The Foes of Affirmative Action Err in Invoking Dr. King’s Dream

The night before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. revealed to striking workers and their supporters that he’d reached the mountaintop. “I may not get there with you,” he said as the crowd rose, “but I want you to know tonight, that we, as people, will get to the Promised Land.”

Supporters of Proposition 209, the so-called California Civil Rights Initiative, would have us believe we’ve reached the Promised Land that Dr. King glimpsed that evening. Twenty-eight years later, a woman on one radio assures us in mellow tones she wouldn’t support Proposition 209 if it wasn’t right, that all Proposition 209 does is follow Dr. King’s dream.

In his final speech, Dr. King offered the parable of the Good Samaritan. On the mountain road to Jericho, first a priest, then a Levite sees a needy person--a crime victim, actually. If I stop to help this person, each asks, what will happen to me? The priest and the Levite cross the street. The Samaritan reverses their question: If I don’t stop to help this person, what will happen to him?

The reversal shifts a paradigm, creating possibility, implying social responsibility. In acknowledging that shift, we, as a society, glimpse our Promised Land.

Our society doesn’t yet fulfill Dr. King’s vision. But precisely because we’ve advanced, we are confronted by the legacy of racism, sexism and classism. We are confronted by organized efforts to ask the wrong questions, to walk across the street, to leave our Promised Land lying there.

James Baldwin saw resistance coming. In his 1963 “A Talk to Teachers,” he advises, “In attempting to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty . . . you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal and the most determined resistance.”

We’ve scaled a mountain in intervening years. But when measurable social progress is evident, such “determined resistance” uses Dr. King’s vision to pretend we’ve arrived. It uses Dr. King against us, against King’s own intentions.

Here is where we really are. We are, indeed, on a mountaintop. A dangerous, beautiful place where vision confronts vertigo. A society where a 10-year acquaintance congratulated me on a published essay and, in the same breath, congratulated my husband. “I know he must have helped you. It’s so well written.” The person smiled. I kept my mouth shut. Did the person mean my husband “helped” me as a man necessarily must “help” a woman? Or, despite a decade of association, was the operative assumption that my surname and dark skin meant English wasn’t my first language? My Anglo husband must have “helped” me compensate for de facto limitations.

Our mountaintop society begets Samaritans like the professor who advised one Latino writer to “write about real people,” and notified another that, despite the merits of his novel, “Chicanos don’t ski.” Apparently, revisions were in order. Another opined that a Latina employee could be expected to exploit leave of absence policies because, “You know how those women are, one baby after another.” Campus committees with all-female leadership arouse suspicions that previous committees with all-male leadership did not.

Jokes. Thinly veiled suggestions. Disrespect. Whose Promised Land?

Many dismiss my experiences. These dismissals are in themselves revealing. The “emotional” woman. The “touchy” minority.

I’ve culled these illustrations from public institutions where affirmative action policies have been implemented. Professors admit and evaluate students, serve on hiring committees. How can we aspire to the “meritocracy” envisaged by Proposition 209 supporters when people like me remain targets of entrenched prejudices that see us as inferior?

People of color and women have embraced opportunities offered by affirmative action. We have competed. We have achieved. It is mainstream society that has failed to transform itself. That society has held its breath, waiting for every available reactionary moment to exhale, to purposefully backslide down the mountain.

No, we have not reached the Promised Land glimpsed by Dr. King. Proposition 209 or its cousins, 187 and Colorado’s Amendment 2, won’t speed our journey. Instead, we will find ourselves echoing Dr. King’s words. We’ve seen the Promised Land. Proposition 209 promises we won’t reach it.

Like Dr. King, forces are primed to stop a whole society mid-stride. Their weapons are not the arms that felled King and other civil rights leaders. But their tactics are equally lethal. They assure us we’ve arrived.

Beware. When people tell you they’ve seen the Promised Land, that it’s near or here, ask them: whose Promised Land? Ask them who they’ve stopped to help along the way. Or if they’ve walked at all.