and proceed to demonstrate deeper violence toward what they perceive to be standard or ordinary examples. In Closing: An Observation There has been at work a harmful misreading of the King legacy, which projects and sustains a patriarchal and individualist construal of the Freedom Movement, beginning with the idea that the Montgomery bus boycott was led and executed by a single man. This calculated fantasy has expanded to depict a contemporary, twenty-first-century Freedom Movement devoid of such leadership, and therefore bereft of critical, even moral, agency: quotidian lamentations claiming, “We don’t have any leaders like that anymore.” Yet various people remember the Freedom Movement differently, not only African Americans versus those who believe themselves to be white. And the ways in which we remember these things have become crucial to the prospect of progress. The antiracist activist not only detracts from the legitimacy of whiteness but also seeks to construct an expansive pan-African humanism. Such as the kind we see in King. What might seem a weakness in King’s antiracism, may actually be a failure of American memory to identify and contextualize the mission, character, and trajectory of King’s work and thinking. And this breakdown of memory can be attributed, at least in part, to the effect of segregation on American identity, education, and the comprehensive, epistemological implications of racial hierarchy for human and social formation. It is the antiracist position, and antiracist movements—including the work of Angela Davis, Black Lives Matter, various campus movements, the newly founded Antiracist Research and Policy Center, the Racial Imaginary Institute, and many others—that have carried on the deepest work of King, along with black liberationist, womanist, and queer theologies that are continually championing, and possibly recovering, the irrevocably compromised missiology, liturgies, and ideologies of Christianity in the United States. If, in remembering King and seeking his legacy, we imagine a mythologized, patriarchal figurehead whose most significant contribution was the March on Washington, then we do not remember King accurately or well. Remembering King as an antiracist criminalized by his government, a strident opposer of white supremacy, a representative of the total activities of a resistance ignited in segregated communities across the United States, we will see the legacy still alive, and under threat. Finally, we’d be remiss in this discussion not to mention directly the philosophy underlying King’s work, which was the centrality of love. King’s conviction that love possesses and demands centrality in every endeavor of liberation is echoed in the Black Lives Matter movement, which is predicated by the initiative to self-love and established as a “love letter to black people.” Baldwin too begins and ends The Fire Next Time with a similar appeal to the
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agency and necessity of love. I have been encouraged by the ways in which queer theorists and theologians have advanced all liberation efforts by diversifying and expanding the normative ways of being embodied people, which inevitably expands perceptions and conceptions of love and loving.
Amy Schiller: I teach about race, along with sexuality and gender and politics, while my research independently has involved a lot of Arendt’s conceptual frameworks. When a panel on Martin Luther King Jr., civil disobedience, and Arendt was proposed to me, I saw an opportunity to address one of the questions that has occupied my classrooms. My students and I have grappled with the lasting impact of the civil rights movement, which is where I think a framework from Arendt might be particularly salient. Arendt presents two options for members of marginalized and excluded populations in relationship to mainstream culture. She is referring in her work to a context of Jews in Europe and the position of Jews in Europe; and the two options she identifies are the parvenu and the pariah. She illustrates this polarity of the parvenu and the pariah in studies of figures like Heinrich Heine and Rahel Varnhagen. For her, the parvenu is one who comes from this marginalized and excluded group yet is able to achieve through assimilation a certain status, a certain respectability among the dominant culture. This can happen through wealth, this can happen through social connections; but it always happens as a part of a striving on their part—for example, in her portrait of Rahel Varnhagen. This is a wealthy German-Jewish woman who took great pride in running a highly regarded intellectual salon. Varnhagen was a woman who did everything she could to assimilate, including changing her name and becoming baptized, to seek respectability and status that was untainted by her Jewishness. The parvenu yearns for acceptance attainable only through social climbing toward the rewards of mainstream society. By contrast, the pariah uses her detachment from mainstream society to see it more clearly, to speak against oppression that is rendered visible by the conditions of her own life. The conscious pariah resists oppression through embracing her marginality. She becomes a champion of oppressed people, and she’s able to analyze the circumstances by which they become so. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl notes that the pariah’s task includes this one critical component, “to avoid sacrificing the outsider’s perspective for the parvenu’s comforts.”1 I’ll say that again: “to avoid sacrificing the outsider’s perspective for the parvenu’s comforts.” That covers that polarity of the parvenu and the pariah and their relationship to each other. Now, to me, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a conscious pariah par excellence. The anniversary of his assassination this year has included much revisiting of King’s political breadth, which goes far beyond the
Discussion: MLK and the Legacy of Civil Disobedience in America
K. V. Adams, A. Schiller, and T. C. Williams
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