Opinion: Reading MLK Ahead of November 6 - Letter from a Portland College
Election season is in the air. As they do every four years, American voters head to the polls or fill out mail-in ballots to select candidates to lead our great democracy. As I do every four years, I find myself returning to the words of the late great Martin Luther King Jr., particularly his Letter from Birmingham Jail. Whenever I reread King’s words I find myself rummaging through different parts of the text, and in a cycle fraught with questions like “Who do I vote for in order to be a good person?” and “How can I engage in democracy without sacrificing my values?” I couldn’t help but share a few passages and polite observations. This op-ed is not meant to tell you who to vote for but to be an incitement to vote at all for Reedies. As we have all heard by now, Reedies do not vote.
To first address the points against voting; that it endorses a candidate who pushes the status quo of empire forward, that it fails to redress the inequality of our nation, that it is impossible to be a ‘good’ person in your vote. In the first case, it was slave power that built this nation. Not only do your dollars represent an accumulation of life hours exchanged willfully, but at a molecular level they are every bit the same dollars earned through the vile Triangle Trade and the unwillful labor of millions of slaves throughout every phase of American history. The so-called abolition of slavery saw a class of people liberated; their yoke shifted instead to those put away in prisons and workhouses. The destruction of reconstruction and the rise of the Central Valley amidst the Dust Bowl saw a rise in modern slavery as the migratory labor patterns definitive of modern capital were reconstituted with huge camps at the border and the advent of a transcontinental tracking system for “migrant” but not “immigrant” laborers. It would be just as morally repugnant as forgiving chattel slavery to say slave power has gone away completely, and yet it was the Fourteenth Amendment (which finds itself under attack from reactionaries like Clarence Thomas, who would see themselves empowered by one candidate) which created the ruse of a nation of free peoples united in their opportunity to labor. To exist in America is no mere compromise, it is an endorsement of a system of governance that is not democratic, was not designed to be, and actively attempts to disrupt popular expression through interpersonal segregation and alienation. As a matter of fact the problem of America, certainly as MLK saw it, was reducible thusly:
“Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things.”
We are blessedly none of us mere things. Each creature given over to walking, wheeling, crawling, swimming, or flying with its back to heaven is worthy of dignity and personhood; and supporting this premise has never been the chief principle of our Republic nor probably any other republic in man’s brief history. It is easy in our alienated day to free associate how we engage politically and socially with how we engage economically. But if you can identify America’s original sin as slavery, if you cannot see in the face of a man who put out a front page advertisement in the nation’s largest newspaper calling for the lynching of five innocent souls the same face that caused “unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches,” then it would seem that our Nation finds itself along a precipice. In fact the precipice, and the ‘unique populist appeal’ of that candidate are entirely illusory. In 1963 a man could identify as the core issues of America and Americanity the exact same questions that are up for debate at the ballot box today. Either you believe chiefly in the dignity of life and the wellbeing of your fellows; or you see yourself as a member of a privileged class called to do ‘good’ upon your fellow man. Doing ‘good’ means something different in either position.
One side understands ‘good’ in this election as bringing the Ten Commandments, a set of principles no Christian sect agrees with its fellows on and which is not present as a single text but rather three distinct lists in the Bible, into schools and public places, they understand ‘dignified life’ as requiring the mass forced torture of people with wombs and the endangering of the lives of those with wombs, they believe in the destruction of nations overseas by a patriarchal cleansing figure which will announce a great “Judgement Day” upon which the Elect (of whom they are assuredly members) will literally float above the heads of the rest of us to a great frontier in the sky to carry on their settling and ‘good Christian soldiering.’ These people would continue their ancient war on public education, which since the fall of segregated schooling (a central premise of Letter from a Birmingham Jail) they have backed up with first Christian and then so-called ‘home’ and now ‘charter’ schooling. There’s nothing “populist” about their message, it is preservationist. They seek to conserve and consign life in ‘their’ country to fit a narrative implanted by a particularly reprehensible media machine which has operated since long before the war between the states but which has undertaken at various times the projects of imitating Indigenous tribes, Lost Cause narrative and statuary building, anti-suffrage, public punitive segregation, redlining, gerrymandering, voter intimidation, “Christian identity,” undoing Affirmative Action, reinforcing gender segregation, genocide, and race war. For this minute and loud group a ‘good’ society is one in which people who look, walk, and talk like them are privileged as the elect guides of our Nation. In the words of one candidate, it is only “Enemies within the nation” that stand in the way of their complete apotheosis.
“A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state's segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?”
