In The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Taleb veers from his analysis of financial systems to argue that the words of dead men can be manipulated to support any argument. When I read these words I couldn’t help but think of one of the favoured tactics for derailing any conversations about racism, “Martin Luther King Jr. fought for a man not being judged by the colour of his skin.” Yes, MLK said those words. The issue is what people interpret from those words.
Based on the context of MLK’s words, he probably meant that black people should be allowed to use the same bathrooms, sit anywhere on a bus, go to the same schools, live in the same neighbourhoods etc. Did he mean that we should never talk about racism and pretend like ignoring it makes it go away? Did MLK mean we should resent any excitement stirred up over a black-led blockbuster? That’s up for debate, but some people are already convinced this is the correct interpretation.
MLK’s words are an anthem for the new colour-blind racists, the ones who refuse to acknowledge racism’s persisting legacy and use “colour-blindness” to derail any conversation on racism. Unarmed black person gets shot- “Why do we have to bring up race? I’m colour-blind.” Black Panther becomes one of the highest-grossing films of all time, led by a mostly black cast- “Why do we have to bring up race? I’m colour-blind. You wouldn’t see me celebrating a film with a mostly white cast.” You get the point I’m making. The colour-blind approach ignores all the ways racism persists and pretends like gaps in things such as employment are all simply due to skill, which ignores evidence of lingering racial preferences.
Yet people who claim to be big fans of MLK and that whole equality thing tend to overlook this point. They also tend to assume MLK was colour-blind, but if they paid attention to any other lines in his speech they would know he wasn’t.
“I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor’s lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.”
Notice that MLK says “black boys…white boys”. He doesn’t say colourless boys. A key part of equality, that a lot of people seem to have forgotten, is that equality requires us to acknowledge differences. A society can’t brag about its racial equality if everyone is of the same race. Equality comes from recognizing someone is different (different skin colour) but not thinking less of them. Noticing someone is black is not racist. Thinking someone is a criminal because they are black is racist.
It is also racist to use the excuse, “I’m colour-blind,” to derail all conversations about racism, whether it is about racist casting in Hollywood, racial profiling by store employees or a story of yet another unarmed black man getting gunned down by a cop who thought his skin colour made him more suspicious.
It is a fact that institutional racism and personal prejudice are still rampant in the world, and especially in the US. To say that we should ignore any black achievement or remove policies meant to help minorities, since it is what MLK would have wanted, is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst. It’s what leads to people walking down the streets with swastika flags and white hoods, thinking that their pride in their whiteness is no different than a black person’s excitement about seeing a black superhero on screen.
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