On this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday, a review of American social and political discourse shows bitter resistance to the fight for justice as strong as that the civil rights movement faced, and less willingness to listen.
On the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday of 2019, it is entirely possible to look back on King’s courage and self-sacrifice as inspirations in especially difficult times. But it’s not as easy to imagine that a miracle like the civil rights movement can recur in the Trump Era.
For those who think of what King and his contemporaries achieved as inevitable and overdue–and now universally praised by everyone this side of open white supremacists–its miraculous nature might seem overstated. But make no mistake, the civil rights movement achieved a progressive breakthrough and a national consensus on an issue–the equality of races before the law–that had divided Americans from the Republic’s very beginning. Indeed, racial equality is still controversial, as evidenced by the furies of resentment that accompanied the backlash to the country’s first African-American president and led to his startling successor.
It’s painful to remember how recently many of us thought Barack Obama represented a permanent consolidation of King’s accomplishments; that he was the Joshua to King’s Moses, who would lead his people into a promised land of opportunity and justice. Now at a time of general reconsideration of the 44th president’s significance, this, too is in serious question. The historic bell sounded by Obama’s election cannot be unrung. But few would deny that the unrighteous remnant of Americans who think white people are oppressed by the aspirations of people of color has grown larger and more militant, effectively reclaiming the appropriately named White House for the race that occupied it for so long.
While that doesn’t mean full-on racial segregation will return, it does mean that King’s legacy has been domesticated almost to the point of vanishing, even though we need it more than ever to combat a resurgence of overt racism.
