Here is a post that I copied and pasted written by Dinesh D'Souza whom I highly respect and enjoy! I encourage everyone who passes by to please stop and read! I thought I would post it from his blog because I thought what he has to say should be read by all my blogging friends!
.............When Martin Luther King Really Died
Posted Apr 4th 2008 12:03PM by Dinesh D'Souza
Filed under: History, Controversy, Race Relations
Posted Apr 4th 2008 12:03PM by Dinesh D'Souza
Filed under: History, Controversy, Race Relations
When did Martin Luther King die? It's been four decades since that event, but let's ask the question in its broadest light. Reflections on King's death are focusing on what he accomplished. Basically King led the movement to secure legal equality for African Americans and, by extension, all Americans. As a nonwhite immigrant I have benefited from the civil rights movement, and have never forgotten my debt to King. Without him America would have had Brown v. Board of Education but not the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act or the Fair Housing Bill. King accomplished a lot.
But he failed in one key respect. King's dream was for America to become a color-blind society where we are judged not by the hue of our skin but by the content of our character. A telling phrase: many conservatives celebrate King's concept of a merit-based society. Yet King didn't say we should be judged by our merits; he said we should be judged according to character.
What happened to King's idea of a color-blind America? It has been stifled not by the Ku Klux Klan or the Southern segregationists. Remarkably it has been abandoned by the very civil rights activists who fought alongside King. Note that the greatest African American leaders, from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington to Martin Luther King, argued for a century that blacks wanted nothing more than to be treated equally under the law. Yet almost immediately after this legal equality was secured, through King's leadership, the NAACP and the other civil rights groups gave up on the idea of color-blindness and began to demand race and ethnic preferences.
The new civil rights orthodoxy was expressed in Cornel West's book Race Matters. West's argument is that it is naive to have color-blind laws and policies in a society where race till matters. Since race matters, we have to institutionalize race as the basis of public policy. Since race matters, we no alternative than to fight racial discrimination with state-sponsored racial discrimination.
The great irony, of course, is that when you institutionalize race in order to combat racism, you move further and further away from the ideal of a society where race ceases to count. First the civil rights movement fought for decades to get race out of university admissions, job hiring and government contracts; then after King's death, it fought to put race back. Yes, the argument was that "benign discrimination" is better than "invidious discrimination," although let us remember that all discrimination is benign to the one who benefits from it, and invidious to the one who pays for it.
King had his flaws, but in an age of racial charlatans like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Jeremiah Wright, Americans of goodwill continue to wonder: where are you now, Martin Luther King? Have we lost your kind forever? Perhaps the best way to celebrate King's legacy is to recall and attempt to restore the color-blind ideal that he fought and died for.
Martin Luther King was gunned down on the balcony of his hotel 40 years ago. But he really died when his dream of a color-blind society was killed by his own followers.
But he failed in one key respect. King's dream was for America to become a color-blind society where we are judged not by the hue of our skin but by the content of our character. A telling phrase: many conservatives celebrate King's concept of a merit-based society. Yet King didn't say we should be judged by our merits; he said we should be judged according to character.
What happened to King's idea of a color-blind America? It has been stifled not by the Ku Klux Klan or the Southern segregationists. Remarkably it has been abandoned by the very civil rights activists who fought alongside King. Note that the greatest African American leaders, from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington to Martin Luther King, argued for a century that blacks wanted nothing more than to be treated equally under the law. Yet almost immediately after this legal equality was secured, through King's leadership, the NAACP and the other civil rights groups gave up on the idea of color-blindness and began to demand race and ethnic preferences.
The new civil rights orthodoxy was expressed in Cornel West's book Race Matters. West's argument is that it is naive to have color-blind laws and policies in a society where race till matters. Since race matters, we have to institutionalize race as the basis of public policy. Since race matters, we no alternative than to fight racial discrimination with state-sponsored racial discrimination.
The great irony, of course, is that when you institutionalize race in order to combat racism, you move further and further away from the ideal of a society where race ceases to count. First the civil rights movement fought for decades to get race out of university admissions, job hiring and government contracts; then after King's death, it fought to put race back. Yes, the argument was that "benign discrimination" is better than "invidious discrimination," although let us remember that all discrimination is benign to the one who benefits from it, and invidious to the one who pays for it.
King had his flaws, but in an age of racial charlatans like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Jeremiah Wright, Americans of goodwill continue to wonder: where are you now, Martin Luther King? Have we lost your kind forever? Perhaps the best way to celebrate King's legacy is to recall and attempt to restore the color-blind ideal that he fought and died for.
Martin Luther King was gunned down on the balcony of his hotel 40 years ago. But he really died when his dream of a color-blind society was killed by his own followers.
3 comments:
Wow, that was perfect! Thanks Marie! I love Dinesh Da'souza!
It is quite stunning to realize that most of the ones who benefit from the Civil Rights Movement are indeed the ones who use the discrimination factors to their advantage. They claim that we are all equal and should not be judged "by the color of their skin," but how quickly they fail to include... "But by the content of their character..."
Interesting perspective; thanks!
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