingcenter dot org. And of course I'm gona leave you phone number here four oh four five two six eighty nine hundred one more time four oh four five two six eighty nine hundred the Kingcenter dot org. If you feel so inclined to make a donation, if you feel so inclined, to find out some of the other ways that you can support this effort. My understanding is that doctor King's daughter runs this organization, if I'm not mistaken, so that would be Ernice King that is at the helm here. But it is affiliated with doctor King's family, and so this is about as close as you're going to get to, you know, what Doctor King would would have wanted so all right in his own words, you know, the first part of today's episode, we were talking about how doctor King's image is. It is used almost like it's used against us.
You know.
One of the things that I will never accuse far right conservatives of being, at least in terms of their leadership, is stupid. They're brilliant. It's just a brilliance mix with like what I believe to be like a sort of evil.
I thought y were never accused him of being honest, but never never accusing them of being stupid.
Also, yeah, they're not, they're not. They do this quite well. But in the same way that. You know, I'm sure there are people that will make an argument that Adolf Hitler was brilliant and also evil. Right to use doctor King's words against the very people that doctor King was advocating for is a particularly sinister maneuver, and do it with a smile on their faces, right, And this is something that we see year after year, evoking God in the church while doing so. And it's it's very hurtful to see. But you know, fortunately there are some people that know better. There's some people that had to read the books, some people that you know, we're very passionate about our history. Some people that ask questions like, well, you know, this is I'm talking about myself now, Well, why is it that black people are always in the poor neighborhoods everywhere we go? This is a question I asked myself when I was younger, like are we just born to be poor? Are we just born to be in jail? Are we? Why are we the ones that the police are always mad at? What? You know, these are question like questions you might ask about about yourself. Why is it all as black people? And I'm black, it's just what I have to look forward to. And then because you're asking those questions, it might lead you to some answers, and if you do enough research, you might see, Okay, there are systems. That's a that's a word that a lot of these far right conservatives don't like, but they exist.
They'd rather pretend that these invisible things we are imagining.
Them, oh, and that have a victim complex. In that space of victim, yes, but no, it's very very easy to research and very easy to look up. And once you get to that point, you start to realize, oh wow. And then when you look at a person like doctor King and what he stood for, you're like, oh, okay, I understand that this is something that has been happening for a long time. And you know, for for those of us on this side of history, we'll say doctor King is definitely a hero for them to take our hero, rewrite his story, and use the rewritten version of our hero to justify their plight when their plight flies in the face of Indeed, what the heroes did for and what we stand for is again that's a particularly sinister form of evil. So I would like to kind of set the record strate one of the things that we talked about quite a bit last. Well, we've been talking about this forever. Is affirmative action, right, And the same people that will invoke doctor King's you know, I have a dream speech that also stand in opposition to affirmative action, that feel like affirmative action is reverse racism or whatever. It's like, you can't you can't get both. You can't you could get both.
If you honestly didn't know better. Oh no, they know better, And that's my point. Yeah, but they were making the mistake of thinking that they were. If they read something and thought, oh, this is what he meant, and then did what they did because that's what they thought he actually meant, maybe they could, yeah, but it wouldn't feel as terrible.
They don't know for certain that.
That's not what he meant, and still evoke him and his language and his words to fight against what he thought fight. That's the thing that makes it especially sinister and diabolical.
And the thing is like, it's almost like the erosion of affirmative action was based on a technicality. It was based on the word equality and not the word equity. But you have to bear in mind at the time, during the Civil rights movement, equality was the next logical step toward equity. Right, because again, the civil rights movement is the transition period between Jim Crow and let's call it the era that we live in now, you know what I mean, So that the civil rights movement to look at Jim Crow and say, okay, if white people can eat at this restaurant, then black people can't, that is unequal. If white people can go to the school and black people can't, that is unequal. And so the only language that really fit in that moment was equality. And now that word is being used to erode things like affirmative action.
And then by the time we collectively got to the word equity, the oppressor put themselves in position of oppressed. Oh wait, and are now currently fighting against equity, Yes, because they somehow feel.
