When Martin Luther King Jr. Called Out "White Moderates" From a Cell in a Birmingham Jail, His Problem was With Their Embrace of the Status Quo Not Their Whiteness

Michael Harriot of The Root often bashes whites as if we’re some monolithic group with no individual members, with no individual lives, loves, struggles, ideas, priorities, consciences, or leanings. If 57 percent of people who identify as white voted for Trump, then everyone with white skin is guilty of voting for Trump, no matter who we actually voted for. Harriot’s columns, by shining a light on the neverending racial injustices that define life in the US, are sometimes insightful. But too often, those columns, with their blanket statements about whites are remarkably reminiscent of the blanket statements by white bigots about people of color.  

In his column on Thursday, March 5, 2020, Harriot went over the rainbow. When Martin Luther King Jr wrote his  Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he was calling out the white moderate ministers who, in 1963, labeled King’s civil rights efforts in Alabama "unwise and untimely.” Did Harriot imagine that his own open “Dear Sir or White Man” letter, written to “White Liberals Blaming 'Low Information' Black Voters for Not Cleaning Up White Folks’ Mess,” would evoke King?

To my eye, it did the opposite. Harriot’s “letter” which takes great offense at being questioned about a vote for the status quo, made Harriot look more like the “white moderates” who King condemned from that jail cell.  

And it’s not just white Sanders supporters who are doing this. There are a lot of super-progressive black youth who dismissively cast anyone who hasn’t seen the light of Socialist Democratic Jesus as an uninformed, backwater hillbilly who needs education.

Doesn’t it sound like Mr. Harriot is angry at the “unwise and untimely” actions that the wiser, more moderate person eschews? (And, just a PS: no large block of progressives, anywhere, label centrists as uninformed hillbillies. They reserve that slur, true or not, for Trump supporters.)

While it’s frustrating that people like Harriot dismiss the Sanders movement, I support his right and anyone’s right to vote however for whomever. We are individuals, and our reasons for our decisions are, or should be, individual. My concern is that people are voting for what they see as the safe choice, which I see as a more dangerous one. But I don’t get to make the call for anyone but me. Harriot, however, wants to make it seem that making what’s perceived as a safer choice is like standing in solidarity against the white oppressor.

Black people in the South didn’t create the racial wealth gap or income inequality. Don’t ask black people to mop up a mess they had no hand in creating.

And, contrary to your opinion, black people have never done anything out of moderation or centrism. Freedom and equality have always been our motivation.

Except, in this case, a vote for Biden, despite the acknowledgement that your candidate of choice has, throughout his political history, been actively engaged in legislating against freedom and equality, doesn’t actually demonstrate the above, does it? No matter how loudly or fiercely Harriot protests, a selective presentation of history will be overwhelmed by a fuller reading of the record.

So, if Harriot is acknowledging his own vote for that white moderate (and I’m not 100% sure he is), what does that make Harriot? He tries to spin it by pretending that all whites are the same:

In the entire history of America, white people have never initiated, supported or participated in, to a significant degree, in a single mass movement for freedom and equality for anyone other than white people.

But here’s the problem: one of those “white people,” Sanders, has been doing all the above, all his adult life.

While Biden was boosting incarceration, bashing bussing, and further enriching rich people, Sanders was marching with King, being handcuffed to his fellow protesters, and fighting for a fair wage. For all people.

 

"Not me. Us." isn't just a slogan, Mr. Harriot. The man you scoff at lives those words, and not just when the cameras are on him. They’re not much different in essence from these, written in a Birmingham jail: 

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." 

Maybe if you also lived those words, you wouldn't feel so threatened by those who do.

  

Anyway, go ahead: rant, rave, scream about the injustice that was done to moderates by having a moderate label slapped on the moderate voter. Or own it. Nothing wrong with being a moderate. Own it.  

But maybe, in the back of your mind, let these words of Reverend King filter in: 

"We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." 

Not me. Us.