Rewriting history

Every good student of American history can recall from memory Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. While much of the speech is noteworthy, a mere 34 words have made an indelible mark on our society and the way in which we conceptualize race relations today.

I speak, of course, about King’s bold dream about a country where his children could “one day live in a nation where they (would) not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

These words have been appropriated by white conservatives as a condemnation of affirmative action and other “preferential treatment” based on race. Indeed, some have boldly claimed that King was actually a republican, and if this is true, that’s news to me.

Much of King’s writings addressed the notion of an equitable society, and he argued rather strongly for actions that would be termed “preferential” today. In his 1964 book “Why We Can’t Wait,” King wrote, “It is impossible to create a formula for the future which does not take into account that our society has been doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years.”

He went on to address the claim that preferential treatment is discriminatory by likening the situation to a running race where a man entered the starting line three hundred years behind his competitor. Short of a miracle, it was impossible for the two to catch up, and this is where affirmative action became relevant. Compensatory gestures for blacks were merely viewed by King as a means to level the unequal playing field, a bitter remnant of slavery.

In recent years, as King predicted, calls of reverse discrimination have become stronger as conservatives have appealed to the fear that whites are receiving unfair treatment. However, a 2005 Princeton study determined that abolishing affirmative action programs in elite colleges would increase the acceptance rates of whites by a mere 0.5 percent. Not surprisingly, the acceptance rate for black candidates would fall from 33.7 percent to 12.2 percent. Interestingly, the only group to benefit from the abolishment of affirmative action would be Asians.

Undoubtedly, this month republicans will do their best to appropriate King’s words for their policies, but it is a fact that during his time the conservative movement did its best to malign the reverend. He was routinely labeled as a communist for advocating anti-poverty measures. In 1964, after King won the Nobel Peace Prize, the National Review, a prominent conservative magazine, accused him of promoting “rabble-rousing demagoguery” through civil disobedience.

To forget this bitter history and claim King as one of their own becomes even more repulsive when we consider conservative opposition to his other views like workers’ rights, pacifism and eradication of poverty. Viewed in such a light, conservative attempts to co-opt King are nothing more than an attempt to hide their own shameful history in setting back the civil rights movement.