MLK and Color-blindness: A Speech

Martin Luther King and Color-Blindness

Good Evening. I'm very honored to be here tonight. The topic of my talk is what Martin Luther King would say about color-blindness.

Color-blindness is the idea that persons should be seen without regard to race. Advocates of color-blindness argue that racism in the United States is mostly a thing of the past and that America should act “as if” it were already a color-blind society in which everyone thought of themselves as an individual competing for status, income, and security. Over the last twenty years, color-blindness has become the most prominent rationalization for racial inequality and discrimination in American society. Advocates of color-blindness like William Bennett and Shelby Steele oppose affirmative action, oppose remedies for school segregation, oppose attempts to address economic inequalities among whites and blacks, and oppose efforts to reduce black unemployment. In addition, color-blind ideas are used to justify residential segregation, justify employment discrimination, justify police brutality against black citizens, justify mob violence against blacks, and justify racial stereotyping. For sociologist Eduardo de Silva, color-blindness is color-blind racism, and he argues that “color-blind racism serves today as the ideological armor for a covert and institutionalized system” of white supremacy.

What would Dr. King say about the idea of color-blindness? That’s an interesting question. Advocates of color-blindness like to quote the passage from Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” where he says that he dreams of a day his children “will be judged by the content of their character not the color of their skin.” But color-blind advocates are disingenuous when they claim that King envisioned a society of competitive individualism. Dr. King usually spoke about black people, he always spoke as a black person, and once again, always spoke with an intense awareness of the racial character of the oppression of black people in American society. When Dr. King talked about 245 years of slavery, he talked about black people as a race; when Dr. King talked about the crippling effect of “the narrow pigeonhole of segregated schools” on black children, he talked about black people as a race (57); when Dr. King talked about the brutality of Sheriffs Bull Connor in Birmingham and Jim Clarke in Selma (184) toward blacks, he talked about black people as a race; when he talked about how “vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will,” (292) he also talked about black people as a race.

The examples of Dr. King talking about African-Americans as a race or as “a people” pile high in his writings. as King sought the most effective way to convey the monstrosity of white oppression and the urgency of resistance among black people as a whole. When King discussed resistance to the civil rights movement, he talked about it in terms of white mobs, white sheriffs, white moderates, white ministers, white businesses, and the white power structure. Likewise, when Dr. King talked about the courage of the students in Little Rock, the Freedom Riders in Mississippi, the civil rights marchers in Birmingham, and the Voting Rights demonstrators in Selma, he saw the bravery of those individuals as examples of the courage and tenacity of all black people.

Finally, Dr. King was speaking of race in 1967 and 1968 when he wrote of the frustration that he shared with black power advocates about black unemployment was still twice that of white unemployment (and black unemployment is still twice as high as white unemployment even today), the fact that most blacks still received second rate educations in segregated schools, the fact that blacks were subject to pervasive housing discrimination, and that blacks were blocked off from the best forms of employment. In response to the persistent discrimination and inequity, Dr. King expanded his agenda to encompass economic justice as well as civil rights laws. King urged African-Americans to patronize black-owned banks, insurance companies, and construction companies. He also organized an affirmative action program called Operation Breadbasket that employed boycotts to force companies into to hire specific quotas of African-Americans in the future (306). Yes, Dr. Martin Luther King believed in affirmative action. Dr. King also supported the establishment by the federal government of a guaranteed annual income (247), advocated a massive economic program along the lines of the Marshall Plan or the GI Bill (366-368) to give job training and better housing conditions to all poor people, and questioned the relation between capitalism and economic exploitation. For Dr. King, the corporate world, the educational establishment, and the federal government were all like the segregated South in that they needed to be radically changed before justice could be achieved.

What would Dr. King say about the advocates of color-blindness. I believe that Dr. King would classify “color-blindness” as a tactic for delaying and denying racial justice. Dr. King had two categories for resistance to the Civil Rights movement. The first was the open rejection of the KKK, White Citizens Councils, and governors like George Wallace of Alabama and Ross Barnett of Mississippi. The second form of resistance was the various kinds of temporizing arguments used to criticize the civil rights movement on non-racial grounds such as the claim that blacks were not yet ready for integration, or the notion that desegregation laws should be obeyed because they were “the law” rather than because blacks were human beings and brothers. In many ways, Dr. King thought that the clever rationalizations for resisting integration among white moderates were more of a barrier than open defiance. According to the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King thought that “lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” I believe the same would be the case if Dr. King were alive today—that Dr. King would view “color-blindness” as an important barrier, perhaps the most important of the ideological barriers, to the achievement of justice and brotherhood for African-Americans; that Dr. King would view the advocates of color-blindness as more of a threat to progress for blacks than all the Klan members and confederate flaggers combined, and that Dr. King would be just as emphatic in his rejection of color-blindness as he was in his rejection of waiting, his rejection of tokenism, his rejection of any claim that African-Americans did not deserve full equality in American society, and his rejection of the on-going discrimination and structural equality that persisted after the passage of Civil Rights legislation in 1964 and 1965.

I also think King would have gone farther. Noting that the advocates of color-blindness are so anxious to quote from his works, Dr. King would ask them to embrace the spirit of his work as well as the letter of the "I have a Dream" speech. King would ask the advocates of color-blindness to acknowledge that a color-blind society cannot be achieved until racial oppression is as played out as the three-cornered hats that George Washington used to wear—in other words, until whites stop practicing racial oppression and blacks stop having to fight oppression. Dr. King would ask advocates of color-blindness to stop attacking affirmative action, defending employment discrimination, and stop defending racial profiling and police violence; Dr. King would ask advocates of color-blindness to fully acknowledge the crucial contribution of the black struggle against white supremacy to American democracy; and Dr. King would ask advocates of color-blindness to accept that a just America is one in which every person shares in the tremendous economic prosperity of this country not just those in the top ½ of 1% wealth bracket. Finally, Dr. King would ask the advocates of color-blindness to redirect their talents and energies to the creation of the racial and economic justice that would make it possible for every person indeed to be judged on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. He would ask that of all of us.

Thank you.

(all number citations from Martin Luther King jr., (ed. by James W. Washington) A Testament of Hope: the Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, jr.)