Reading Old, Reading New

I'm sitting up this evening reading a book by Michael Eric Dyson entitled "April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr's Death and How It Changed America." I just came across the following paragraph which began with these words of Dr. King's -- "'At the very same time that America refused to give the Negro any land, through an act of Congress our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and Midwest, which meant it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with the economic floor.' King wailed indignantly at the nation's unjust demand for self-reliance from black folk while forgetting how white immigrants were offered eduction, agriculture, and subsidies. 'But not only did they give them land, they built land grant colleges with government money to teach them how to farm. Not only that they they provided county agents to further their expertise in farming. Not only that, they provided low interest rates in order that they could mechanize their farms.' It was not lost on King how white privilege and government support contrasted sharply to--and ultimately reinforced--black suffering.
King reinforced that the call for black self-help made hypocrites of those who ignored the aid given the very groups to whom blacks are unfavorably compared. 'Not only that, today many of these people are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies not to farm, and they are the very people telling the black man that he ought to lift himself up by his own bootstraps.' The calls for blacks to turn inward and pull themselves up by their own striving, rather than wrestling with the massive structural problems of economic inequality that caused their blight, struck King as plain dishonest. 'So often in America we have socialism for the rich, and rugged, free enterprise capitalism for the poor,' King said on another occasion. 'Nobody has lifted himself by their own bootstraps.' King also knew that there had been a time, and recently too, when the act of wearing boots, and thereby showing some small outward sign of equality to whites, was enough to get a black man hung."

These words of Dr. King, for me, resonate today as they did in that decade when I was still a boy and he first spoke them. As I've watched the response that we have made, as a nation, to the current economic crisis, I've been struck by how Dr. King's analysis of the socialism of the wealthy and the capitalism handed to the poor seems to at least ring a bit true. The other thing that has struck me is the urgency with which Congress has been acting -- trying to do something to fix the ailing economy. And I have wondered - where was that urgency while this emergency has been going on and on and on for decades (if not longer) among those who were poorest? Then - the responses were to volunteer in soup kitchens or to encourage "faith-based" organizations to run programs that would "meet the needs" of those who are struggling. Now when the economic crisis is hitting everyone they see the emptiness of those responses. They are looking for and fighting about what types of structural responses need to be made. Well I say God Bless 'em for finally getting religion. Now let's not forget that lesson when the "big" economy begins to improve for the people on the top of the heap. Let's keep the momentum going and urge everyone (including the "faith-based" communities) to work not just to maintain the problem, but to actually solve it (what a concept!).

I look to the past, in part, to learn from it. Though I can tend to wallow for a moment in my complaints about what has been done in the past - my main desire is to learn from it and find a way forward in the here and now. The words from Dr. King are a good reminder to me tonight. Very good.