Great White Hope: The National Martin Luther King Memorial

Char Roone Miller
George Mason University


The U.S. census recentlyreported that the incomegap between the richest and the poorest in the United States has doubledsince 1968 (from a ratio of 7.69 to 1 to 14.5-to-1 in 2010), the United Statesis currently active in not one butthree major wars, and there are more black men in American prisonstoday than there were slaves in 1850. You don’t need a crystal ball, or a giant granite one, to know MartinLuther King’s response to this condition.

In spite of the justifiable andtouching power the new Martin Luther KingMemorial on the National Mall in D.C. takes from our nostalgia for theCivil Rights Movement of the 1960s, it fails to move us any closer tounderstanding or realizing how a living monument to King's dream requires ourresistance to militaristic and economic forms of oppression.  The Memorial whitewashes any sense of King asactivist, disrupter of power structures, and critic of economic systems.  It hides the struggle demanded by King.

A figural 30 ft-tall sculptureof MLK emerges partially formed from a block of granite, called The Stone ofHope, which appears to be the middle third of a giant boulder, sliced out andpushed from between the other two slabs of rock—The Mountain of Despair—towardsthe tidal basin on the National Mall. The colossal white granite memorial, located at the cartoonish addressof 1964 Independence Ave., SW DC, sternly faces the Jefferson Memorial, withits back towards the Lincoln.

None of the fourteen quotationscarved into the wide marble wall that arcs around and behind the statue of Kingrefers directly to King's work against economic injustice.  One quotation, from his Nobel Prizeacceptance speech, does suggest the audacity of his desire that all peoplereceive three meals a day. Unfortunately, this phrase becomes a touching platitude when removedfrom demands for state action or public policy. The architect carved two additional quotations onto the sides of thestatue of King, including one that has provoked significant criticism in whichKing appears to be describing himself as a “drum major for justice.” 

King’s original quotation suggested that hedidn’t mind being deprecated in the service of the cause even if critics wantedto call him a “drum major for justice.” Exactly the meaning suggested by the redaction; Maya Angelou said thatedit made King look like an "arroganttwit."  The Foundation missedthe point, but, worse, they missed an opportunity and wasted valuable spacewith a clichéd phrase, when King authored so many pithy statements ofpurpose.  King's remarks, for example,concerning the seat of the national government are remarkably appropriate fordisplay in Washington DC:  “We will placethe problems of the poor at the seat of government of the wealthiest nation inthe history of mankind.”  The statementsdisplayed on the memorial fail to provide much meaning to King’s vision, evenas they strategically lack any reference to his economic demands.

This shouldn’t be toosurprising.  In spite of their repeatedattempts to destroy organized labor, suppress wages, and general success atshifting wealth to the very rich, major corporations paid for thismemorial.  Coke, Ford, Target,ExxonMobil, BP, FannieMae, JPMorgan Chase @ Co., NFL, McDonalds, and LehmanBrothers all donated to the Memorial and are listed on the majorcontributors page.  General Motorsdonated $10 million.   Wall-Mart gave $1million. The Foundation proudly proclaims the faith these major donors have inKing’s dream.  “By their generoussupport,” the website proclaims, “they’ve demonstrated something trulyremarkable.  They’ve shown the breadth ofsupport that exists for Dr. King’s vision, from the man on the street toboardrooms on the fiftieth floor.”

Thoseboardrooms, high above the people occupying the street, did not offer large donationsin order to memorialize the fact that King was assassinated in 1968 while inMemphis supporting striking sanitation workers; that just days after herhusband’s murder Coretta Scott King and 42,000 people peacefully marchedthrough Memphis to demand that the Mayor of Memphis recognize the sanitationworker’s union; that at the time of his assassination King was hard at work onthe Poor People’s Campaign.   Neither Walmart nor Target,companies that have dedicated massive financial resources to fighting laborunions, could be expected to memorialize King’s vision for the power oforganized labor.  Certainly not Coke, with its history of fighting unions inGuatemala and accusations that the company has used prison labor in China, andits probable complicity in the death of union organizers in Columbia.  These donors, I claim, paid for a Memorialthat would help us forget that the revolution, as GilScott-Heron sang, "does not go better with Coke."  They got what they paid for; the Memorialdoes not offer any sense of the stern criticism King would certainly directtoward the labor practices of many of these companies.  The problem is not that they gave money forthe Memorial, it’s that the Memorial fails to display the conflict thosedonations have with King’s labor advocacy. “We call our demonstration acampaign for jobs and income,” King wrote, “because we feel that the economicquestion is the most crucial that black people, and poor people generally, areconfronting.” (A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writingsand Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., Pages 67-69) Simply allowing the Memorial todeliver King’s message concerning the importance of organized labor on amonument paid for by labor busters would offer a better representation of thestruggle that King advocated.

