What Happened to MLK’s Dream?

4,961 words

During our formative years, most Americans heard much about the celebrated civil rights activist Martin Luther King and his lofty teleological vision. His doctrines, promulgated under the halo of reverence, present a compelling vision of racial harmony best exemplified in the “I have a dream” speech. This discourse ornamented with biblical flourishes conceived of a golden future in which people would be judged only by the content of their character. Another keynote of the speech envisions blacks and whites living side by side in perpetual friendship and good will.

MLK already was the foremost civil rights figure of the time, thanks to glowing journalistic coverage. Then his martyrdom promoted him to a saintly sage in the eyes of his admirers, if not a demigod. For them, his dream became a hallowed struggle. In the present, however, it seems we’re very far indeed from realizing this utopia. What happened?

Ideological Foundations

The nature-versus-nurture debate in the social sciences is long-standing. Through the influence of Franz Boas and his disciples, by the 1960s, the most prominent academic viewpoint upheld environmental rather than hereditarian explanations for group differences in socioeconomic outcomes. It became an article of faith that race is only a matter of skin color. According to absolute egalitarianism, which remains a very common viewpoint, all particularistic groups are inherently equal in every way, and differing outcomes are the result of societal influences. This is especially so for the races. One can think of it as the extension of Rousseau’s “blank slate” idea. It’s also closely-related to the idea that human nature is just mental software which is easily reprogrammable.

More specifically, this viewpoint holds that discrimination alone caused the gap in average outcomes between blacks and whites. Contrary to the illiberal nay-sayers, “urban problems” weren’t the result of genetic differences, psychological traits, basic incompatibilities between populations, or any individual bad attitudes and self-sabotaging behaviors within the black community. Instead, in true Rousseauian form, it was society’s fault—in practice, this means white people. This too remains a common viewpoint.

According to the egalitarians of the time, the solution was simple: eliminate segregation and discrimination, just as the civil rights activists were demanding. It did make logical sense, if one assumes that their premises were correct. Without these artificial barriers in the way, socioeconomic outcomes would level out to their natural condition of equality. I’ve never found a clear statement from them when this inevitability was expected to take place. Given their premises, one might expect the job to be done within a generation or two, or at least show stunning progress that unequivocally would vindicate the plan. In practice, it was left open-ended when the Promised Land would emerge.

They were certain it would work. The nay-sayers would be proven wrong. Racial tensions would fade away. All it would take were some legislative remedies, and the long-standing race problem eventually would be over once and for all. The outcome would be something like Martin Luther King’s rose-colored dream. Although the egalitarian premises were hotly debated, the notion was at least convincingly plausible back then, other than to Southerners and working-class urban Northerners who had much real-life experience with representative populations of blacks.

The Social Experiments of the 1960s

Consequentially, American public policy turned toward civil rights during the 1960s. The WASP establishment was all on board with egalitarianism. Meanwhile, the Zionist entryists into the ruling class had their own peculiar reasons, though not exactly motivated by lofty idealism. Putting the theory into practice, The Agenda wasn’t just a matter of repealing Jim Crow laws so that racial differences could settle out and ultimately vanish. This optimistic and largely hands-off approach as initially promised wasn’t enough. Instead, several sweeping interventions would be necessary. Some of these panaceas would be costly too—but for the egalitarians of the time, surely no price would be too high to pay and no sacrifice would be too much to demand for the sacred cause of Negro equality.

Still, the public was divided. Probably none of the following measures would have passed had they been voted on in a nationwide referendum. Segregation was dismantled, in some cases even at bayonet point. The politicians assured us that it would bring racial harmony and eliminate black socioeconomic inequality. Another social experiment was Affirmative Action, which the politicians assured us wouldn’t become a quota system. (Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota promised that if it did, he would eat his hat. I doubt he followed through.) Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society program enacted welfare. The politicians assured us it wouldn’t create idleness or dependency on government handouts. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 abolished immigration restrictions, which Ted Kennedy solemnly promised on the floor of the Senate wouldn’t change America’s ethnic composition or flood the country with third-world hard-luck cases. The list goes on; these were just The Agenda’s major items. Again, no timetable was given for when these special interventions would end.

If they had worked, then MLK’s dream would have come true. However, the egalitarians turned out to be wrong on every count, despite the litany of solemn promises from politicians. Segregation began as a measure to stop the tremendous violence after Radical Reconstruction by keeping incompatible populations largely separate. It’s hardly a coincidence that desegregation marked the beginning of a crime wave that didn’t even begin to subside until mass incarceration and other stern judicial measures took effect in the 1990s. Affirmative Action transformed from an anti-discrimination initiative into a racial spoils system. Welfare initiatives became an intergenerational cradle-to-grave buffet of taxpayer-funded giveaway programs.

