Abstract
Memory—of what has been, of acts of commission or omission, of a responsibility abdicated—affects the future conduct of power in any form[emphasis added]. Failure to adopt some imaginative recognition of such a principle merely results in the enthronement of a political culture that appears to know no boundaries—the culture of impunity.
In these times of renewed scholarly assessment of Martin Luther King Jr.’s contributions to American and global politics and to the projection of his ideas into this politically schizophrenic present, posing questions about the forms of power that shape the reappropriation of his ideas could not be more important. The political theorist and historian has tended to respond to these questions by turning to narrative reconstruction or to hermeneutics in an attempt to rescue King’s ideas from his hostage-takers. The idea is that if we can just read him properly and situate him within his political and historical milieu, all will be eventually set right in terms of gate-keeping his ideas from the most reactionary political forces and ultimately transforming the populace. Our truth-telling about King is understood to make dubious interpretations difficult to defend by staging King’s own words and ideas against malicious interpretation and hoping such actors will hew to reason. The wager that Hajar Yazdiha makes in The Struggle for the People’s King is that empirical investigation remains vital to separating grain from husk in terms of a method that can pick out ideological gunk—Ted Cruz’s King—from the real—Rev. William Barber’s King. Empirical investigation, and in her case, a qualitative analysis of the political development of rhetoric, helps to clarify when and under what circumstances the uses of his words and speeches amount to lying and manipulation and when they show fidelity to the political visions he set forth.
One of the most crushing semiotic reversals of the post-Civil Rights period has been the distortion of King’s anti-war and socialist views in the service of political projects that call for the expansion of the carceral state, the violent entrenchment of borders, the intensification of imperial conquest under the guise of humanitarian intervention, the stripping away of voting rights, the disavowal of material redistribution as the basis of human freedom, and even the denial that race continues to structure social reality. American conservatives constantly say that inequality is a thing of the past and that the enlistment of King to support the idea that the world remains structured by the social and material reproduction of racism amounts to nothing more than a wounded fetish for powerlessness, recrimination, and “wokeness.” Meanwhile, liberals tend to partake in their own misappraisals by freeze-framing some isolated phrase and jamming it into their own claustrophobic liberalism: racism, once solved through the perfection of opportunity structures, will free the oppressed to realize their full potential as productive members of society. It is by looking and analyzing the present field of uses and then comparatively judging them against the ideologies, histories, and ideas undergirding King’s milieu that we can undermine the political and rhetorical force of misuse. I am only partially convinced of the book’s objectives in this regard for reasons that reflect more so my abiding ambivalence about the present political conjuncture than they do the scholarly merits of the book.
My ambivalence stems from two sources. The first has to do with the singular utility of attitudinal critique in an age where people are more likely to double-down than change their views. If the present is marked by the manipulative repackaging of history to serve the selfish ends of political actors, then simply correcting this manipulation through rigorous empiricism will turn out to be necessary but woefully insufficient. In this regard, we may learn a key lesson from the Black Power era: when that movement, exhausted with the desire for the very multiracial working-class coalitions animating Dr. King’s late socialist vision, turned to empirically studying dissimulated racial attitudes among Whites, they did so by essentially surrendering the radical possibility of doing mass politics. Such a politics would have involved, not an attempt to convince Whites of their racism but instead to show how racism mystifies the shared vulnerability of persons on the lower end of the class strata; and then, to organize for a structural reconfiguration of the economy. I think we need attitudinal critique but only in a context that can enable class power and structural transformation.
