THE PROBLEM WITH INVOKING MLK'S NAME

IN this week of Martin Luther King's birthday -- and probably most of
February's Black History observance as well -- we will be getting an
earful of what King would be doing about our social, economic and,
particularly, racial problems.

Some of what we'll hear will make good moral and pragmatic sense;
much of it won't. But hardly any of it will have much to do with what
King himself would be doing. I'm not sure we care what he'd be doing.
We invoke his name only to lend weight to our own propositions.

If King were around today, he would certainly be protesting the
election of George W. Bush. If King were around today, he would be
urging Republicans and Democrats to come together across party lines
to do God's will. If King were around today, he'd support affirmative
action (or colorblindness), defend a woman's right to choose (or the
rights of the helpless unborn) and take a clear and principled stand
for (or against) vouchers.

Aside from my near certainty that King would be leading some sort of
action based on careful analysis of both problems and solutions, I
don't know what he'd be doing today.

He wouldn't, I'm pretty sure, do what I did a while back. I told my
students that the electoral debacle in Florida was proof that nothing
had changed since the days when civil rights workers put their lives
on the line to win black Americans the right to vote.

They were a little skeptical until I explained it to them. Wasn't the
key fact of the Florida mess the disproportionate disenfranchisement
of minority voters? What did it matter if it was done by flawed
voting machines and officious poll workers rather than by police dogs
and fire hoses?

Didn't the racists of 40 and 50 years ago invent all sorts of
seemingly benign impediments to keep blacks from voting? And didn't
Florida electoral officials just do the same thing? How else to
explain the resistance to recounts in heavily black areas? And wasn't
the confusing butterfly ballot just a modern-day version of the
outlawed literacy test?

By the time I got wound up, most of the students were convinced that
Florida did in fact represent a reincarnation of the American
apartheid they'd heard about all their lives.

Then I revealed the trap I'd laid: With a good helping of
straightforward sincerity and just enough truth to make it barely
plausible, you can sell just about anything to anybody -- even when
they know better.

It's a nasty thing to do, of course, and I only do it to make a point
- -- and then not very often. The last time I'd done it was in a speech
at a King Day celebration at some college, back in the days when so
many young black men were falling to drug-driven violence.

I told my mostly black audience that they should be clear as to what
was turning young black men into what we then called "an endangered
species."

Weren't the people who imported the heroin and cocaine into our
country mostly white? Wasn't the Customs Service, which allowed the
stuff in, run by white officials? Weren't the domestic law
enforcement departments -- from county sheriff to the FBI -- mostly
white? Weren't the bankers and money-launderers who made the whole
thing possible and hugely profitable largely white? And weren't the
importers of the Uzis and AK-47 weapons our young men were using to
destroy each other mostly white people?

Wasn't it obvious, then, that our young men were dying at the hands
of white folks?

When the applause finally subsided, I confessed my demagoguery. It
wasn't that I had told them falsehoods; only that I had told them
incomplete truth. I had appealed to their emotions, not to their
minds, by getting them to view a vastly complicated matter entirely
through the lens of race.

What they saw was accurate enough, but what escaped their notice --
including the eager, profit-driven participation of those I portrayed
as victims -- was more important.

Why do I say these things while our attention is turned toward King?
I do it as a reminder that our situation demands not just organized
action but also honest and accurate analysis. King, who understood
that one without the other is useless, was a master of both.

And if he were around today ...