The worst of these disasters was that mass third-world migration brought in tens of millions from unassimilable populations. In earlier times, European immigrants were carefully screened at Ellis Island to ensure that they wouldn’t become wards of the state. They were expected to learn English, conform to American customs, set aside any Old Country disputes, and become loyal citizens. These factors fell by the wayside for the post-1965 wave of far-flung immigration which is still ongoing. Democratic Party chiefs effectively stuffed the ballot box by importing more voters. Oblivious to this endgame strategy for many decades, Republican figures wanted the cheap labor to keep wages down. Empty promises notwithstanding, the public didn’t get a choice. It should have gone smoothly, according to extended Rousseauian theory. Since everyone is essentially the same and easily reprogrammed, why would it matter where the interchangeable worker-units come from as long as they help corporate profit margins?

According to the globalist timetable, within two decades, white Americans will be a minority in the country that our forefathers established for ourselves and our posterity. Even now, the race problem has become remarkably tangled and dysfunctional. Before this, it was almost entirely a unipolar dispute between blacks and whites. Now, several races and hundreds of ethnicities jockey for place, some expecting to be accommodated, others aspiring to run things their way, with the dwindling majority coming in last. With all the anti-white agitprop they’ve absorbed, this doesn’t bode well for the future. Third-world mass migration generated countless new conflicts, all of which could have been avoided if the politicians hadn’t given away the country.

For example, blacks had pushed whites out of large swathes of Greater Los Angeles in times past, and now their descendants are being ethnically cleansed by Hispanics. Some Mexicans maintain irredentist claims on the American Southwest, planning for an eventual secession, though of course it doesn’t prevent them from spreading out elsewhere. Hindus once were warmly regarded for their exotic spirituality, but with greater numbers, their pushiness and contempt for their host population have come to the fore. Their Pakistani rivals aren’t much better. Growing Muslim immigrant communities include some who consider Sharia law to override Constitutional civil law, and their terrorism problem makes them much more trouble than they’re worth. The Chinese aren’t so objectionable individually, but subversion and economic colonization by China are growing problems. Fresh-off-the-boat Africans have little regard for blacks who are already here. The list goes on. One might even suspect that diversity isn’t our greatest strength after all.

The Dream Became a Nightmare

Shortly after demands for equal opportunity were granted, the new demand became equality of results. The goalposts were moved, as always. The initial race-neutral colorblind positions fell out of fashion in favor of aggressive social levelling. The Agenda became increasingly coercive. Like before, no endpoint was specified. Not even preferential treatment and enormous cash infusions made the ghettos flourish, a clear sign that the grand egalitarian plan wasn’t working. The intended results turned out to be the opposite of what its proponents proudly predicted.

Prior to these massive interventions in the 1960s, blacks enjoyed full employment, their neighborhoods had thriving locally-owned small businesses, only 21% of their children were raised in fatherless households, and the streets were safe. A decade later, conditions were spiraling into freefall. Some other social experiments worsened things yet, such as soft-on-crime policing and (later) globalist free trade. Liberal permissiveness helped an ugly and tremendously damaging drug problem take root. Worst of all, the black population went into a dysgenic spiral when welfare subsidized generations of under-parented illegitimate children, usually procreated by those least able to function in society.

Racial tensions certainly didn’t go away. Quite notably, the massive wave of 1960s race riots occurred after desegregation, preferential treatment, massive social expenditures, and other major accommodations. Some rioting was very likely encouraged by Active Measures subversion, but there was no lack of fuel for the fire. LBJ’s Kerner Commission, of course, blamed whites for black behavior during the Long Hot Summer of 1967. From their report’s introduction:

Despite these complexities, certain fundamental matters are clear. Of these, the most fundamental is the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans toward black Americans.

Race prejudice has shaped our history decisively; it now threatens to affect our future.

White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.

That was the preamble to a litany of supposed root causes, comically absurd in light of all the demands that had been met by then. Whether or not the Kerner Commission had a valid point, there certainly wasn’t a scintilla of appreciation for being lavished with welfare benefits and social programs, or any other measures catering to them.

The tone of the rhetoric had changed by that point. Earlier, the civil rights movement was characterized mainly by entreaties that tugged on heartstrings, appealed to misapplied religiosity, and invoked culturally-specific virtues of fair play. After blacks started getting what they wanted, truculence and militant attitudes came to the fore. These were hardly the moralizing sermons in dulcet tones once preached from MLK’s pulpit.

