Thank you for this piece. I really appreciate the nuance and the author’s willingness to say “we simply don’t know” what MLK would think of the conversation about race today.
I think his legacy has become a political football. When people say, What about MLK’s ‘content of my character’ reference in his “I have a dream” speech, today’s left answers with other MLK quotes in an attempt to show that he would have sided with them.
Then I saw an interview with a man who was a MLK’s friend and fellow activist (I think it was in The Free Press) who said that MLK would have only disdain for this “the answer to racism is more racism” tactic.
Thank you for this thoughtful and thought-provoking piece. So much of this ongoing acrimony is driven by the use of the inaccurate, anachronistic terms with which we classify people. As I — and others — have repeatedly pointed out, colloquial racial categories are virtually meaningless, and can't, therefore, lead to any real or nuanced understanding of human experiential diversity. For instance, "The ACT Isn’t Racially Biased Because “Black" and “White” Aren’t Races"
I agree with the author, and firmly believe that we should abandon these archaic 'racial' terms and focus on our commonalities and shared experiences with compassion and understanding… by everyone. Thank you again. Sincerely, Frederick
Thanks for responding! Regarding Dems being more reasonable than their media, I live in Portland. I hang out on Substack in search of sanity. If it exists where you live, you are blessed!
I actually just talked to a Dem from Portland. She had she/they pronouns in her bio and knew going in that I was a conservative libertarian. But she seemed pretty down to earth, and we had a wonderful conversation :)
Of course, I also connected with her through Braver Angels. It's possible there was some selection bias going on.
Thanks for this, could not agree more. King’s legacy must be rescued from any taint of the kind of nonsense that goes under the name “anti-racism”.
However, one small objection. Where you said that “King strongly supported affirmative action in 1965 as a necessary corrective to centuries of segregation”, I see no evidence of this at all. You provide a link to a speech King gave at Drew University in 1964. There is nothing in this speech that comes anywhere near endorsing what we call affirmative action.
Great point! I don't actually recall why I linked to that 1964 speech, or what I was trying to link to instead to back up my point.
Maybe I should have linked to this instead, from Why We Can't Wait: "Among the many vital jobs to be done, the nation must not only radically readjust its attitude toward the Negro in the compelling present, but must incorporate in its planning some compensatory consideration for the handicaps he has inherited from the past. 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. How then can he be absorbed into the mainstream of American life if we do not do something special for him now, in order to balance the equation and equip him to compete on a just and equal basis??
In his 1964 book “Why We Can’t Wait”, King couched his argument for doing something “special for the Negro” as a remedy for the historical disadvantages that blacks had suffered as a result of slavery and its aftermath. But I don’t believe he would have been comfortable with the way that modern implementations of “special” look only at skin color in order to define “disadvantaged”. He very explicitly couched his suggestion in terms of the general principle of compensating for disadvantages per se, regardless of skin color.
“It is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness, should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor. A Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged could mark the rise of a new era, in which the full resources of the society would be used to attack the tenacious poverty which so paradoxically exists in the midst of plenty.” (from Chpater VIII, The Days to Come)
Very true! I had trouble with that passage, because it seemed like he was arguing for class-based AA but also race-based AA on top of it. That doesn't fit neatly into our modern categories.
Or as I wrote in my notes on that passage: "So was King in favor of race-based AA or class-based AA? Yes."
I don’t think King believed that “doing something special” for blacks would necessarily entail sacrificing the interests of non-blacks whether individually or on a group basis. I don’t think King would have approved of sacrificing merit on behalf of racial preferences in hiring or college admissions. I think he was pretty clear on the ideal of color blindness in such contexts. But I’m no scholar of King and haven’t read everything he wrote or said. One can argue that “doing something special” for one group of people, on whatever basis you define the group, means subtracting from someone else. Zero-sum. But even that can be disputed, I think.
Good piece, I would clarify, as others have written in substack far better than I will here, that affirmative action as MLK stated is not a contemporary biased hiring process, but an affirmative invitation process.
The “action” was “affirmative” elimination of selection pool bias and “judgement” absent “color of skin” by focusing on “content of character”.
I see it as a process of intentionally expanding invitations to participate in important roles.