Corporations were not the onlydonors, nor were they the only donors with labor policies in serious conflictwith King's struggle.  The Memorial, asmany have remarked, was created in China.   The Chinese government, probably the largestsingle donor to the memorial, gave the foundation $25 million--the U.S.government only gave $10 million in matching funds.  The Foundation naively denies that theChinese donation influenced their decision to create the memorial inChina.  Union representatives in theUnited States protested the contract with China and eventually received apromise from Johnson that union labor would be used to assemble the monument inthe United States.  Then in September oflast year, the union discovered that the Foundation had reneged on this writtenpromise and that unpaid workers from China were working on the Memorial.  Harry S. Johnson, president and CEO of theMemorial Foundation, evoked a hypocritical claim toracial harmony to hide the issue of economic exploitation. On September 8, theFoundation asserted:  “While 95% of thework is being done by American workers, we strongly believe that we should notexclude anyone from working on this project simply because of their religious beliefs,social background or country of origin.”

TheFoundation consistently gestured toward pluralism and artistic integrity tomake the exploitative dimension of their economic choices disappear.  According to Ed Jackson Jr., the ExecutiveArchitect on the project: “The granitefor King's statue was chosen because when lit at night, it lends a brownishtone to King's likeness. The stone, however, only exists in China.” though, headded, “some wanted it to come from the United States.”  All the white marble on the National Mall,whether from China, Italy or New Hampshire, gets darker when the sun goesdown.  Jackson’s ridiculous claim aboutthe color of the statue raises another, more obvious, question:  why not use black granite? Martin Luther Kingwas Black. 

Birmingham, Alabama King Memorial

TheFoundation’s decision to represent Dr. King in white granite treats the colorof his skin as a peripheral issue, when in fact it made King who he was.  King certainly looked to a time when peopleno longer made judgments of value based on the color of skin but in the UnitedStates white has never been the neutral absence of color. That the Foundationchose white as an abstracted representation of King continues, regrettably, thesocial positioning of whiteness as neutral, which requires the production ofother colors as derivative or deviant.

Theassertion, given broad currency in the 1960s, that “black is beautiful”highlights a politics of aesthetic taste. The color and shape of the statue ofKing appears as a visual and sensual event. The body with its attractions (ofcolor, shape, size, strength, weakness, etc.) functions as a political triggerfor desire and emulation.  Plenty of ourresponses to the appearance of the human body are beyond and before ourunderstanding of actions, arguments, and behaviors. Such responses are animportant part of our political life. Monuments operate in this field. King’s physical appearance moves us; King deserved a monument that wouldmove us. 

Binghamton, New York King Memorial

Tobuild a colossal statue to King on the Mall is to represent him in many of theterms that have solidified white male privilege (with its connections tonational and imperial forms of domination). The representation of emperors,kings, and presidents in sculptural form often presented the leader astranscending the limits of the body.  Itis undoubtedly an important moment when the body of the son of a Blackpreacher, himself the son of a sharecropper, appears as a giant white god. 

Itis inescapably necessary to represent King in earlier categories of power andvalue but the valuable struggle comes in using that positioning to undercut theborrowed hierarchy. Borrow the trappings of power but only to transform theterms of success. Take some money from Coke but spend that money to support theColumbian food workers union, SINALTRAINAL.  This Memorial fails because it never displaysthe struggle necessary for political life. King’s life was a life of this struggle.

