Constructive Coercive Power

On white facebook (I say that in humility and to acknowledge that as a white person I inhabit mostly white spaces on facebook) I see a lot of arguments about looting and assumption that MLK would not like what is going on, even sometimes white people trying to shame the current situation using MLK as an example. To those people, I say -- Read some Martin Luther King. (I also like what Ezra Klein said that maybe the police and government leaders should read Dr. King too).

The behavior they are talking about when they call for nonviolence is at most a small element of a much much larger crowd of nonviolent protesters and regular people who are mad as hell, sad as hell, tired as hell. If you want these protests to be organized then you should stop allowing people like the Minneanapolis police chief Bob Kroll to call groups like BLM a terrorist group. Wake up dummies, the biggest domestic terror groups are white supremacist!

What I don't think our nostalgia brain(washing) with its connection to our I-hate-history impulses is taking seriously is how uncomfortable the 50s and 60s were and that they were uncomfortable by design. The non-violent part was a strategy, not a Christian thing. The pattern was Gandhi. (Of course, inspiration can be found in Jesus life, but Jesus was willing to die for a religious/spiritual cause. Those participating in nonviolent protest were hoping to live and see the world changed). (Also, Gandhi said the sermon on the mount was a great influence on his ideas).

Pick up this book if you have never read Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King discusses the strategy of violent rebellion. Did you know that? His argument is that violent revolution only works if the concentration of the minority is closer in population to that of the majority. In other word, the nonviolent part is chosen method, a strategy to achieve change. I have even read others say that the strategy could actually be called violent nonviolent protest as it often incited violence. It is meant to force change. It was meant to be televised. It was meant to make the United States look horrible in the middle of the Cold War.

If history teaches anything, it is that evil is recalcitrant and determined, and never voluntarily relinquishes its hold short of an almost fanatical resistance. Evil must be attacked by a counteracting persistence, by the day-to-day assault of the battering rams of justice. (128)

King says it is a fallacy that "ethical appeals and persuasion alone will bring about justice. This does not mean that ethical appeals must not be made. It simply means that those appeals must be undergirded by some form of constructive coercive power. ... So every ethical appeal to the conscience of the white man must be accomplished by nonviolent pressure ... Our course of action must lie neither in passively relying on persuasion nor in actively succumbing to violent rebellion, but in a higher synthesis that reconciles the truths of these two opposites while avoiding the inadequacies and ineffectiveness of both." (128-129)

Ok, I have to catch you up or remind you of something before we hit the next point. If you read this book you will see that conservative christians are no where to be found. Those, I-love-the-Bible, the Bible-is-inerrant-and-perfect are absent from these pages as they were absent from the struggle in large part. Of course, I am only referring to white conservative christians, many many black christians were conservative and marching (along with liberal christians and liberal jewish people and nonchristians). The best argument you can give them is that they stood aside and didn't preach against civil rights (as opposed to one hundred years earlier when then lent their bible knowledge and preacher pulpit to justifying slavery). They let the political theorists and politicians carry all the weight. But they were not marching in the street. This is a big red flag against Dobson, Buchanan, Falwell and the rest of the Moral Majority crowd. Please let us admit they were on the wrong side of history back then.

So, I say all that, to say that the critique of the white liberal on these pages is because they are involved enough to get these critiques. It is because they are in some ways allying with the struggle. (Also, in the passage below I am quoting and so leave the text as it is, although it has antiquated language, apologies if that is wrong and correction welcome):

The white liberal must rid himself of the notion that there can be a tensionless transition from the old order of injustice to the new order of justice. Two things are clear to me, and I hope they are clear to white liberals. One is that the Negro cannot achieve emancipation through violent rebellion. The other is that the Negro cannot achieve emancipation by passively waiting for the white race voluntarily to grant it to him. The Negro has not gained a single right in America without persistent pressure and agitation. However lamentable it may seem, the Negro is now convinced that white America will never admit him to equal rights unless it is coerced into doing it.
Nonviolent coercion always brings tension to the surface. This tension, however, must not be seen as destructive. There is a kind of tension that is both healthy and necessary for growth. Society needs nonviolent gadflies to bring its tensions into the open and force its citizens to confront the ugliness of their prejudices and the tragedy of their racism.
It is important for the liberal to see that the oppressed person who agitates for his rights is not the creator of tension. He merely brings out the hidden tension that is already alive. Last summer when we had our open housing marches in Chicago, many of our white liberal friends cried out in horror and dismay: “You are creating hatred and hostility in the white communities in which you are marching. You are only developing a white backlash.” I never could understand this logic. They failed to realize that the hatred and the hostilities were already latently or subconsciously present. Our marches merely brought them to the surface. How strange it would be to condemn a physician who, through persistent work and the ingenuity of his medical skills, discovered cancer in a patient. Would anyone be so ignorant as to say he caused the cancer? Through the skills and discipline of direct action we reveal that there is a dangerous cancer of hatred and racism in our society. We did not cause the cancer; we merely exposed it. Only through this kind of exposure will the cancer ever be cured. (90-91)

The tension was there, we, some of us, just don't like seeing it. We, some of us, are looking for someone to blame or someone to end it.

This is a movement against police violence against black people--men, women and children (recent killings in all these categories and other brutalities don't make national news). That is what this is about. The reaction is a revealing of tension and the way to resolve that tension is to address the problem of police violence against black people (and all the other dominoes connected to it).

I want to share this passage where King answers the questioners of why they let children march in demonstrations:

A hundred times I have been asked why we have allowed little children to march in demonstrations, to freeze and suffer in jails, to be exposed to bullets and dynamite. The questions imply that we have revealed a want of family feeling or a recklessness toward family security. The answer is simple. Our children and our families are maimed a little every day of our lives. If we can end an incessant torture by a single climactic confrontation, the risks are acceptable. Moreover, our family life will be born anew if we fight together. Other families may be fortunate enough to be able to protect their young from danger. Our families, as we have seen, are different. Oppression has again and again divided and splintered them. We are a people torn apart from era to era. It is logical, moral and psychologically constructive for us to resist oppression united as families. (108)

We need to engage. We need to read and listen and learn. We need to vote. We need to get involved.

Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn. (9)

It is disappointment with the Christian church that appears to be more white than Christian, and with many white clergymen who prefer to remain silent behind the security of stained-glass windows. (36)

MLK points out in the chapter on Black Power that it is a sick country that applauds "nonviolence whenever the [blacks] have practiced it" meanwhile they are waging war in Vietnam and are one of the most militaristic cultures in the history of the world. Couldn't we say the same today? We spend so much on defense and Trump ran on taking the handcuffs off and rebuilding the nuclear weaponry, meanwhile he was slashing the task force for pandemics!?! Are we really in a holy place to point the finger at burning buildings? Seems like our own house (white America) is out of order.