MLK’s Legacy and the Quest for a Racial Reckoning

A reflection on our distorted, sanitized version of the civil rights struggle, reactionary “backlash,” and the eternal objection of the white moderate

We had the monuments almost to ourselves on Monday morning. My kids woke me up at 6.45, and they were ready to go: Snow, finally! My wife suggested we could catch the sunrise at the Lincoln Memorial, just a 15-minute drive away from where we live. We got to the Memorial around 7.30. No sunrise to be seen behind the thick grey clouds; no ice on the Reflecting Pool either, which was a bit of a disappointment. But just enough snow to keep the boys happy and excited. We walked over to the Martin Luther King Memorial next. “Today is actually his birthday,” I told them. My younger one was impressed by the massive granite stature: “He must have been a giant,” he muttered. “He was a person, silly!” his older brother corrected him. We had a conversation about MLK last week, when he wanted to know who Martin Luther King Jr. was and why he had his own holiday dedicated to him. We talked about the civil rights struggle, about justice, equality, about the fact that MLK had been a leader in the fight against racism back in the 1950s and 60s, “when your grandpa was a little boy,” which is how my kindergartner measures time. “Did he win?” my son asked – did MLK win his struggle for equality and justice? Well…

MLK Day should be an opportunity for the country not just to celebrate the legacy of one of the most important civil rights advocates in history, but also to reflect on where America stands in terms of realizing King’s vision, his dream of his little children one day living in an egalitarian multiracial democracy. Instead, we get an endless stream of empty “Honoring the life and legacy” messages from politicians and corporations that tend to sanitize King and the civil rights movement until there is nothing left but a completely sterile message about “unity.” (And this year, we also got Trump in Iowa…)

Last year, the Bangor Daily News out of Bangor, Maine, made headlines nationwide for publishing – not for the first time, it turned out – a censored version of King’s “I have a dream” speech from which they had cut everything they saw as “divisive,” completely extinguishing King’s sharp criticism of white supremacy, the connection between systemic racism and social inequality, and what King described as the “unspeakable horrors of police brutality.” It’s good that such a stunt finally received some backlash. But it was also, in a way, unfair to single out this one newspaper, when what they did was just a manifestation of the standard version of MLK and the political project he pursued that is broadly admired in the United States today. There must not be anything “divisive” about Martin Luther King Jr. – the editors at the Bangor Daily News were just a little too explicit in implementing this dogma.

So sanitized, distorted, and perverted is the image of MLK that leaders of the Republican Party – a party entirely defined by its commitment to maintaining discriminatory hierarchies of race, wealth, gender, and religion; a party that has become the political home of white Christian nationalists and white supremacists; a party whose standard bearer is the leader of a radicalizing fascistic movement – routinely and comfortably invoke King’s legacy. Republicans don’t just present MLK as a sterile “unity” figure. They deploy him as a weapon to delegitimize attempts to bring about the kind of racial reckoning King was all about – to delegitimize any critique of racist structures and practices, any demand for equality and respect. Rightwing bizarro MLK is all about “colorblindness.” His vision, Republicans want America to believe, is not undermined by politicians who propagate violent conspiracy theories; not by reactionary moral panics that relentlessly demonize society’s vulnerable groups; not by legislation stripping citizens of fundamental rights. Instead, Republicans tell us it is those marginalized groups themselves, their activist “identity politics” and their pesky insistence on equal rights, respect, and representation that threatens national “unity.”

The year 2024 started with the perfect encapsulation of what rightwingers really mean when they say “colorblind”: the reactionary campaign against former Harvard president Claudine Gay. When she finally resigned on January 2, far-right activist Christopher Rufo, who had orchestrated the breathtakingly disingenuous crusade, celebrated: “This is the beginning of the end for DEI in American institutions. We will expose you. We will outmaneuver you. And we will not stop fighting until we have restored colorblind equality in our great nation.” The assault on Gay was part of a much broader struggle aiming to extinguish whatever progress towards diversity and integration has been made. “Colorblind equality” means no people of color in positions of power and influence, and nothing else.

Some prominent figures on the Right are no longer willing to play coy and even pretend they honor MLK and his legacy. Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a far-right youth and college organization, is apparently launching an attack on King, denouncing the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. This position is not new on the Right, nor has it ever been confined to just the fringe. Some parts of the Right were never content with accepting the post-Civil Rights Act reality and railed against what they saw as the acquiescence and appeasement of the forces of multiracial pluralism. Until recently, the established story of modern conservatism’s emergence insisted that those far-right forces had been confined to the irrelevant margins by the gatekeepers of the “respectable” Right. But rightwing extremism was never fully purged from the conservative political project. And after Obama was elected president, the idea that Republicans were selling out “real” America, that more drastic action was urgently needed, was spreading fast into the center of conservative politics.

