Savant's Words

The 0riginal Doby wrote:

Yes, Brother Savant, you did not "state" that Kings dream was watered down by "self hating" blacks. You merely "implied" it. I stand corrected.
Economic justice exists in law, which is what I said, it has been accomplished, but not in fact, which is also what I said, it's now up to the economically oppressed to take advantage of the opportunity those laws afford them.
You did it.
I did it.
Many other people of color have done it.
What possible excuse exists for those who have not yet done it?

Actually, I NEITHER stated nor implied that those leaders who abandoned or watered down king's vision of economic justice were motivated by self-hatred. In fact, I was thinking about somethig else--though, now that do think about it, who knows? But what i REALLY had in mind was lack of vision and the blinkering of imagination and consciemce by narrow class interests.
Now economic justice DOES NOT exist in either law or fact. If it did, there would be no poverty in the world richest nation. There would be no illiteracy. There would be no joblessness. And everyone who needed decent health care would have it. It was to attain economic justice that King sought to win an ECONOMIC BILL OF RIGHTS during the Poor Peoples Campaign. That economic justice isn't legally guaranteed was well understood by King himself.
Hence his comment: "It is not a Constitutional right that men have jobs, but it is a HUMAN right." (See p.5 of FROM CIVIL RIGHTS TO HUMAN RIGHTS, by Prof. Thomas Jackson or PAPERS OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR (3))
Unfortunately, economic inequities are structurally built into the economym abd cabbi be renedied without (in King's words) a "radical redistribution in political and economic power."
But he meant from the haves to the have nots. What we've seen over the past 30 years is a redistribution of more of the nation's wealth from the have nots (and have less) to the haves. This must be halted and reversed, maybe by a NEW MOVEMENT for economic justice.
As to the claim that anyone can simply work his/her way out of poverty, that's an old rags-to-riches myth like the divine rights of kings and Santa Claus.
There are alwatys those who will "succeed", but those individuals do not amount to a coutrrargument. You had the wealthy Cuffee brothers even during slavery. You had CJ Walker even during the early 1900s. The state of most people are little affected by this.
Poverty and exploitation are SOCIAL CONDITIONS, not expressions of individual character. And in a period when the electronic revolution threatens to make labor itself obsolete, the "hard work"ethics is virtually irrelevant as indeed it was always false.

-Savant

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Harrisson wrote:

As you may have guessed, brother Savant, "Chip Westhoven" is yet ANOTHER troll - likely an ohReally clone.
They are hell bent on maximum disruption this morning and should be ignored.

I have noticed a similarity in style and content between OhReally and Westhoven.
But now you say there's "Doby1" and "Doby2"? Well, whatever....I stand on my position, supported by King's own words and the works of King scholars (e.g. Rufus Burrows, Clayborne Carson, Lewis Baldwin, Robert Franklin Mithcell Jr, Taylor Branch, John Ansbro and others) that Dr. Martin Luther King, was a PROGRESSIVE.

Amd pme cam cherry pick, as I've seen conservatives do, all sorts of isolated words and phrases to try to show otherwise.
King was a progressive. He would have been applauding the Arab Spring, marching (even if with a cane) with the workers in Wiscosin, and scolding Obama for not living up to the progressives promises and ideas he campaigned on.


-Savant

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Harrisson wrote:

Excellent point!

By the way, you never told me whether you checked out the chapter on King that I sent you. The book will be a collection of writings by philosophers on king, who was himself philosophically educated. I think we can pick up on a number of things some previous scholars (and activists) missed.

-Savant

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Savant wrote:

....Now the question is: Why did Black "leaders" abandon or water down King's quest for economic justice? Lack of understanding? Myopia? Narrow class interests?

Now...answering THAT question is getting to the 'nitty-gritty' of understanding our contemporary dilemma, brother Savant.

I will suggest that a convergence of all three factors you just mentioned is at work. There always has been, in my opinion, a class schism within the AA community - a division between the lumpen proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie; and a division between the latter and the professional classes; and further division right up to the ultra-elite ranks of the rich.

In one of his prior works, brother Cornel West talks about how the 1970s saw an explosive boom in the collective fortunes of the AA middle class - including, I would add, people like our corporate brother Barack. It seems that removing the lid off the long-suppressed ambitions of bright, upwardly-mobile, ambitious AAs diverted a great deal of otherwise social-reformist talent towards the more narrow interests of self-aggrandizement and conspicuous consumption.

I'm sure there is more to it than just that, but that is what seems apparent to me at the moment...

-Harrisson

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14280.html


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