These roles are anything which requires merit discrimination. (I can't find less abstract words this AM, sorry) - student, labor, law, management
This meant your reaching out to new communities to seek candidates, instead of selecting only a pool you may be part of, or most familiar with.
It did not mean changing critera for selection itself - he was quite clear on being judged by “content of character”.
Thanks! I would like this to be true, but I'm not so sure. In Why We Can't Wait, MLK wrote approvingly of how India was reducing discrimination towards its "untouchables": "Moreover, the prime minister said, if two applicants compete for entrance into a college or university, one of the applicants being an untouchable and the other of high caste, the school is required to accept the untouchable."
It’s hard to speak to MLK today to discern what his attitude was, but I have read some well-reasoned authors.
Unfortunately in this app it’s very difficult to search my own replies to get a path to articles I found illuminating. That’s a dog ate my homework response, but it’s hard to find the sources which I thought were interesting on the subject.
I wrote in the abstract because it’s a principle I derived from his speech seems to work in multiple contexts for “affirmative action”. An example is laws passed early on in the civil rights era which forbade businesses from restricting trade on the basis of a customer’s ethnicity.
It expanded the selection pool for fair trade, but it did not change the nature of trade by enforcing, for instance, differential pricing.
If you could pay (ability to pay as the discriminating factor) you get the goods or service irrespective of your ethnicity. As this permeated a huge variety of business types it productively enabled outcomes which were fair on the basis of pricing, in the abstract.
Anyone today in practice, and in reality can eat in any restaurant, go to an entertainment venue, buy clothing and food, and so on. This is why unfair practices today as they arise are so jarring - for instance, ethnicity-based real-estate valuation, or interest rate pricing. [I took my husband on a trip through the south when we moved to the US from NL, and there was still amazing tension in restaurants in AL]
Extend the same principle to education. Ethnicity-blind admissions expands the candidate pool broadly, but does not distort the principle that scholastic-performance testing predicts candidates who get the most from higher education.
In hiring, the same principle applies.
I have other opinions myself on how to compensate for differential candidate pool success when it comes to a decision point, when there was clear historic unfairness, leveling a playing field. That is also “affirmative” “actions”.
The most powerful way to take action where there were histories of disruption of “level playing fields” is to invest in financially disadvantaged communities. Businesses do it, institutes of higher education may do it (honestly I don’t think Harvard is funding tutors in Selma). To me, I’m not an economist or sociologist, so take it with a grain of salt, that’s the most rational way to actually address issues of fairness and inequity. I’ve used these principles in business for decades. I greatly value viewpoint diversity in business, and have long sought ways to amplify it.
I can only recall a few sources for my thought, the New Yorker has fairly good writing on the subject. I hope this was worth the bother of reading! 🤓
Thank you so much for the thoughtful reply! It was definitely worth the read :)
"The most powerful way to take action where there were histories of disruption of “level playing fields” is to invest in financially disadvantaged communities."--I completely agree with this. I don't like race-based AA, but I'm strongly in favor of private-sector class-based AA (ex. private universities giving preference to lower-income applicants). Have you seen Coleman Hughes' TED Talk on the topic, or read his book?
"[I took my husband on a trip through the south when we moved to the US from NL, and there was still amazing tension in restaurants in AL]"--wow, I didn't expect that. Damn.
We were in one of those amazing areas where it’s all bright red clay, honeysuckle, locust trees harboring cicadas and mile-a-minute, and those ghostly tufts of hot moisture that brush up against you when you’re out of a car.
We had breakfast at a Waffle House, bearing a prominent sign in chalk over the counter 12 feet long “Be respectful of all customers […]”.
A family came in that could have been the Obamas, driving a white Mercedes, parked alongside old small Datsuns and Toyotas with spots of rust that matched the dirt. That family was the only ones which looked like the Obamas, the rest were straight out of “Heat of the Night”.
The place became dead quiet except for us and the family.
You could cut the tension with a knife, straight out of a Joan Didion novel really.
My husband is Dutch and our first vacation moving to the US was for him see and understand part of the country that few do, to contextualize politics a little better.
All racial discussions seem to try and build on MLK Jr. I believe that's because MLK is as close to common ground as the anti-racism versus color-blind sides are going to get.
