I have a horrible feeling that I should be giving this topic a very wide berth indeed, but here goes regardless.

Here‘s a new piece by David Jagernauth in the ODE, in which he mercifully stops short of calling Colin a racist. A couple of points off the top of my head:

Firstly, reducing MLK’s career to a soundbite doesn’t do the man justice. Fair enough. But is there a major political figure to whom this doesn’t happen? Lincoln freed the slaves. Churchill fought the Nazis on the beaches. Reagan busted the air-traffic controllers union. Clinton… um… anyway, once you’re in the history books, a certain amount of this sort of thing is unavoidable.

Also, I’m (perhaps predictably) less outraged than Jagernauth about the focus on the uncontroversial aspect of King’s legacy. Racial unity – the ideal, not the details of what the hell we should actually do about it – is a touchy-feely, uncontroversial issue. It is something we can all agree on, thank God. This bit of the famous King quote certainly has been cast in such a way as to appeal to absolutely everybody and ruffle no feathers. But them’s the breaks: this is why lots of things are named after Martin Luther King, and rather fewer things are named after Malcolm X.

Anyway, speaking as a damn fer’ner, I’m not going within ten miles of the affirmative action debate – not today, anyhow – but debate it is and continue it does. I read Jagernauth’s pieces with interest, but for the sake of balance it should be noted that a John McWhorter or a Shelby Steele would probably draw a vastly different moral from the quote he concludes with – particularly the bit about “paternalistically… set[ting] the timetable for another man’s freedom.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2004 at 17:07 by olly and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.