Martin Luther King, Jr., Ronald Reagan, and the Conservative Sleight-of-Hand

(This is Martin Luther King, Jr., with my mentor, D. Elton Trueblood, in Stout Meetinghouse on the campus of Earlham College.)

A recent conversation led me to do some thinking about the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.  I have come to the conclusion that it is in a deliberately disingenuous manner that conservatives invoke Dr. King's legacy to support causes which the great Baptist preacher and prophet would have himself opposed.  Vivek Ramaswamy and Mike Pence have both name-checked Dr. King recently to advocate policies which King himself would have denounced as unjust, if not evil.  I happen to live in Mike Pence's hometown, and am aware that he and his brother, Congressman Greg Pence, both have made statements which they either knew, or should have known, were not true.

I asked Greg Pence, on his Facebook page, why he voted to overturn the 2020 election, which would have rewarded the very criminals who sought to kill his own brother.  I said to him, "If you are willing to sell-out your own brother, how do we, as your own constituents, have any assurance you will not sell us out as well?"  For the record, Rep. Pence never got back to me on that!

A friend recently pushed back on me, which should always be welcomed, when I said the idea of a colorblind society was heinous.  The exchange made me think about where the phrase colorblind society came from.  I looked into that, and I found the phrase came, not from Dr. King himself, but from Ronald Reagan.

I personally think Reagan was an enemy of morality.  No moral person would cut the tax rate of billionaires from 70% to 28% and then try to make up the lost revenue by taxing people's Social Security benefits!  Not to mention the "Iran/Contra affair."  For all his talk of law and order, Reagan was a corrupt and lawless man.  I believe the difference between him and Donald Trump is almost negligible.  Reagan had an affable personality which covered him like a  white sheet.  Members of the KKK do not even use white sheets any more.  I believe Donald Trump is Reagan without the sheet, figuratively speaking.  It was not by accident that Reagan began his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Dr. King never used the phrase colorblind society.  What he said is that he wanted a society where people are judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.  Ronald Reagan misappropriated and distorted King's message when he said we should be a "colorblind society."  Colorblindness negates an important part of who people are. It says to people of color, "we do not want to see you for who you are."  The idea of a colorblind society wounds many people of color.  You can read about what that phrase says to them here.

Colorblindness is a disability.  It makes absolutely no sense to use a disability as a metaphor for what one desires a society to be.  And for those of us in the disability community, that is a completely separate cause of offense.  No one holds other disabilities up as a paradigm for a societal ideal.  The idea of society as colorblind is as reprehensible as saying you want a society where there are no wheelchair ramps.  It is also quite curious to me that, those who argue for the ideal of a colorblind society are quite heated over transgender issues and use rather lame excuses for that like unfair competition in sports.  They want a colorblind society but not a  genderblind society.  That is telling.

I am suggesting here that anybody who would use the phrase colorblind society has either been hoodwinked into believing conservatives care about racial justice, or they are a party to the effort to do the hoodwinking.  Those who use the phrase and try to pass it off as King's idea have sought to undermine the very policies he gave his life for by pretending to use his own words.  They are not his words.  I have found no instance where Dr. King used the phrase colorblind society.  The dismantling of the Voting Rights Act and Affirmative Action in his name is damnable to say the least.  I believe he would forcefully denounce how conservatives have co-opted him,  Martin Luther King III discusses that here.

Christopher Petrella and Justin Gomer wrote in the Boston Review about how conservatives have completely distorted King's words.  You can read that here, but I love one paragraph from their piece.

"The inaccurate conflation of King’s activism with the ideology of colorblindness—in which ignoring race is positioned as the only way to end racism—began in earnest during the Reagan administration. Reagan, who thought little of King, ultimately used the creation of a national holiday honoring King as a way to co-opt his legacy, enabling Reagan ironically to oppose key civil rights laws in the name of aligning himself with King’s supposedly colorblind dream. In so doing, Reagan became one of the most successful proselytes of what sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva terms “colorblind racism,” and Reagan’s frequent citation of King marked the beatification of King not as a champion of racial justice but of colorblind ideology."

I think the phrase colorblind racism is a powerful one, and it seems to me to be part of the raison d'être of  modern conservatism.

There is simply no way on God's green earth Dr. King would have supported the way conservatives co-opt his memory to undo his legacy.  It is disgusting to even entertain that thought.  What King wanted was not a colorblind society, he wanted  a society where your color did not consign you to injustice.  In no way would he have supported the dismantling of things like Affirmative Action.  He wanted us to see color.  We cannot hold people accountable for racial injustice if we are blind to color.  Conservatives know that, and they know they already have the upper hand.  A colorblind society keeps them in the driver's seat. Appeals to a colorblind society are a moral and political sleight-of-hand.

We do not need a colorblind society.  That makes some persons invisible.  We need to see and celebrate color, and celebrate it equally.  Colorblindness does not require anything of the white person, but it requires the person of color to not be who they are.  Perish the thought of a colorblind society.