From my perspective, the first step is for anyone who identifies as "white" to stop doing it. Instead of asking for race on questionnaires, start asking for heritage. My heritage is Danish. My parents immigrated from Europe. I believe "Black" - note its capitalized which typical white is not - is a heritage in the divided states. People who identify as "Black" chose that heritage over African.
The brown designation is ridiculous. I do not know anyone who identifies as "brown" - note its lower case. They either identify as Hispanic or Indian (i.e. India).
I respect Mr. Adorney's patience in crafting this careful argument in opposition to the anti-white racism that has been embraced by the so-called Progressive Democrats in the U.S. Unfortunately, they are no longer capable of being influenced by rational thought. They are deeply immersed in an orgy of self-congratulations and intense hatred towards other white people, because they just found out in 2020 that there is a history of racism in the U.S. They feel a need to discredit those of us who knew that before they were born, because it is a blow to their egos. Democrats are progressive only in the sense that they are progressing rapidly towards becoming a completely exclusionary club of upper middle class white snobs. Ibram Kendi and Robin D'Angelo have caused more damage to our society than any other charlatans in recent history, but they have succeeded only because they provided such effective weapons to Democrats whose primary need in life is to feel superior to other white people.
Thanks for commenting! I share a lot of your concerns, in particular about DiAngelo and Kendi. And I do think that a lot of Democrats are shedding their working-class appeal to become "a completely exclusionary club of upper middle class white snobs"--especially in elite circles.
But I don't think all Dems are incapable of being influenced by rational thought or have other bad motives. I've talked to a lot of Dems 1-on-1, and I think there are a lot of Dems who are way more reasonable about this stuff than the average NYT writer or CNN host. What do you think?
Thank you for this piece. I really appreciate the nuance and the author’s willingness to say “we simply don’t know” what MLK would think of the conversation about race today.
I think his legacy has become a political football. When people say, What about MLK’s ‘content of my character’ reference in his “I have a dream” speech, today’s left answers with other MLK quotes in an attempt to show that he would have sided with them.
Then I saw an interview with a man who was a MLK’s friend and fellow activist (I think it was in The Free Press) who said that MLK would have only disdain for this “the answer to racism is more racism” tactic.
I completely agree with all of this :)
Thank you for this thoughtful and thought-provoking piece. So much of this ongoing acrimony is driven by the use of the inaccurate, anachronistic terms with which we classify people. As I — and others — have repeatedly pointed out, colloquial racial categories are virtually meaningless, and can't, therefore, lead to any real or nuanced understanding of human experiential diversity. For instance, "The ACT Isn’t Racially Biased Because “Black" and “White” Aren’t Races"
https://everythingisbiology.substack.com/p/the-act-isnt-racially-biased-because
I agree with the author, and firmly believe that we should abandon these archaic 'racial' terms and focus on our commonalities and shared experiences with compassion and understanding… by everyone. Thank you again. Sincerely, Frederick
Thank you <3
Really good points!
Thanks for responding! Regarding Dems being more reasonable than their media, I live in Portland. I hang out on Substack in search of sanity. If it exists where you live, you are blessed!
Haha thank you!
I actually just talked to a Dem from Portland. She had she/they pronouns in her bio and knew going in that I was a conservative libertarian. But she seemed pretty down to earth, and we had a wonderful conversation :)
Of course, I also connected with her through Braver Angels. It's possible there was some selection bias going on.
Thanks for this, could not agree more. King’s legacy must be rescued from any taint of the kind of nonsense that goes under the name “anti-racism”.
However, one small objection. Where you said that “King strongly supported affirmative action in 1965 as a necessary corrective to centuries of segregation”, I see no evidence of this at all. You provide a link to a speech King gave at Drew University in 1964. There is nothing in this speech that comes anywhere near endorsing what we call affirmative action.
Great point! I don't actually recall why I linked to that 1964 speech, or what I was trying to link to instead to back up my point.