King's arrest for 'loitering,' 1958

It’sexciting to see Martin Luther King Jr. occupying such select space on theNational Mall but we can’t afford to loose his critiques of the forms of valueand prestige that the Mall and its Memorials represent.  Lehman Brothers and Coke may have paid forthis Memorial but the real monument to King are the activists occupying Wall Street and DC in an attempt to transform notions ofprivilege and power through conflict and struggle.

1968 Brown Metalic Mercury Cougar

Aspirational Fascism

William E. Connolly
   Johns Hopkins University
                                                                           
    In an earlier post, entitled What Was Fascism?, I responded to a set of right wing pundits who treat social democracy, liberalism and a welfare state as modes of fascism. The logic behind that equation is simple: unregulated markets promote consummate freedom and rationality; state regulation of markets stifles both and produces irrational intervention in the daily lives of people. One point of my post was to remind people what these revisionist histories seek to forget: Drives to European fascism were triggered above all in the thirties by the advent of the Great Depression; and that Depression was produced by practices of market utopianism. While market utopianism was not itself fascistic, the collapse it fomented helped to spawn fascist movements in several countries and to intensify them in others. Only a few actually succeeded. But the results were devastating.

There were several characteristics of fascism the first time around. It was virulently anti-semitic, propelling death camps in its most extreme version. It also defined social democrats, communists, homosexuals and the Romani as degenerates, deserving to be placed on the dumping grounds of history. Its racism with respect to non-Europeans was virulent. Where it succeeded, it introduced a one-party state, disallowing electoral challenges, to say the least. The success of fascist movements, when they did succeed, was spurred by a dark series of resonances between the state, industrialists and local vigilante groups who spread terror in the streets. These versions of fascism were also capitalistic. Profit and ownership of the means of production were private. Fascist capitalism replaced the myth of market self-sufficiency by one of exclusionary national unity, brownshirts, bellicose militarism, police repression and aggressive war policies.

It is thus a mistake to equate every large state with fascism, as the radical right loves to do under the umbrella of market utopianism. In fact, it is difficult to find a capitalist state anywhere that is not also a large state, though the priorities of such states do vary significantly.

2008 RNC National Convention St. Paul, MN

One critic of that post suggested that I had merely pretended to read Hayek. Hayek, of course, was an early purveyor of the view that regulated markets promote a fascist state, though socialism was his key target. He presents an uncanny mixture of the insightful and the fanciful: a fascinating account of freedom, spontaneity and social processes of self-organization; a utopian view of market processes as the only place such processes occur; and a homogeneous suspicion of any large state, however distinctive in aim, accountability, and organization. He was not a friend of aspirational fascism. A critique of Hayek, joined to a corollary appreciation of his early engagement with complexity theory, could thus be timely. He was, for instance, wary of any association between the state and religious enthusiasm. It is too bad, then, that he confined the play of spontaneity and real complexity to economic markets, setting into motion an ideological movement that denies the role of spontaneity and self-organization to social movements and, indeed, to a much larger host of interacting human and nonhuman domains (See The Fragility of Things). Welcome to the world of under-regulated markets and rapid climate change, Mr. Hayek.

2011 Texas Wildfires Bastrop, TX

What about aspirational fascism today and the possibility of its enactment in America? Its reoccurrence, if it happened, would express some continuities with the past punctuated by a series of significant differences. To detect hints about those affinities and differences, we can listen to Republican, Tea Party candidates such as Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich; we can heed the expressions of hate and ugliness regularly spouted by an active minority in their audiences; we can recall the Tea Party’s willingness to shut down the government to support the ends of a minority movement; and we can attend to repressive police practices already underway in American cities. Here is what such listening suggests:

1) Neo-Fascism, if it were to arrive, would not take the shape of one party rule. The media, corporations, the state, and vigilante groups together would cow constituencies on the middle and the left. The minority party would offer only weak resistance to the policies of the right, and some sections would collude with it.

2) Anti-semitism, while hovering in the wings, would be displaced by virulent opposition to all Muslim groups, within and outside the country. Gays, feminists, professors, atheists, and union leaders would also be on the list of enemies. The war on terror would morph, as it is always on the verge of doing, into a war on Islam as such. The most right wing tendencies in Israel would be supported enthusiastically, even as calls to make America a more Christian nation intensified. Those two apparently incompatible drives can be sustained in some circles by saying that the first stage of Armegeddon will arrive in Israel, to be followed by the Second Coming in which only Christians are rescued. You don’t need to worry about the devastation of the earth if you are waiting for the Second Coming; you don’t want to if you are committed to a neoliberal image of production, consumption and markets. Such a combination, to the extent it succeeded, would silence a large and growing section within Christianity that eagerly supports a pluralist culture. 

