Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: Ignorance is not an Option

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a prominent hero in the pantheon of U.S. history. His enduring advocacy for peaceful protest, equal justice for all races, economic opportunity, and promoting the ideals of our civil rights, is a profound aspirational legacy.

Dr. King admired and respected the principles enshrined in our Constitution and Declaration of Independence. The two premier documents of the Founding Fathers were the underpinnings of his argument: Our country wasn’t being true to the ideologies of our founding.

The opportunities to live a full American life, he argued, had been withheld from black Americans, in essence, a betrayal of what the U.S. claimed to stand for. In his words: “America has given its colored people a bad check, a check that has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ When the architects of our great 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.” 

Hard to argue with.

Despite the compromises necessary to create a unified country, the Constitutional framework was a solid start to build a country based on individual liberty.

Our early history is indeed darkly stained as analyses of colonial and early American slavery show, but rays of hope were breaking through. At the Declaration’s signing, every state permitted slavery (Vermont didn’t, but Vermont was not yet a state). By the time the Constitution was written, five of the original 13 states abolished slavery, or had begun the process of abolition. The Northwest Territory was declared free. By 1804, the scales tipped with two more of the original 13 states joining the abolition movement.

The founding of our country may have been inspired by the noblest of aspirations, but we can’t ignore the context of the time: Slavery was a common practice around the world. So was indentured servitude. Hunger and poverty were the standard conditions for most people everywhere, and slavery was an unremarkable feature.

Seymour Drescher, a prominent historian of slavery, describes the 1775 human condition: “Personal bondage was the prevailing form of labor in most of the world. Personal freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution. In 1772, Arthur Young estimated that only 33 million of the world’s 775 million inhabitants could be called free. Adam Smith offered a similarly somber ratio to his students and prophesied that slavery was unlikely to disappear for ages, if ever.”

Thankfully, things have changed. Dramatically, for the better.

Country after country abolished slavery. Humanism, Christianity, economics, and Enlightenment ideas concerning individual rights all contributed.

But we still argued about it.

Ultimately, we Americans slaughtered each other to abolish slavery in a brutal civil war. 

Did this solve all the problems, suddenly creating rampant equality? Of course not. I have articulated how the points Dr. King advanced reflected that we still had much work to do, generations later. And we still do.

For decades, our efforts to address racial injustices followed the path stated by Dr. King: let’s live up to ideals of our founding documents and Enlightenment philosophies that buttress it. Current thinking on the topic has diverged from that position, in an arguably divisive direction. Our momentary iconoclastic tendencies, the problematic review of history colored by a contemporary lens, or a lens limited to one perspective, create profound distortions.

And conflict.

From school curriculums to ongoing protests, the arguments have been reframed: our racism is institutional and systemic. As explicitly stated by Critical Race Theorists (CRT):  “…racism is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions…” and “CRT recognizes that racism is codified in law, embedded in structures, and woven into public policy. CRT rejects claims of meritocracy or ‘colorblindness.’ CRT recognizes that it is the systemic nature of racism that bears primary responsibility for reproducing racial inequality.”

Some argue that CRT goes too far when it asserts that racism is in fact the reason for this country’s very existence. According to The New York Times: “(The 1619 Project) aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”

Does CRT ideas deserve to be taken seriously? Absolutely. And we should debate them with passion and commitment, just as those who wrote the Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution did (and they were all white men). 

Let’s understand the starting point with these fundamental questions: are the foundations of the United States of America built upon a pretense of virtuous ideas applicable to whites only? Was the founding of America actually a promotion of slavery? Or are they built on noble ideas that we still need to live up to with each new generation, reflecting the fallibilities of human nature?

If we can’t start from the same place of inquiry, we will never agree…