Maybe I should have linked to this instead, from Why We Can't Wait: "Among the many vital jobs to be done, the nation must not only radically readjust its attitude toward the Negro in the compelling present, but must incorporate in its planning some compensatory consideration for the handicaps he has inherited from the past. 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. How then can he be absorbed into the mainstream of American life if we do not do something special for him now, in order to balance the equation and equip him to compete on a just and equal basis??
In his 1964 book “Why We Can’t Wait”, King couched his argument for doing something “special for the Negro” as a remedy for the historical disadvantages that blacks had suffered as a result of slavery and its aftermath. But I don’t believe he would have been comfortable with the way that modern implementations of “special” look only at skin color in order to define “disadvantaged”. He very explicitly couched his suggestion in terms of the general principle of compensating for disadvantages per se, regardless of skin color.
“It is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness, should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor. A Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged could mark the rise of a new era, in which the full resources of the society would be used to attack the tenacious poverty which so paradoxically exists in the midst of plenty.” (from Chpater VIII, The Days to Come)
Very true! I had trouble with that passage, because it seemed like he was arguing for class-based AA but also race-based AA on top of it. That doesn't fit neatly into our modern categories.
Or as I wrote in my notes on that passage: "So was King in favor of race-based AA or class-based AA? Yes."
What do you think?
I don’t think King believed that “doing something special” for blacks would necessarily entail sacrificing the interests of non-blacks whether individually or on a group basis. I don’t think King would have approved of sacrificing merit on behalf of racial preferences in hiring or college admissions. I think he was pretty clear on the ideal of color blindness in such contexts. But I’m no scholar of King and haven’t read everything he wrote or said. One can argue that “doing something special” for one group of people, on whatever basis you define the group, means subtracting from someone else. Zero-sum. But even that can be disputed, I think.
Good piece, I would clarify, as others have written in substack far better than I will here, that affirmative action as MLK stated is not a contemporary biased hiring process, but an affirmative invitation process.
The “action” was “affirmative” elimination of selection pool bias and “judgement” absent “color of skin” by focusing on “content of character”.
I see it as a process of intentionally expanding invitations to participate in important roles.
These roles are anything which requires merit discrimination. (I can't find less abstract words this AM, sorry) - student, labor, law, management
This meant your reaching out to new communities to seek candidates, instead of selecting only a pool you may be part of, or most familiar with.
It did not mean changing critera for selection itself - he was quite clear on being judged by “content of character”.
Thanks! I would like this to be true, but I'm not so sure. In Why We Can't Wait, MLK wrote approvingly of how India was reducing discrimination towards its "untouchables": "Moreover, the prime minister said, if two applicants compete for entrance into a college or university, one of the applicants being an untouchable and the other of high caste, the school is required to accept the untouchable."
What do you think?
You have a fair point.
It’s hard to speak to MLK today to discern what his attitude was, but I have read some well-reasoned authors.
Unfortunately in this app it’s very difficult to search my own replies to get a path to articles I found illuminating. That’s a dog ate my homework response, but it’s hard to find the sources which I thought were interesting on the subject.
I wrote in the abstract because it’s a principle I derived from his speech seems to work in multiple contexts for “affirmative action”. An example is laws passed early on in the civil rights era which forbade businesses from restricting trade on the basis of a customer’s ethnicity.
It expanded the selection pool for fair trade, but it did not change the nature of trade by enforcing, for instance, differential pricing.
If you could pay (ability to pay as the discriminating factor) you get the goods or service irrespective of your ethnicity. As this permeated a huge variety of business types it productively enabled outcomes which were fair on the basis of pricing, in the abstract.
Anyone today in practice, and in reality can eat in any restaurant, go to an entertainment venue, buy clothing and food, and so on. This is why unfair practices today as they arise are so jarring - for instance, ethnicity-based real-estate valuation, or interest rate pricing. [I took my husband on a trip through the south when we moved to the US from NL, and there was still amazing tension in restaurants in AL]
Extend the same principle to education. Ethnicity-blind admissions expands the candidate pool broadly, but does not distort the principle that scholastic-performance testing predicts candidates who get the most from higher education.
In hiring, the same principle applies.
I have other opinions myself on how to compensate for differential candidate pool success when it comes to a decision point, when there was clear historic unfairness, leveling a playing field. That is also “affirmative” “actions”.