3) Carbon based sources of energy for production, consumption and military operations would be celebrated and extended. The dangers of fracking and nuclear power would be ignored. Climate change would be ridiculed. And imperial operations designed to protect traditional modes of energy would be launched.

Hydro-Fracking Run Off

4) As the effects of climate change foment suffering and disorder in several regions, the United States would become even more of a garrison state, invoking massive state power to barricade its borders and creating a series of wars in vulnerable or oil rich regions.

In Violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act U.S. National Guard 'Lends a Hand' to the Border Patrol and So Called 'Citizen Soldiers'

5) As market utopianism, unlimited corporate campaign money, and state repression grows, inequality of wealth, income and communicative power would become even more extreme. Attempts to protest these developments would foment more intensive modes of state and media repression to disparage and silence them. You might think that the Supreme Court would help here, but its recent drive to give more rights to corporations as “persons” than to living persons is hardly reassuring. The majority of the current court participates in the ideology of market utopianism. 

Crack Down at Wall Street Occupation

6) As the combine of market utopianism and state bellicosity grew, another world wide market collapse would almost certainly occur. It is an open question whether China would escape its effects. The right would draw upon the suffering promoted by that collapse to pursue even more intensely market utopianism. Since a perfectly free market is always a chimera promised for a fanciful future, you can always blame the latest failures on too much market regulation and taxation of “job creators”. 

Chinese Military Trying to Cope with the Sichuan Earthquake. The Earthquake's Devastation Was Magnified by China's Intense Poverty and Urban Density.

6) Vigilante groups, already discernible in this country, would grow in size and type, seeking to silence alternative voices as they infiltrate localities, churches, corporations, and universities. The state and the police would enter into covert alliances with them.   

Such a new type of fascism is certainly not inevitable. It does, however, operate as an aspiration in some circles that already makes a big difference in our politics. It also could occur, if a major terrorist event encountered a Republican President and Congress. It poses a real danger.

In the Immediate Aftermath of Pearl Harbor FDR Interred 110,000 Americans of Japanese Heritage. Although Reparation Were Paid Korematsu v. U.S. Still Affirms the Constitutionality of Racial Internment.

The immediate question is how to criticize market utopianism more effectively as we identify the dangers it promotes, the denials it demands, the suffering it fosters, the unfocussed anger it unleashes, and the repressive, militaristic state it solicits to sustain its fantasies. Above all, how can we awaken a large constellation of “Independents”--who first try to ignore politics as much as possible and then become susceptible to slightly softened versions of right wing sound bites when a crisis emerges. Here Mitt Romney, perhaps, is even more dangerous than Rick Perry, as he exudes a willingness to be the soft voice of a rampant minority movement. The secret of the neoliberal/evangelical machine resides in the way that it promises smooth markets for the future as it feeds off crises of today it helps to foment. 

Barack Obama, for all his eloquence, is not good at exposing these drives and dangers. Paul Krugman, for all his economic insight, does not crack through either. Academic radicals have insufficient reach and connections on their own. Steve Colbert and Jon Stewart show merely a few flashes of brilliance in this regard. What then? Some noble intellectuals in the American Jewish community are now speaking out actively about the American/Israeli/Palestine quagmire. A forthcoming documentary by Bruce Robbins at Columbia University is promising in this regard. Recently, I have begun to wonder whether Rachel Maddow and Elizabeth Warren might provide hope in exposing the insidious character of this machine to a wider audience.

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One thing seems clear, however: it will take enhanced participation by more people in the micropolitics of families, churches, unions, localities, consumption cooperatives, universities, the new media, protests, and corporate exposes to pave the way for the social movements and electoral coalitions needed today. Connections to social movements in other countries are critical too. In these respects protest movements on Wall Street and in Wisconsin, along with militant protests against austerity in England, Greece and elsewhere may be promising.