Bittersweet King

“I will end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into everyday life."

Hi all,

I wasn’t going to write about Martin Luther King, Jr. on his day.

However, as the day progressed things began to feel different. In his speech today, President Donald Trump declared: “I will end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into everyday life. We will forge a society that is colorblind & merit based.”

With these words, he spoke what many of us — Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele to the man on the street — have fought for since the 1960s. Trump’s plain words echoed King’s timeless quote that man should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

The fact that Trump echoed King was bittersweet. It revealed how profoundly we Americans have betrayed King’s Dream since the 1960s.

One can only imagine what America would be like today if we had pursued development instead of racially engineered diversity, merit instead of lowering standards in the name of racial equity, inclusiveness grounded in common interests instead of skin color, and the power of the individual instead of the racial power of identity politics.

We gave power to race and what’s done is done. The road to increasing the equality for opportunity for all Americans will not be easy. Race is too seductive and easy of a power for many to give up. However, the opportunity to move closer to King’s Dream is nearer than ever before — not because of Trump, but because We the People have fought to reach this point.

When I was growing up, my father would often tell the story of how his father piled him and his teen friends into the truck and took them to see Martin Luther King, Jr., at Chicago’s Soldier Field. Before that day, my father had heard his parents speak of the young minister from Atlanta over dinners. King was this rather distant figure at that time and they didn’t quite know what to make of him.

My grandparents had marched in the civil rights movement since 1942 and they did not want to squander their decades of effort on a false prophet. But when my father finally heard King’s voice boom across Soldier Field in 1964, he felt a surge of hope he never felt before. By the time King finished, my father felt for the first time that segregation would not be able to sustain itself much longer and would end soon.

Up until this moment, my father had known no other world but the segregated one. Even his first moments on earth were marked by it. When his white mother arrived at the Cook County hospital the nurses rushed her into the maternity ward because she was about to deliver. My black grandfather was parking the truck and when he showed up the nurses realized that the baby was not going to be white. They rushed my grandmother down into the basement where the negro maternity ward was.

My father thought it would be segregation to the end of his days and that race would be the dominant power in his life. But that afternoon, the power of King to inspire conviction and certitude for a better America in such a profoundly oppressed people made him, in my father’s words, “Christ-like.” Men like King come once every several hundred years.

Much has been written about how Americans back then squandered the promise of that moment. They used race, not character, as their means to redemption from America’s racist past. But race can only lead to racial power and tribalism and is it any wonder that we ended up in the absurd racial quagmire of today?

In our documentary, “What Killed Michael Brown?” my father pointed out that “America’s original sin is not slavery. It is simply the use of race as a means to power. Whether for good or ill, race is a corruption. Always. And it always turns one group into the convenience of another group.”

King knew this. We know this now and with more understanding than ever. The only way to defeat the power of race as a social determinant in our free society is to become Americans, unconditionally.

My best,

Eli