Such open hostility towards the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s is also dominating among reactionary intellectuals. Remember the 1776 Commission, for instance? That was the name of the advisory Committee established by then-president Donald Trump in the fall of 2020, with the explicit goal of guaranteeing “patriotic education.” The Commission was stacked with rightwing politicians, activists, and political theorists from a particular political and intellectual eco-system – I wrote about these West Coast Straussians a while back: They represent the most Trumpian strand of the rightwing intellectual sphere. The Committee epitomized the anti-Critical Race Theory moral panic that was taking off at the time, and was a reaction to the supposed leftwing capture of U.S. history that had manifested most visibly, according to the Right, in the New York Times’ “1619 Project.” The 1776 Commission released its official report on January 18, 2021 – on MLK Day! – and was disbanded by president Biden immediately upon taking office just a few days later. The 1776 Report was a plea to defend the nation against the assault of leftwing identity politics. No other than John C. Calhoun is presented as “perhaps the leading forerunner of identity politics,” and the Report asserts a direct line of anti-American identity politics from Calhoun to progressivism to the civil rights movement – which, in this interpretation, devolved into favoring “group rights” instead of equal opportunity “not unlike those advanced by Calhoun and his followers” – to today’s “woke” Leftism and Black Lives Matter activism. Yes, you read that right: A rather bold inversion of Calhoun’s actual political project, as he was one of the key intellectual and political architects of anti-democratic minority rule, weaponizing the idea of “states’ rights” to preserve white supremacy. From Calhoun to MLK to today’s “woke” Left: That is, we are asked to believe, the genealogy of the real enemy.

Charlie Kirk, the reactionary thinkers of the 1776 Commission, the Republican politicians “honoring the legacy of Dr. King” while supporting Trumpism: They are all on the same side, different strands of the same political project fueled by the idea that egalitarian multiracial pluralism is an affront to the natural and/or divinely ordained order and must not be allowed to destroy “real America.”

When the Racial Reckoning May Have Seemed Possible

There was a moment towards the end of Trump’s presidency when it might have seemed like a leap forward toward realizing King’s vision was possible. In the summer of 2020, during the mass protests after the public murder of George Floyd, a racial reckoning appeared feasible, perhaps – there was hope that the nation would finally address the systems that keep producing such horrible violence.

The protests were not only bigger, but also broader and more diverse than previous instances of anti-racist mobilization. For a while, at least, mainstream America seemed largely on board, as indicated by public perceptions of the Black Lives Matter movement. When BLM started in 2013/14, it was broadly unpopular among white Americans. But as racial attitudes generally moved left, specifically in the late Obama era and then during Trump’s reign, BLM’s popularity rose and then exploded during the summer of 2020. At that point, around two thirds of Americans approved of BLM and supported BLM-led protests.

What happened in the summer of 2020, and why did it happen right in this moment? One factor that made protests of this magnitude possible was the force of the event itself, the killing of George Floyd – both because of how exceptionally cruel it was, and because it was not an exception at all. Yet another state-sponsored murder of an unarmed citizen who constituted no threat, but was treated as a threat by the agents of a system that considered his very existence as a Black man, his very being, dangerous. Yet another public execution caught on camera. Yet again, the outcome the system is set up to provoke and produce – and therefore keeps producing with a regularity that is shocking, but shouldn’t surprise anyone. Black Lives Matter had been founded in reaction to precisely this reality. And BLM activists had laid the groundwork for this kind of mobilization, were ready to organize and coordinate.

Secondly, the protests were also a product of a specific political context. Donald Trump was in the White House. He was the face of a racial grievance campaign to restore white dominance, he embodied the promise to mobilize the coercive powers of the state to squash any attempt to topple white supremacy. In the summer of 2020, Trump forced Americans to make a choice: Support the protests – or the white nationalist regime that sought to suppress them. Marching in the BLM-led protests was also a way to oppose Trumpism directly – a way for Americans to signal maximal distance from Trump.

Counter-reckonings and the rise of “popularism”

And yet, the racial reckoning never materialized. There are several reasons why there has been so little structural change since the summer of 2020. One is the fact that the George Floyd protests sparked a significant radicalization of the Right – a kind of racial counter-reckoning, as Hakeem Jefferson and Victor Ray have rightfully argued. This found its emblematic expression in the manufactured anti-“CRT” panic that took off in the fall of 2020. It also manifested in an escalation of red-state legislation intended to roll back fundamental rights for traditionally marginalized groups, a full-on assault on public education, and far-reaching attempts to censor and purge anything and anyone daring to deviate from a white nationalist understanding of the country’s past and present.

