Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
What is a ‘Protester?’
It is depressing to hear MLK or the Civil Rights movement cited in support of actions and political stunts that are antithetical to those values and methods. Even the word “protesters” has been debased.
Martin Luther King was not winging it. He had a clearly articulated theological basis for his social justice mission and the centrality of non-violence. In the perfect protest, the just man breaks an unjust law but only the injustice law. He wants to be put on trial to force the large jury that is the rest of us to choose to affirm the just man rather than affirm the injustice law.
The entertaining speech that Gandhi made to the British colonial court demanding that he be found guilty was done to complete just such a plan. Rosa Parks was arrested for not obeying an unjust directive based on an unjust law. She did not call the bus driver bad names, kick out a couple of windows while being dragged out, or spit on a cop. To be effective, civil disobedience can never entail injury or injustice to others.
What is almost exhilarating about the model King deployed was its very daring yet completely optimistic message which could be summed up as:
I believe that if I put myself in your hands while posing no threat to you, you will see the justness of my cause and you will join me because I know that you are fundamentally good and that God works through us all.
The civil rights movement was not a challenge so much as an ennobling invitation. We are so far removed from that era of genuinely principled action.
Maybe at a minimum, we need some criteria for when to use the word “protester”:
You are not a “protester” if you:
• Attack shop keepers or pedestrians
• Drag people from vehicles
• Kick anyone on the ground
• Are carrying an appliance still in the box or a weapon
• Start a fire in or near buildings
• Break windows or doors
• Throw objects with the intent to injure
• Think that mass violence is justified by a single incident
There are other less flattering, less neutral terms that apply in these instances. The pretense that any of this is related to social justice is disgusting.
Published in General
. . . and black Americans are spitting on and trampling the invitation that he offered.
They should be ashamed.
Technically speaking, the invitation I described was extended to white people. What is being trampled on are the values, meaning, goals and substance of the movement. This current horror show is in the spirit of Mao or Lenin, not MLK.
Correct, and they are proud of it, too.
Maybe the key difference between the 60’s and now is that blacks really did suffer discrimination and a lack of civil rights back then. You didn’t have to hunt around trying to find people to play the role of racist: There were plenty of people who freely and proudly confessed they were. So a principled campaign of civil disobedience that exposed this situation to the general American conscience was effective.
The hope was that with minority rights truly protected, minorities would join whites in achieving the American dream. For a number of reasons that never happened, and for other reasons the reigning culture cannot bring itself to face those reasons so it continues to rerun the 60’s playbook and blame racism and discrimination. Since the real reasons are never addressed, the protests have no effect and nothing changes for the better for minorities. The only thing they can think of is that the protests aren’t frequent or strident enough, so they become increasingly belligerent, excused by whites as justified, and it becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop as the failure of the protests to produce change justifies ever more radical measures. Eventually you get general burning and looting.
I’m not sure that even were MLK around today he would be able to stop this dynamic.
Very well said.
An interesting question is at what point the psychology changes. If it does.
I was born in 1963, so I’m among the first to have spent his entire conscious life in an America where minorities, at least legally, had their civil rights formally protected. Growing up in the 70’s, and on into the 80’s, while I might have had misgivings about affirmative action, I certainly recognized that the legacy of discrimination didn’t simply disappear in 1964. It would take time to work that legacy off and repair its effects. There would be efforts to fix it, some would work and some wouldn’t, but it was assumed general progress would be made and over time things would equalize.
Lately my perspective has been changing. It’s been a half century now of affirmative action and set asides and things seem to have gotten worse rather than better. I’m just tired of it all, and tired of the lies and subterfuges that go on to avoid facing reality. I’m tired of the desperate efforts to justify unjustifiable behavior. My patience for tolerating it is near an end.
It’s dangerous to generalize one’s personal psychology, but I wonder how many others in my generation are feeling the same way. They would never articulate it, of course, but an internal switch may have been thrown. Maybe they’ve had enough.
What that means going forward politically, I don’t know. And it could just be me.
Preach, brother!
I was born in 1949, and your feelings mirror my own. I’m tired of all of it, of the inability to satisfy those who feel they’ve been abused and cheated. And I don’t see a way out, because I don’t think they know what it would take to satisfy them. Thanks for echoing my own thoughts, @jclimacus.
🙋♂️
So where are we supposed to carry our guns?
Unfortunately, you can hear the politics of grievance in MLK’s remarks even though this was taped two years after passage of the Civil Rights Act.
Ah, I remember the 1970s and ’80s. Having spent my childhood in the segregated South, I saw racial attitudes changing. There really was substantial progress. I knew I was part of the generation that would see the end of racial strife.
Spoiler: It didn’t happen. I’m not sure where it all went wrong, but what I call “racialism,” the hyper-awareness and belief in the importance of race is at its highest level since that long ago childhood. Maybe even higher.
Lord, have mercy.