http://www.hnn.us/articles/122286.html
By Michael H. Carriere
1-18-10
Michael H. Carriere is assistant professor of general studies at the
Milwaukee School of Engineering. He received his PhD in American
urban history from the University of Chicago in 2009.
--
Throughout this week, educators across the globe will stray from
their lesson plans to discuss the life and legacy of Martin Luther
King, Jr. Undoubtedly, many such discussions will focus on the
landmark events of King's career, including the 1955 Montgomery Bus
Boycott and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. This
latter moment will receive the most attention, as it was at the march
that King gave his seminal "I Have a Dream" speech, a speech that
encapsulates the most positive components of King's vision of racial
equality. With nods to "the magnificent words of the Constitution
and the Declaration of Independence," King here spoke a language of
Americanism that was both inclusive (there was a place in the
movement for "our white brothers") and optimistic. "Now," King
forcefully concluded, "is the time to make real the promises of democracy.
Current events will only make the decision to highlight such speeches
as "I Have a Dream" even more alluring. This year, Martin Luther
King, Jr. Day occurs almost exactly one year after the inauguration
of Barack Obama, the nation's first African-American president. If
the "architects of our republic" had indeed viewed America's founding
documents as "a promissory note to which every American was to fall
heir" as King proclaimed in his 1963 speech then perhaps one can
read the election of Obama as the moment when the nation's
African-American population finally had complete access to "the bank
of justice." With such a development in mind, it seems as if the day
when all Americans would live "in a nation where they will not be
judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their
character" has finally arrived.
Obviously, there is much to this reading of King's life and
words. King often spoke a language of democracy that transcended the
confines of race, a language that Obama clearly drew upon throughout
the 2008 campaign season. Sadly, King did not live to see the end
result of his vision. In such a context, Obama's election victory
served as a fitting conclusion to the long narrative of the modern
civil rights movement, a victory that King would have joyfully
welcomed. We, as a nation, had finally overcome.
Yet King was more than just one speech. And King, particularly
towards the last years of his life, came to see the realities of
racial inequality as just symptom of a larger disease that had
inflicted America: the sickness of empire. It is this aspect of
King's body of work that I hope educators as well as Obama himself
reflect upon this week. For King, as the Vietnam War raged on,
violence abroad threatened to derail the real progress that the civil
rights movement had made throughout the early to mid-1960s. Yet more
importantly, King's evolution into an anti-war activist highlighted
his ability to diagnosis the root cause of the country's
sickness: its inability to view both the past and the present free
from its ideological blinders. In places such as Vietnam, history
and Cold War anti-communism had become so intertwined that an honest
assessment of America's policies in the region had become impossible.
One begins to see evidence of King's burgeoning anti-war beliefs in
such speeches as "Beyond Vietnam." In this speech, given April 4,
1967 before a crowd of 3,000 in New York's Riverside Church, King
eloquently outlined his growing mistrust of American foreign policy.
On one level, the country's escalation of attacks in Vietnam was
making it harder and harder for King to convince younger, more
militant civil rights demonstrators of the need to embrace
non-violent confrontation. Such young people, when asked to confront
the American state non-violently, answered back with one question:
"what about Vietnam?" Violence, as the Vietnam War profoundly
illustrated, had become the only language that U.S. policymakers
seemed to understand.
At the same time, King realized that more money spent for the war
effort meant less money for such domestic concerns as anti-poverty
efforts. The Vietnam War was therefore "like some demonic suction
tube," one that compelled King to "see the war as an enemy of the
poor and to attack it as such." Yet the war was doing more than
robbing America's poor by diverting resources from needy
neighborhoods. It was also decimating another valuable resource: the
very lives of African-American men. Convinced that the war "was
sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and
to die in extraordinarily high proportions to the rest of the
population," King felt he had little choice but to speak out against
such a destructive conflict.
Yet the most grievous error that American forces had made in Vietnam
was misreading the region's history. The U.S. military had believed
that the Vietnamese, following France's withdrawal from the country
in 1954, would welcome an American presence in the region (one
wonders if Dick Cheney heard this speech). To King, the Americans
were undoubtedly viewed as "strange liberators." After all, the
Vietnamese people had already proclaimed their independence in 1945
using, as King pointed out, the American Declaration of Independence
in their own "document of freedom." Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh
had even written to President Harry S. Truman, proclaiming his
admiration of American-style democracy and asking his administration
to recognize the independence movement (Truman never wrote
back). Instead, as King concluded, "we refused to recognize them.
At the core of this refusal was the belief that the "the Vietnamese
people were not 'ready' for independence." Without our assistance
and oversight, Vietnam would fall victim to the communist forces of
the Soviet Union and China. Here, America "feel victim to the deadly
Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for
so long." Unable to see beyond the binaries of the Cold War, America
viewed Vietnamese development solely through the lens of
anti-communism. Those that fought against us were then cast as
inhuman agents of communism, their true motives for resisting
American occupation left unexplored and unexamined. Instead, the U.S.
focused exclusively on meeting such resistance through military
means, paying little attention to the psychological and political
repercussions of these destructive policies.
America, as President Obama has reminded us many times recently, is a
country currently engaged in two wars. In many ways, we seem to have
paid little attention to the warnings offered by King in 1967. The
situations in both Iraq and Afghanistan are both marked by the
inability to see beyond the ideological confines of the "War on
Terror." History has mattered little in these two conflicts, and
nine years after our initial campaign in Afghanistan we still have
very little understanding of the root causes of the animus against
the United States. It is within this context that a reexamination of
King's entire body of work would prove useful at this historical moment.
All of this is not to simply argue that Afghanistan (or Iraq) will
soon turn into Obama's Vietnam. King's thoughts on Vietnam remind us
that a certain ahistorical hubris has informed U.S. foreign policy
for much of the country's existence regardless of where these
policies were ultimately enacted. We don't need to cast Obama as a
latter-day LBJ to make the case that we need to rethink our positions
in Iraq and Afghanistan. We might, however, want to revisit King's
thoughts on such matters as we begin this difficult process.
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