Like and that's why I say they're not stupid unfair. Yeah, And that's why I say they're not stupid because as a strategy, it's you know, it's it's given us a tough you know, we got a tough, uphill battle. But again, in doctor King's own words, this comes from the La Times. William J. Bennett's August twelfth commentary is the latest example of a trend in conservative public relations. Opponents of affirmative action excuse me, claiming to be the heirs of Martin Luther King Junior, They invoked the sentence from King's nineteen sixty three speech looking forward to the day his children would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Okay, so that's the cherry picking, right, Doctor King said, You're not supposed to judge someone by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, which again in a vacuum, without any other context, you know. And again if they were if that was an honest like, if they just didn't read the rest of it, or they didn't know better, or there was no Ronald Reagan to try to push a sanitized version of doctor King onto the United States of America to appeal to white moderates that was needed at that time, to ensure victory in the election cycle and appease you know, the whatever his political affiliates or whatever at the time. You know, we don't end up here, but I'll continue reading. Bennett conveniently ignores one fact. King was a strong supporter of affirmative action. And Why We Can't Wait, published in nineteen sixty three, he argued that given the long history of American racism, blacks fully deserved special compensatory measures in jobs, education, and other realms. Four years later, and where do we go from here? He wrote, quote, a society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him. Doctor King's own words, the same Doctor King, that they cherry picked this color of their skin, content of their character bar from okay. Bennett's Peace not only misrepresents King, but reduces the civil rights movement's complex outlook to the quest of a colorblind society. In fact, as King wrote, the movement's goal was far broader to quote make freedom real and substantial, substantive for blacks by overcoming pervasive racial inequality and absorbing them into the mainstream of American life. King saw, affirmative action is one of the many measures, some colorblind, some not needed to counteract the legacy of centuries of discrimination. Now, for many people that may not know, I'm going to give you a quick laundry list of things that you can look up in terms of the legacy of discrimination. These things include redlining. That's something that you can look up in later years, the war on drugs. That was a discriminatory practice. We already discussed Jim Crow and the legacy of that. There are many tragedies and atrocities that have taken place that have resulted in effectively land theft from black people. It could have been through legal means, it could have been through just marching in and taking it whatever. But all of these things have had some impact on economic impact on black people. Black people were left out of the GI Bill, Black people were left out of during the what is the word I'm looking for, great depression? The stimulus package. I forget the name of it, but I think it might have been FDR whatever designed a welfare program to benefit white people and not black people.
Black people were freed from slavery and not given property.
For that money, no economic basis upon which to build sure, and we haven't gotten to like environmental racism. We haven't gotten to healthcare, we haven't gotten education, we haven't gotten to employment and all that other sort of stuff. But those are the systems, and there are legal things that have been in place, some still on the books. We just don't practice them the same way.
And to our color blind brothers and sisters, that is a very cowardice and intentionally non conflict position to take non confrontational, non confrontational a better way to say that you're not color blind. Yeah, not literally or figuratively. And that's not what we're requesting. That's not what we want. That's not what doctor King was asking for. He wasn't asking you to be color blind. He was asking you to not treat us worse because you see our color. Pretending that these injustices don't exist, don't make you a better or more enlightened person or a more decent.
Person, and pretending that they don't have lasting implications and lasting effects on not individuals, data data, if you look at outcomes for black families, outcomes for white families, Pretending that these injustices did not exist, prevents you from seeing the root cause of the problem and coming up with a solution that will actually address it. And you will be born, live in, and die in a society that treats certain people unfairly because you have chosen the reality that makes you the most comfortable, not the reality that actually exists.
Yeah, there's statistical outcomes that would be impossible to happen randomly. Right, The thousand wealthiest white people in America have more collective money than all of the black people in America. I think they're forty million black people in America something like that. Just under one thousand. The top thousand richest white people have more money collectively than all of the black people that live in America. That is statistically impossible to happen randomly. There have to be systems in place for those type of outcomes to be true.
So let's move on. Because CRT the actual teaching of this history and not in school what the GOP is talking about when they say it. Yeah, we're talking CRT is American history full stop. Right, We said that many times on the show.
But what they say, I want I want us to not say this incorrectly. What the GOP is trying to have outlawed in schools that they call CRT is American history critical race theory as a scholastic endeavor is some collegiate completely different than what they're talking about. It sounded like we just said was that CRT is American history. They are not the same. Yeah, Okay, they're been conflated in that way. That thank you because you said that the right way. Okay, So where we are is we have to and we have an hour in some cases half hour to try to explain so much and it just defies, like logistically it doesn't work right.
