RACE : For Younger Blacks, King’s Dream of Integration Dies

Put this simple question to the next homeboy you see: “If he were alive, could MLK drop crazy knowledge and make hope dope?” Nope, he tells you. Martin Luther King Jr. has lost his juice among black youth--integration is not the flava’ they sava’. The reverend’s rap is weak today.

In the time it took fathers despised as “niggers” to raise sons self-styled as “niggaz,” more than the words have changed. Freedom does not ring familiar, and dreams are the stuff of sports marketing. Though this generation of African Americans was born black , it was never colored . It cannot conceive of its dignity arising from what King, in 1962, heralded as the “new Negro” awakening from a 400-year-old “posture of silent waiting.” Today, there is no waiting. There is no dreaming. There is getting “props” and getting paid--”by any means necessary.”

Yet, the power of King’s image, and its centrality in modern American myth, means that younger African Americans’ rejection of the man, and what he stood for, is far more than mere indifference. If you outlived King, you were supposed to want to be King in your highest aspirations of blackness; you were supposed to be the proud vanguard of integration itself. Why then should a nonviolent, revolutionary black man and his message have such a negligible, if not hostile, effect on many younger blacks born to a generation that so emphatically considers itself besieged by the same forces King confronted?

Several reasons. First, integration didn’t work--as their parents and their own eyes can tell them. Second, they were taught King by the wrong people in the wrong light. Third, they live in a violent TV culture in which ethics be damned; religion seems either outdated or right wing; racism is subtle yet defensible, and communal love is unspoken.

Finally, and most important, white people, whom King counted on to fulfill their end of the spiritual, ethical and socioeconomic bargain, never engaged in collective accountability for the process. Instead, they are now perceived to have rejected it in favor of blaming blacks for the whole mess we started. Did peaceful words incite all this?

“Integration, “ King wrote in 1963, “places certain ethical demands upon those who have been on the oppressed end of the old order.”

Indeed, it is the historical memory of many African Americans over age 25 that these demands were more than ethical--but entailed the costs in time, self-esteem and alienation that came with busing, employment-discrimination lawsuits, cross burnings and property values decimated by white flight. The history of integration in the American communities that experimented is that blacks did it--at ridiculous costs to life, limb and sanity.

Yet, just as blacks generally lack the power to segregate, we alone could not integrate. Despite the efforts of so many, primary-school segregation remains the same for blacks today as in 1968. And many blacks blame the suburban exodus of more upwardly mobile blacks in the late ‘60s and ‘70s for the social decay of traditional black neighborhoods. A gazillion racial slights later, many of the “racial ambassadors” who made the move lament the resulting anomie. Together, there is near unanimity that whites, for the most part, still do not know us, understand us, respect us.

Tolerance was never a good word, but, unfortunately, it has been replaced with intolerance. And here’s the special rub for black parents who tried to pass King’s challenge on to their children: You want your kids to have more than you had. So, too, with race relations. In your mind, there may be honest recognition of the material gains since desegregation. But in your heart, there is persistent doubt and continuous reasons to rage quietly.

How can this parent honestly promise his child that her world will be better, smarter, safer than the world that disappointed him? Exhausted, he finds intolerance intolerable. Because it systematically ensures his and her invisibility.

The ethical demands that blacks bear through integration were not supposed to extend the invisibility into this young generation. Yet, this generation remains virtually invisible in white-collar jobs, professional schools and upper echelons of higher education. It’s true, a basketball phenom’s star may be fleeting, but a black corporate lawyer can disappear in two years. In contrast, the 19 year-old “b-boy” in baggy pants can part white people on public pavements, because, to them, he is a criminal. Pick your poison.

Ironically, the b-boy’s “hard-core” poison can seem sweet enough that even middle-class African American youth, the apparent beneficiaries of integration, may look on jealously and want a taste.

Compared with the tokenism that King repeatedly decried, a b-boy wears the power to frighten his enemies. He is an unintegrated master of his anger. And surveying the growth of independent film-making and record-producing by mainly middle-class African Americans--about ghetto lives they’ve never experienced--anger runs so deep that many of these young creators have lost interest in their own image. Newly empowered to project themselves, these children of integration choose others instead.

Yet, King asserted, “Our Hebraic-Christian tradition refers to (the) inherent dignity of man in the biblical term of the ‘image of God.’ Every human being has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the Creator.”

This critical premise to nonviolence has not been effectively presented to a generation of schoolchildren. Instead, King has been cast as a passive, turn-the-other-cheek darling of white liberal educators, whose superficial characterizations of King’s content and courage appear to many younger blacks as plantation-era docility--in which a black man’s saintliness arises from his victimhood. His quotations of David Thoreau are too long in reasoning with his enemies. His insistent Christianity may be too unmanly to contain their rage. He is neither strong nor revolutionary in their eyes.

Just as these younger blacks will not see the changes in Malcolm X after his trip to Mecca, they cannot see the power that King inspired. What they see is a King loved by the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

“I may do well in a desegregated society, but I can never know what my total capacity is until I live in an integrated society. I cannot be free until I have had the opportunity to fulfill my total capacity untrammeled by any artificial hindrance.”

Utopian truths perhaps, but King’s eloquent articulation of pure motherwit does not jibe with a society that has silenced real talk of ethics. As the language of politics cedes to the manipulations of advertising, this younger generation hears an ethos sound-bitten into worthless crud. When people in authority consistently speak inconsistently, words lose their meaning.

Nonetheless, with what King called “a promising basic doctrine,” this generation debates diversity and political correctness in a valiant effort to articulate communal ideas of inclusion based on informed acceptance. Yet, in our get-mine culture, such humble beginnings are ridiculed. Multiculturalism gets co-opted. And without the brazen specter of Jim Crow inequality, our youth can’t get a foothold.

Integration is creative, and is therefore more profound than desegregation. Integration is the positive acceptance of desegregation and the welcomed participation of Negroes into the total range of human activities.

Unfortunately, integration could not happen without the active participation of collective white imagination--and whites have shown singular unimaginativeness on the question of their group identity in relation to others. If the norm of the culture is psychologically unwilling to imagine the equality of nonwhites, it is unrealistic to assume that blacks can effect America’s transcendence from desegregation to integration. As King warned, “The demands of segregation are enforceable demands while the demands for integration fall within the scope of unenforceable demands. Integration has to be mutually desired--then fought for.”

In fact, the dominant society has fought against it. Racial bloc voting by whites--which ushered in the GOP’s “contract with America”--nowhere suggests a rededication to the ideals of integration. Instead, it is--as Republican pundits aptly label it--a “devolution” to a not-too-distant time in the white imagination when their superiority was unquestioned.

This is hardly imaginative thinking. This is wholesale resistance to introspective struggle by the majority of whites and intergenerational shame for the minority who try. Until white people, as a group identity, assume ownership of this unfortunate legacy, the creativity demanded by integration is impossible. Positive acceptance and welcomed participation require the strength of honesty.

If King’s vision was right, we may live past our chaos. When we become strong, King’s vision will return.