The Gaslighting of Martin Luther King Jr.

MLK's legacy hasn't been co-opted by conservatives, it has been co-opted by progressive "anti-racists"

[This post is an excerpt from my upcoming book, “The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America”. Pre-order the book here.]

Every Martin Luther King Day, there are a predictable series of articles claiming that Dr. King was really a “radical”––especially towards the end of his life. The subtext of these articles is that if Dr. King were alive today he would support the policies and the rhetoric advanced by today’s “anti-racist” radicals––people like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. King’s legacy, they argue, has been sanitized, co-opted, and weaponized by conservatives and moderates.

This argument relies on a bait and switch. The areas in which Dr. King could rightly be called a “radical” were two-fold: economics and foreign policy. He favored policies like universal healthcare and guaranteed federal employment, and he strongly opposed the Vietnam War––positions that were considered radical in the 1960s. 

Whatever you think of those positions, neither of them pertain to the topics on which he is alleged by modern commentators to have been a “radical”––namely, the importance of our common humanity and the goal of transcending race. On those topics, King never wavered.

Nor did he waver on his preference for class-based policy over race-based policy. In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here?, he devotes a whole chapter to critiquing the Black Power movement. One of his critiques was that the Black Power movement focused on race where it should have focused on class. He even suggested changing the name “Black Power” to “Power for Poor People”.¹ (One wonders what he would have thought about the slogan “Black Lives Matter”.)

What’s more, Dr. King’s proposal for “compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro” was a class-based anti-poverty program he called the “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged” that would target the poor without regard to race––but would, of course, disproportionately benefit blacks because blacks are more likely to be poor.² 

In general, it is hard to imagine the “anti-racist” thought leaders of today uttering even one of the following Dr. King quotes below, let alone all of them:

Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout “White Power!”––when nobody will shout “Black Power!”––but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.

In an effort to achieve freedom in America, Asia, and Africa we must not try to leap from a position of disadvantage to one of advantage, thus subverting justice. We must seek democracy and not the substitution of one tyranny for another. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man. We must not become victimized with a philosophy of black supremacy.

Black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy, and God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men. God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race.

The problem is not a purely racial one, with Negroes set against whites. In the end, it is not a struggle between people at all, but between justice and injustice. Nonviolent resistance is not aimed against oppressors but against oppression. Under its banner consciences, not racial groups, are enlisted.

The important thing about man is ‘not his specificity but his fundamentum,’ not the texture of his hair or the color of his skin but the quality of his soul.

Properly speaking, races do not marry. Individuals marry. 

As I stand here and look out upon the thousands of Negro faces, and the thousands of white faces, intermingled like the waters of a river, I see only one face––the face of the future.

If it strikes you as odd that today’s “anti-racists” sound nothing like Dr. King yet claim his mantle, it should. They do not carry his mantle. They enjoy the moral authority of being seen as the carriers of his legacy while simultaneously betraying the very ideals that he stood for.

[Pre-order “The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America”]

1. King, Where Do We Go From Here?, pg. 51.

2. King, Why We Can’t Wait, pgs. 163-165.