White people and the March on Washington

At Gawker, Tom Scocca explains how White people have ruined the March on Washington, starting with a simplification of King’s speech:

Here is what King actually said, in this one quote of his that today’s white people take as proof he was on their side:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

When white people cite this passage, they tend to replace “my four little children” with something generic—”people,” for instance. The specific facts of 1963, of a caste of children born in a society that intentionally excluded them from opportunity, give way to an ahistoric (and therefore pointless) idealism. America is about how everybody is treated the same. Equality is replaced with equivalence.

So we arrive at a color-blind society, one in which if you did look at the people who are poorer, or less educated, or sicker, or more likely to be imprisoned, or more likely to be turned aside from the polls under voting laws passed this very year, you would see that they just happen to be disproportionately nonwhite. But it is wrong to look. Dr. King—the white people’s version of Dr. King—told us so.

***

The genuine Martin Luther King Jr., 50 years ago, said this:

When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

Here is where white Americans failed themselves and their country. That image of the promissory note was too much for white people’s greed and selfishness to accept. White people had defined themselves, as a race, by having the things that other people could not have. So the vaults of opportunity would not be opened, not without white people staging a run on the bank first. If the public schools had to educate black children and white children together, the white people would get out of the schools, declare war on the whole idea of public school. If black people could participate in civic life, white people would clear out of the cities. White people would revolt against paying taxes, against poverty relief, against food stamps, even.

And then, after decades of this, white people would look back at the things white America had abandoned or refused to build, and they would blame black people for living in the ruins. Their character. Their culture. Their music. Their pants.

This is what blaming the victim looks like.

Also on the subject of Martin Luther King and the failure of whites, here is a segment from Keith Olbermann’s new show on ESPN:

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Ebert on O’Reilly*

Every time I see a link to something from Roger Ebert’s blog I think that I need to read it more often.  A link to a recent post is no different.  In the post, Ebert discusses Bill O’Reilly and the ramifications that those like him have for cultural discourse in the US.  A few highlights:

I am not interested in discussing O’Reilly’s politics here. That would open a hornet’s nest. I am more concerned about the danger he and others like him represent to a civil and peaceful society. He sets a harmful example of acceptable public behavior. He has been an influence on the most worrying trend in the field of news: The polarization of opinion, the elevation of emotional temperature, the predictability of two of the leading cable news channels. A majority of cable news viewers now get their news slanted one way or the other by angry men. O’Reilly is not the worst offender. That would be Glenn Beck. Keith Olbermann is gaining ground. Rachel Maddow provides an admirable example for the boys of firm, passionate outrage, and is more effective for not shouting.

…

O’Reilly represents a worrisome attention shift in the minds of Americans. More and more of us are not interested in substance. The nation has cut back on reading. Most eighth graders can’t read a newspaper. A sizable percentage of the population doesn’t watch television news at all. They want entertainment, or “news” that is entertainment. Many of us grew up in the world where most people read a daily paper and watched network and local newscasts. “All news” radio stations and TV channels were undreamed-of. News was a destination, not a generic commodity. Journalists, the good ones anyway, had ethical standards.

Obviously, change happens for good and bad and I am not going to pretend that the cultural discourse of ten years ago represented the gold standard for all of history.  Still, the fact that so many people watch shows like these makes me fear for a future straight out of Idiocracy (which has been airing on Comedy Central lately):

At least we still have Jon Stewart:

*For the first time in a while, today’s post has a soundtrack.

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