The second source of ambivalence has to do with the liberal misuse of King’s ideas. Yazdiha argues that the contentious politics of meaning-making in the aftermath of King’s death set the stage for the path-dependent boundaries of acceptable debate and memory about King’s legacy. Yazdiha turns to the political disputes leading up to and in the wake of the passage of the federal statute in 1983 as a critical case-in-point. No sooner than the day after King’s assassination did Rep. John Conyers introduce a bill for a national commemoration, thus setting in motion a long struggle to give official national recognition to a figure who was deeply unpopular by the time of his assassination. Conyers and other “living bearers of the memory” and their immediate descendants, as Yazdiha rightly shows, can be understood as “mnemonic gatekeepers” against the obviously nefarious uses of his ideas (Yazdiha, 22). Yazdiha’s source material places American conservatism at the heart of the story, the idea being that if in more recent years American conservatives have sought to carve out a homogeneous, benign, and ideologically empty “civil rights movement” to dilute its radical political significance in the present, it represents the consequence of a long ideological struggle emanating from Reaganites on one hand and racial liberals like Conyers, Young, and members of the King family on the other. In my view, one of the limitations of Yazdiha’s study is its framing of this ideological struggle as liberal-conservative when in fact, the ideological struggle among liberals and leftists themselves has been equally contentious and damaging. Given that the movements operating under the banner of civil rights often saw themselves as debating the question of capitalism’s centrality to racial inequality—especially as the locus of concerns moved into the urban ghetto after 1965—it seems important to ask whether contemporary progressive movements have given up on this debate as evidenced by widespread discursive investments in diversity and inclusion as opposed to seeking to fundamentally reorganize the American economy.
In Prophet of Discontent, my co-author and I argued that the liberal enclosure of King’s radical ideas could be discerned in the split between The King Center and the Institute of the Black World in 1970, as the former wagered that attracting philanthropic support for the center was best fostered by positioning his legacy as one of economic liberalism (Douglas and Loggins 2021, 82). As King confidante and IBW co-founder Vincent Harding saw it in 1974, “certain heirs of Martin King” had come to “support . . . the myth of Black Capitalism as a means to ‘Save Humanity.’” This is not to say that contemporary progressive movements join with conservatives in their malicious interpretations along these lines. It might suggest, however, that the horizon of acceptable debate about what progressive movements want has been severely constrained by a decades-long assault against anti-capitalist movements and ideas—animated by internal fracturing within movements as well as external pressures with respect to the changing character of economic and political power.
Here we are. King’s dream of harnessing the welfare state toward radical ends has not come to fruition—due at least in part to ideological splits over whether the state can in fact be other than its coercive, domineering form. Neoliberal capitalism and its bipartisan prophets have been steadily privatizing the social, while stripping away any pretense that the state ought to be reorganized along the lines of distributive justice. Contemporary organizers struggle mightily against the political and discursive damage these forces have invited, both at the hands of American conservatives and liberals. Yazdiha’s book certainly provides a powerful archive in this respect. Yet, I am not so sure that the normative political vision entailed in exposing these forces will be able to do what it promises in this age of extreme political polarization. For those who have obscenely distorted the radical vision of the civil rights movement, what in this account will push them to reorient their political and moral judgment to truth? Today, a Ted Cruz or a Freedom Caucus member or a Candace Owens can swallow up the past as they see fit and spit its distorted carcass back at us as they work to undermine the very idea of the beloved community with the power they hold in their hands. Meanwhile, the assembly of witnesses who call them out have little beyond rhetorical power on their side, and this is no doubt the cruel effect of a decades-long campaign to undermine radical movements and their antecedents. That being said, we may be seeing the revival of the U.S. labor movement and in ways that are entirely in line with King’s vision and those of his more radical contemporaries. As more and more workers of all stripes find themselves locked into economic precarity and as the state continues to turn away from the very possibility of a massive response that might absorb changes in the economy, labor militancy and solidarity may be the antidote against the debilitating pessimism of changing attitudes. Whether the issue is poverty, debt, or healthcare, the overriding hope is that a renewed sense of shared vulnerability across sectors—as wagelessness, as indebtedness, as surplus—will be able to cut through the thick walls of resentment, polarization, and racial antipathy. I must therefore end with Yazdiha’s powerful words:
For now, hope is in the long-overdue clarity with a new generation of seeing and rejecting the futility of the old strategies, the violent politics that have brought us to this societal impasse. We cannot even envision emancipation from the violence and inhumanity of our present world if our eyes are closed, if we cannot see the forest for the trees. (Yazdiha, 191)
This is our call.