A normal recourse to this minority would be their fiscal and social exclusion, it is no convenient coincidence that the minority seeking to enchain America’s destiny are her historic national owners. In MLKs time he called for direct nonviolent action against these usurpers of liberty, often in the form of boycotts and marches. Also in his time, injustice was heaped upon those who stood up for something more important than themselves, just as the letter of law today is swung at youth activists and organizers. It is unfortunate; therefore, that these tactics have been abrogated by national power. One candidate, a man too senile and impotent to plan his own administration, is representative of the interests of groups such as Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute; he would seek therefore to mobilize harsh authoritarian legal frameworks such as RICO (Racketeer Influenced & Corrupt Organisations Act) against people who donate to causes, who share posts online, who support popular movements against his government. Where in MLKs time the state and so-called popular authority ‘happened’ to align against the individual, this candidate would seek to unify the state’s monopoly on violence against any individual in the way of his perceived nation within a nation. Bewombed individuals will find themselves tracked throughout their monthly cycles by multiple state governments as those localities hope to predict pregnancy even before the impregnated are aware of it, to better prevent the dissemination of legal and necessary medical care, and indeed are also working to ban and criminalize contraceptives which the race of man has employed since the dawn of time.
It is totally necessary to that party’s vision that bodily purity of the members of the nation-state be maintained. That is the danger. To the other candidate, however, the situation is mercifully complex. She cannot promise an end to slavery, which was ended on paper over one hundred years ago. She cannot offer an expansion of rights, whose passing back and forth makes dominoes out of the lived experience of individuals, she cannot even make amends for the horrors casually inflicted in service of empire. But she has made clear that remuneration of the right to bodily autonomy, something implicit within the Constitution the other party holds so dear, is her first principle desire. Individuals are absolutely correct to see her goals as something other than ‘good.’ There is no ethical purity on offer from her side, that being the demesne of the opposition. Instead she must lead a multiracial diverse coalition into the promised land of opportunity. Opportunity, in a republic and indeed in our non-democratic nation, means each of us no matter where they hail from is a person full of options. The coalition that coalesces to vote for her on election day is a reflection of the Poor People’s March, the radical movement that got Martin Luther King Jr. shot and killed. It is the same coalition that the Rev. Jesse Jackson mobilized, that came together to deliver Barack Hussein Obama, that pushed Bernie Sanders to three back-to-back primary victories.
To return to an earlier point; reparations is not on the ballot, nor is justice for what our empire has wrought, in no election in American history have voters decided upon the administration of our superpower status. I don’t think policymakers themselves have complete control over the state; the Nation is rather unlike a four-in-hand coach, led by rein and crop. What is on the ballot is simple, either we will elect a man who believes “America is for Americans,” a narrative of total ideological purity and adherence to a specific narrative of world events that necessitates in his words “mass deportation camps” full of millions of hardworking honest good people. Let there be no doubt that who qualifies as “American” will be a shrinking pool, and let us call to mind the results of this sort of rhetoric in recent history. It is therefore quite worrisome to me that the common refrain against the other candidate in this race is that she has lacked a certain ideological purity or abeyance. If we seek to change people and action, we do this in the public square. Through our consumption, through our social action. Voting, filling in a ballot, filing it, having it counted, is as private an action as there is. It is where we private humans come together to acknowledge our shared burden of social obligation to one another, and it is only by voting to protect the shared personhood of all things, be that by protecting the climate, or ensuring that American dollar aid can continue to flow to critical areas, or by making certain that medical care is accessible by people who require it to live, remain in the realm of things we can legally agitate for. Put another way, while your specific issues probably aren’t on the ballot, neither are mine, but on the ballot is an opportunity to pick our opponent in the long walk towards justice.
It is relevant to end this opinion with a reflection on why MLK wrote Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Much of the letter is addressed to ‘white moderates’ who King understands to be “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;” Those white moderates were eight clergymen who wrote a letter calling for “unity” as an approach to civil rights. The unity they sought will sound familiar, as it called for “our own Negro community to withdraw support from these demonstrations, and to unite locally in working peacefully for a better Birmingham.” It’s only a page long, and concludes with an appeal to “both our white and Negro citizenry to observe the principles of law and order and common sense.” In their desire for movement purity, white moderates necessarily batted aside the real concerns of everyday people. Their callous disregard for random horrific violence and the everyday cruelty of apartheid regimes belays not an us and them mentality, but what King calls an “I it” belief.
No one is an island, we find ourselves in just the same place as MLK when he wrote of mankind connected beyond the geographic and spiritual “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” He saw, and I challenge you to see now, that the opportunity in this moment is immense. The first woman president of America is a very real possibility, someone who could enshrine at the highest level reproductive rights, who is campaigning for trans youth’s access to requisite healthcare, the restoration of rights to certain nonviolent offenders, and most importantly of all the continued right to free expression. The very last president of America is a very real possibility, and if the once and future king should decide to wipe away our travails then all will be lost for far more than just we mere so-called ‘Americans.’
I cannot tell you what to do, or how to do it. Please, please, please, vote. It costs nothing, and there is a world to win.
I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.