But hopefully we've given you the tools to do a little bit more research this stuff. We don't make up none of this stuff. This stuff is all. We have to like research all of this before it comes into the show. So when we share things with you, it's so that you have insight into forms of oppression systems. The legacy of oppression is so that you understand the economic basis upon which all of the privileges and advantages and advantages in a society rest, and all of the shortcomings and pitfalls in a society rest.
Right.
History provides a framework so that you understand, you have context. You don't think, well, black people are just this way and white people are just this way, and that's the way it goes, because that's not true. You know, everybody is born a clean slate. If you accept that as your reality, then the data ought to suggest that there's something systemically wrong because the data is reflect correct. So let's talk about why teaching the history is important. Okay, So this comes from the King Institute via Stanford dot Edu. Okay, it seems to me that education has a two fold function. This is Doctor King's words to perform in the life of man and in society. One is utility, the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve, with increasing facility, the legitimate goals in his life. Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for oneself is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truth, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and in the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to descern true from false, the real from the unreal, the facts from the fiction. Sounds to me based on that that Doctor King would have been in support of teaching the fullness of American history and providing context, age appropriate context for people so that at five years old they could understand concepts that a five year old could.
Understand and then at eighteen and have the desire to actually learn about that. There it is, and you, what you've done is created more empathy. Now, more empathy means that black people are going to benefit, and it might cost white people a little bit of some of their status or whatever, and that is a hard no on its face for a lot of far right It would have a larger collective benefit even as white people, absolutely oppressors and very greedy, selfish people would have something taken from them. Everyone else would benefit.
Thank you, Thank you, And when we have more time, will make that case, because I feel like that needs to be made again. And so we're about due for another one. But this last one equity versus equality. I got these words from the Atlantic, but again they're they're doctor King's words. Why is equality so assiduously avoided? Why does White America delude itself? And how does it rationalize the evil it retains? The majority of white Americans consider themselves committed to justice for the Negro They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle class utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self deception and comfortable vanity. Now again, at the time of the Civil Rights movement, the order of the day was equality. Treat us equal, we want equal rights. Right. But if you and I are playing monopoly, because everything goes back to economics, that's economics shapes outcomes across the board, full stop. But if you and IQ we're playing monopoly, okay, Let's say you're the white piece and I'm the black piece. Okay, and you get to play Monopoly and go around the board for two hundred years, three hundred years. Sure, and then you get to collect all the money, buy up all the properties, whatever. Then you get to let me play. But I'm hampered by let's call it the Jim Crow era where I can only throw one dice and can't I only collect one hundred dollars when I pass.
Go. Okay, you're also starting the game with no money.
Right exactly. I didn't even get nothing. I got no forty acres, no mule. You started with nothing. Then after that period of Jim crow. Let's say a gentleman comes and introduces a new rule. Let's call him doctor Martin Luther King, right, and he says equality, everybody gets to get two hundred dollars. Everybody gets to roll both dice. Do I even have a modicum of a chance of catching up to you?
Absolutely not?
Okay, Now, equity equality is one thing. Equality is not nothing. But equity seeks to restore the injustice. And what's happening is because doctor King's words were about equality, those words have been co opted and used against us to attack us on affirmative action, critical race theory, and pretty much everything else. And that leaves us where we are. So we need to know this. And unfortunately, in this society, the only way that we can engage is to vote. Got to wait to do it, but that's what we do. So with that in mind, we'll leave it right there. As always, thank you very much for tuning in to Civic Cipher, especially our first time listeners. Welcome. We like to have fun as often as we can, but you know we deal with heavy stuff. I have been your host, Rams this Ja, he is.
Rams this Jah. I am q Ward and we are forever grateful for our listeners, both those who are joining us for the first time and those who have been riding with us for years. We appreciate you.
Yeah. Absolutely. If you like, head over to our website, civiciper dot com. You can download this episode in its entirety or any previous episodes. You can also submit any questions any topics you want us to cover. You can make a donation. The show exists with your support. We appreciate that, and it grows with your support as well. Also, be sure to follow us on all social media at Civic Cipher, especially on YouTube, and of course you can follow me on social media at Rams's jah.
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Until next week, y'all, peace,