As with so many aspects of rightwing politics in the Trump era, these initiatives are not simply a departure from a venerable conservative project that ended in 2016 – but they do represent an exacerbation of long-standing tendencies; they build on anti-democratic traditions on the Right – while also constituting a significant radicalization. Recent political and societal events have dramatically heightened the sense of being under siege that has always characterized the modern conservative movement and the reactionary Right. The first one was the election and re-election of the first Black president to the White House, a symbol of the threat to the “natural” order of white dominance. The summer of 2020 further escalated this perception of imminent danger: It has become a key element of rightwing political identity to regard the protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd as irrefutable proof that radically “Un-American” forces of “woke” extremism were rising, that “the Left” had started its full-on assault. This interpretation is a central component of the permission structure that governs rightwing politics. Building up this supposedly totalitarian threat from the “Left” enables the Right to justify its actions within the long-established framework of conservative self-victimization. It’s a permission structure that doesn’t ever allow de-escalation or retreat. Clinging to the idea that “The Right won’t go THAT far” is futile because they have convinced themselves that the other side has already gone *much further*.

But it’s not just rightwing resistance that prevented a more significant racial reckoning to emerge from the summer of 2020. Once Trump was no longer president, a widespread longing on the center-right to center-left for a return to pre-Trump “normalcy” overwhelmed and drowned out many supposedly more “radical” calls for change. “Normalcy,” in U.S. history, has never entailed a racial reckoning, but rather a combination of ignoring, upholding, and complying with structural racism.

Finally, the post-George Floyd counter-reckoning was also helped along by the rise of the anti-activist narrative of “popularism” within Democratic circles that foregrounds electoral concerns to discourage any serious focus on race and racism. “Popularism” holds that Democrats should de-emphasize what’s unpopular and focus instead on what polls well in order to win elections. In a very general sense, this sounds plausible, and in a vacuum, it is hard to argue with such wisdom. But the popularist argument is actually a lot more specific, and it is not advanced in a vacuum.

Popularists argue that Democrats should focus on what’s popular with a specific group of voters: The swing voters, or cross-pressured voters – the mythical median voter. They imagine that median voter as a middle-aged white man, more likely than not without a college degree, probably living in a red state or reddish area of a blue state. In practice, popularists demand Democrats focus on the sensibilities of “moderate” to center-right white people – and white men specifically. Popularists are therefore broadly opposed to emphasizing “culture war issues.” They say they are *for* racial and social justice – but reject talking about or actively tackling matters of race and racism because that supposedly lacks popularity with the key demographic and is only bound to trigger “backlash.” In practice, they usually advocate for a focus on the mythical pocketbook and a more conservative posture on what they see as “culture wars” and “identity politics” distractions.

A few things stand out about the way “popularism” has been discussed in recent years. Popularists work very hard to present their recommendations as purely objective, common-sense politics. And the mainstream discourse has generally taken this kind of “electoralism” – what can you say, gotta win elections! – at face value. But it’s striking how “popularist” concerns just so happen to map perfectly onto the general sensibilities and preferences of those who propagate this approach. While supposedly based purely on rational, electoral considerations, “popularism” positions “moderate” white elites as the arbiters of what is and what is not reasonable. It has the effect of re-centering the perspective and sensibilities of “moderate” white men – and of cementing their elite status.  

Popularism also has all the hallmarks of the kind of backlash politics that has often stifled – or rather: been deliberately used to stifle – egalitarian policies: a logic of defeatist appeasement and pre-emptive abandonment of justice, equality, and progress in the name of “unity,” of winning elections, of avoiding an aggressive reaction. Since the Civil War, as Jefferson Cowie has powerfully argued in Freedom’s Dominion, civil rights progress has often been hampered by attempts to prevent “backlash” – leaving those who are the targets of the reactionary assault insufficiently protected when it inevitably came anyway.

There is a long tradition of “moderate” elites presenting their discomfort with any “activist” attempt to level hierarchies in this way. These “popularist” pleas to slow down, these warnings against “radicalism” very much echo arguments white “moderates” presented in the 1950s and 60s against the civil rights movement they constantly derided as wanting too much, too fast, as going about their business in the wrong way, too uncivil, too divisive.

And this brings us back to Martin Luther King Jr. If this country had always followed this maxim, adhered to the eternal battle cry of the “reasonable” moderate, the 1960s civil rights revolution would not have happened. It certainly wouldn’t have been embraced by any politician in Washington.