The most powerful way to take action where there were histories of disruption of “level playing fields” is to invest in financially disadvantaged communities. Businesses do it, institutes of higher education may do it (honestly I don’t think Harvard is funding tutors in Selma). To me, I’m not an economist or sociologist, so take it with a grain of salt, that’s the most rational way to actually address issues of fairness and inequity. I’ve used these principles in business for decades. I greatly value viewpoint diversity in business, and have long sought ways to amplify it.
I can only recall a few sources for my thought, the New Yorker has fairly good writing on the subject. I hope this was worth the bother of reading! 🤓
Thank you so much for the thoughtful reply! It was definitely worth the read :)
"The most powerful way to take action where there were histories of disruption of “level playing fields” is to invest in financially disadvantaged communities."--I completely agree with this. I don't like race-based AA, but I'm strongly in favor of private-sector class-based AA (ex. private universities giving preference to lower-income applicants). Have you seen Coleman Hughes' TED Talk on the topic, or read his book?
"[I took my husband on a trip through the south when we moved to the US from NL, and there was still amazing tension in restaurants in AL]"--wow, I didn't expect that. Damn.
Thanks.
We were in one of those amazing areas where it’s all bright red clay, honeysuckle, locust trees harboring cicadas and mile-a-minute, and those ghostly tufts of hot moisture that brush up against you when you’re out of a car.
We had breakfast at a Waffle House, bearing a prominent sign in chalk over the counter 12 feet long “Be respectful of all customers […]”.
A family came in that could have been the Obamas, driving a white Mercedes, parked alongside old small Datsuns and Toyotas with spots of rust that matched the dirt. That family was the only ones which looked like the Obamas, the rest were straight out of “Heat of the Night”.
The place became dead quiet except for us and the family.
You could cut the tension with a knife, straight out of a Joan Didion novel really.
My husband is Dutch and our first vacation moving to the US was for him see and understand part of the country that few do, to contextualize politics a little better.
He got contextualized.
All racial discussions seem to try and build on MLK Jr. I believe that's because MLK is as close to common ground as the anti-racism versus color-blind sides are going to get.
From my perspective, the first step is for anyone who identifies as "white" to stop doing it. Instead of asking for race on questionnaires, start asking for heritage. My heritage is Danish. My parents immigrated from Europe. I believe "Black" - note its capitalized which typical white is not - is a heritage in the divided states. People who identify as "Black" chose that heritage over African.
The brown designation is ridiculous. I do not know anyone who identifies as "brown" - note its lower case. They either identify as Hispanic or Indian (i.e. India).
The bottom line, the term "whjite" as an identity is the problem. I wrote a medium article asking people who identify with that label what they really thinking they are identifying as:https://medium.com/@rogue4gay/what-does-it-mean-to-claim-you-are-white-0d7c2b844ad0
Too many people use the term "white" as if its clearly understood. Its anything but clear what the meaning of using that label is.
You make some really good points!
Great article!
Thank you!
I respect Mr. Adorney's patience in crafting this careful argument in opposition to the anti-white racism that has been embraced by the so-called Progressive Democrats in the U.S. Unfortunately, they are no longer capable of being influenced by rational thought. They are deeply immersed in an orgy of self-congratulations and intense hatred towards other white people, because they just found out in 2020 that there is a history of racism in the U.S. They feel a need to discredit those of us who knew that before they were born, because it is a blow to their egos. Democrats are progressive only in the sense that they are progressing rapidly towards becoming a completely exclusionary club of upper middle class white snobs. Ibram Kendi and Robin D'Angelo have caused more damage to our society than any other charlatans in recent history, but they have succeeded only because they provided such effective weapons to Democrats whose primary need in life is to feel superior to other white people.
Thanks for commenting! I share a lot of your concerns, in particular about DiAngelo and Kendi. And I do think that a lot of Democrats are shedding their working-class appeal to become "a completely exclusionary club of upper middle class white snobs"--especially in elite circles.
But I don't think all Dems are incapable of being influenced by rational thought or have other bad motives. I've talked to a lot of Dems 1-on-1, and I think there are a lot of Dems who are way more reasonable about this stuff than the average NYT writer or CNN host. What do you think?