Editor’s word: The next article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the writer’s personal. Learn extra opinions on theGrio.
Amid the fireworks and yard barbeques celebrating the start of the USA, we must take a second to replicate on the hearth looming on the horizon that threatens the nation’s future. The latest slate of anti-democratic Supreme Court docket selections is a part of a long-building and extra ominous phenomenon: the right-wing’s political technique of distorting the previous to regulate the long run.
Many will take a look at the Supreme Court docket’s selections as casualties of the up to date tradition wars. In doing so, we miss the longer political sport that has been brewing for over 4 many years. This political sport ensures we misunderstand the world round us by misunderstanding how we acquired right here. The latest guide bans and laws in opposition to racial training are essentially the most specific of long-standing efforts which have constructed the tradition of willful ignorance the late thinker Charles W. Mills warned us about, below the guise of preserving “true” American identification. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote within the dissent to the repeal of affirmative motion, “… having so indifferent itself from the nation’s precise previous and current experiences, the Court docket has now been lured into interfering with the essential work that establishments of upper studying are doing to resolve America’s real-world issues … finally, ignoring race simply makes it matter extra.”
In a rustic the place even poor white folks within the backside 20% of the revenue distribution have the next median web value than all Black folks, how can the very best courtroom within the land take significantly the notion that race-conscious laws hurts the dominant group? Worse but, how can right-wing politicians so egregiously use Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s phrases to legitimize the case, as Sarah Huckabee Sanders did when she tweeted, “As Martin Luther King Jr stated, folks needs to be judged on the content material of their character, not the colour of their pores and skin. The Supreme Court docket affirmed that elementary fact in at the moment’s choice.”
My six years of analysis on the political misuses of Dr. King’s reminiscence within the guide, “The Battle for the Individuals’s King: How Politics Transforms the Reminiscence of the Civil Rights Motion” finds that the conservative backlash to the beneficial properties of the Civil Rights Motion — throughout sectors together with training, housing, voting, and employment — has taken the form of a robust political technique: misrepresenting Dr. King’s reminiscence as a Malicious program for anti-civil rights causes. From civil rights rollbacks throughout the Reagan administration to right-wing legislative assaults on LGBTQ rights by the 2000s to the rise of the Tea Celebration to predict the MAGA period, every of those moments weaponized King’s phrases in opposition to the multicultural democracy he fought for and was killed for. An NPR report in 2021 confirmed that at a press convention about the specter of essential race idea, half the Republican audio system used King’s phrases about his dream of a world the place we’re judged by the content material of our character and never the colour of our pores and skin to justify the restriction of training in our nation’s racial historical past.
On this political sport, distorting the previous is the purpose. Distorting the previous is the technique. If we’re offered with a collective reminiscence of the Civil Rights Motion as a last chapter in America’s story of racism, then it’s unclear why race-conscious insurance policies or pupil mortgage forgiveness are essential. If we’re offered with a revisionist collective reminiscence of Dr. King as a mannequin of American meritocracy and individualism, arguing for a colorblind nation, then race-conscious insurance policies appear antithetical to King’s dream.
Actually, there are those that consider that if we cease speaking about race, our social issues will dissipate, that Dr. King believed recognizing race is its personal type of racism (regardless of a historic file that clearly reveals in any other case). Nonetheless, if we put our blinders on and act — legally, politically, and culturally — as if race doesn’t matter, then we paradoxically strengthen and irritate the system of racial inequality. Extra dangerously, we lose sight of the political sport that weaponizes Dr. King and the previous to distort social actuality, pit us in opposition to each other, and dismantle multicultural democracy.
In 1963, Dr. King stated, “There may be nothing in all of the world extra harmful than honest ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” How can we resist a politics that seeks to make willful ignorance the regulation of the land, that distorts the best way we perceive who we have been so we will perceive who we’re and the place we’re going? We will start by restoring and fiercely defending a strong essential training in our colleges and communities, holding our political, media and academic establishments accountable for legitimizing and spreading the political misuses of reminiscence, and supporting the work of Black group organizations that carry the grounded data of our collective fact. This July 4th, let’s keep in mind our societal future hangs within the stability.
Hajar Yazdiha is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, College of Southern California Dornsife School of Letters, Arts, and Sciences and school affiliate of the Fairness Analysis Institute. Her analysis examines the mechanisms underlying the politics of inclusion and exclusion as they form intergroup boundaries, ethno-racial identities, and intergroup relations.
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