MLK and the civil rights protests were not popular at the time. According to a Gallup poll conducted just days before the March on Washington in late August 1963, where King would deliver his “I have a dream” speech, 60 percent of Americans – of those Americans the polls captured, at least – saw the coming protests unfavorably, only 23 percent supported them. In April 1964, only 16 percent of those polled by Gallup argued mass protest and demonstrations helped racial equality – 74 percent said they hurt. What about MLK himself? Even at his most popular, in 1963/64, King’s net approval was barely positive, and it got worse after that. Asked to rank him on a scale of +5 to -5, 45 percent saw him positively in 1965, the same percentage had a negative view. Just a year later, he was already down to 32 percent positive, 63 percent negative. That’s because a lot of white Americans had hoped all the talk about civil rights would stop after the Voting Rights Act was passed. But King wouldn’t let them off the hook, demanded structural change, even started taking a public stance against the Vietnam War. Racism wasn’t over, and a lot of white Americans blamed that on King and the civil rights movement. Barack Obama would experience the same after his election: The post-racial utopia still not realized? Clearly, the first Black president was responsible for what was often euphemistically termed worsening race relations. By the time he was assassinated in April 1968, over 70 percent of Americans disapproved of Martin Luther King Jr.   

King himself thought that the openly racist, segregationist Right wasn’t the only and maybe not even the main obstacle to real racial progress. There were also the “moderate” circles who claimed to support racial equality – but always told him that the civil rights activists were too radical, would only invite backlash, should go slower. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, written in April 1963, he focused his critique on the “white moderate”:

“First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;’ who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.’”

This has been the norm in U.S. history: Moments of racial progress, or even just perceived progress, were followed by intense counter-mobilizations from the Right – flanked by centrist concerns that it was really all the activists’ fault for causing “backlash.”

People on the center and those who consider themselves “liberal” while ceaselessly raging against “wokeism” and the “social justice Left” never reflect on this fundamental contradiction: They all claim that the civil rights revolution of the 1960s was good and necessary – but they are all advocating a position that would have likely made it impossible. If the Democratic Party shouldn’t embrace and fight hard for policies and positions that are “divisive,” even broadly unpopular, for fear of causing a white reactionary backlash, then clearly it shouldn’t have supported Martin Luther King and the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.  

This is the question that I would love all the popularists and centrist critics of left-wing activism to grapple with, all those who believe there has just been too much focus on racial justice, that the activists’ voices should be de-emphasized: What does it mean that you are making the same arguments as those “white moderates” MLK was singling out as a key hurdle to racial justice? Arguments that, at every previous civil rights crossroads in the country’s history, had to be overcome in order to achieve significant racial progress?

There is hope

In terms of racial attitudes, Americans are strongly polarized along party lines, and the signs of a retrenchment beyond just the Republican camp are unmistakable. But it isn’t all bad. The broader trends of the past decade have not been reversed. It continues to be true that white Democrats display increasingly liberal racial attitudes. Let’s remember that even halfway through the Obama era, nearly half of all white Obama voters, 49 percent, did not think that Black people “have gotten less than they deserve,” 39 percent didn’t think racial discrimination had anything to do with social inequality, and 28 percent believed that Black people simply didn’t work hard enough.[1] Again, this is among white people who voted for Barack Obama.

Over the next few years, some of these white Obama voters who held racially conservative, resentful views, left the Democratic Party and went over the GOP, where such views are hegemonic; most of those who stuck with the Democratic Party moved left on racial issues. Trump accelerated that process among Democratic voters. The percentage of those arguing racial discrimination was the main reason for existing inequalities between Blacks and whites rose from 44 percent in early 2014 to 66 percent half a year into Trump’s presidency. It wasn’t until after the 2020 election that a majority of Democrats supported affirmative action for the very first time. And even though support for the Black Lives Matter movement dropped after reaching a peak in June 2020, it has stabilized at slightly over 50 percent. That’s the same approval rating as early on in the Trump era, and it is much better than pre-Trump. Moreover, support continues to be very high among white Democrats. The overall drop in support compared to the summer of 2020 is almost entirely a function of Republicans turning hard against BLM.

Who are we going to listen to? Whose voices, interests, and sensibilities count? That has always been the key question. The American Right argues – openly, with increasing aggression – that only white reactionaries count as they are the embodiment of “real America.” Popularists demand we privilege the “moderately” conservative white man, as he supposedly represents a path to electoral victory and “reasonable” common sense. Those who actually want to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. shouldn’t give in so easily to such ideological temptations. There is a (small-d) democratic majority to be mobilized out there. No realistic pathway to a swift realization of MLK’s vision of egalitarian multiracial pluralism is currently available to America; it will be a long and arduous struggle. But that majority, if we choose to listen to it, might get us a lot closer than this country has ever been.

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[1] These numbers are taken from Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America, a fantastic dissection of what led to Trump’s victory in 2016, published in 2018 by political scientists Michael Tesler, Lynn Vawrick, and John Sides. Their findings are supported by reams of empirical evidence from other studies as well.