Blacks weren’t grateful for all the misplaced magnanimity, least of all their agitators. If anything, they became more sullen and resentful. They learned to leverage manipulative bitterness for results. Their white allies weren’t showered with praise for their endless service and self-abasement. If anything, liberals were seen as particularly easy marks. The irresolution that blacks perceived was mainly by the political class refusing to back the majority. Even so, the message that they got was that whites collectively were unwilling to stand up for themselves. Again and again, belligerence and open contempt were rewarded with new concessions. Considering all this, surely some blacks concluded that whites had become a paper tiger. Worse, there was much less fallout for misbehavior than in the past, with liberal judges granting leniency in the name of troubled childhoods and socioeconomic circumstances.

Whites were pushed out of countless living spaces through disorderliness, truculence, and street crime, arguably a race war in slow motion. (The liberal take was that “prejudice” and unscrupulous real estate practices were to blame.) Urban midcentury whites were all too trusting, up until recently being able to count on their politicians to look out for them. With no help coming from these quarters, retreat was the path of least resistance. Many homeowners were forced to sell at a loss.

These new no-go zones deteriorated into slums. As I’ve mentioned in the past, the aggregate property damage from urban blight over the decades might be comparable to that of a medium-scale nuclear war. Even so, lately some minority motormouths brazenly complain that we forced them to live in bad neighborhoods. Another idea is that white communities enhance their quality of life by making black communities miserable; naturally, the specifics about how this massive niceness extraction operation works aren’t spelled out.

The Promised Land of Racial Harmony is Remarkably Slow to Emerge

Certain political and cultural factors developed in context of these massive social experiments. One unhelpful attitude among some blacks is that white people are collectively indebted to them. (Among the least evolved, this entitlement complex “justifies” idleness and even criminal behavior.) One increasingly popular demand is reparations for antebellum slavery. Given the tremendous expense of egalitarian interventions already, this fictitious “debt” has been enormously overpaid by now. The surplus would be enough to build a city on Mars—an astronomical sum indeed—yet these social uplift schemes still continue.

Where’s the endpoint to all the giveaway programs and preferential treatment? It’s hardly ever discussed when it finally will be time to turn off the faucet. An exception is that in recent years, Ibram X. Kendi helpfully popularized the “equity” concept. The short version is that all legislation must be specifically tailored to engineer equal outcomes across all socioeconomic and medical statistics. These Procrustean interventions are to be supervised by an unelected panel of “experts” which will supersede all branches of government at all levels. As much massive expropriation as that would inevitably involve, at least it’s preferable to some worse outcomes.

Culturally, rebellion for its own sake has been tremendously damaging, even to the black community—perhaps especially so. Lately, this is best exemplified in gangsta rap. Although these bad attitudes didn’t result directly from midcentury social levelling schemes, it did develop within the resulting cultural context, and its roots can be traced further back to other instances of dysfunctional Leftist ideology. This doesn’t enhance anyone’s life, for one thing. Getting over all that would be quite helpful for race relations, and measurably improve conditions in the black community. Even so, it still wouldn’t be our duty to fix other people’s problems, or endlessly sacrifice our interests in the name of social levelling.

Did I mention how little appreciation was inspired by catering to them? Even now, blowhard minoritists pretend that nothing changed since the days when they plausibly could complain that they were getting the fuzzy side of the lollipop. These massive social experiments taught them that bellyaching works, but there’s still plenty of bile behind it. If anything, they should be praising us to the skies that we permit them to live in the advanced and prosperous societies that they couldn’t have created on their own. Moreover, not only have we been patient to a great fault with their atrocious behavior, we’ve sacrificed our own best interests in favor of minority uplift. Still, they’re not happy, and never will be.

So this is peace and love? On the white side of the equation, there’s much to resent about the “progress” since the 1960s. This includes the skyrocketing crime rate that still hasn’t settled down to earlier norms, trillions in taxpayer money squandered on minority uplift, and so forth. The difference is that we’re expected not to discuss it.

The Great Taboo

Another notable effect was that pro-white viewpoints gradually became practically unthinkable, at least in enlightened society. In the 1960s, accommodations for minorities were framed as fairness. During segregation, it was more believable. The nay-sayers were portrayed as mean-spirited, behind the times, unfair, intolerant, bigoted, rednecks, ignorant, etc. These political questions increasingly were stated in moral terms, tugging on heartstrings and taking advantage of our sense of fair play—cultural virtues which aren’t reciprocated. Churches converged by umbrella groups began preaching politicized doctrines. Eventually, television sitcoms mercilessly satirized illiberal Archie Bunker characters, making their views unfashionable and poisoning the well in public opinion.

By the end, nearly all pro-white politicians were shamed into silence with bad press and forced to rely on “dog whistling” tactics at the very most to get their message across even while their opponents openly appealed to minority constituencies. Elected officials quite often will default to expediency, making politically safe decisions based on which way the wind is blowing. Siding with minorities was a lot less risky, since they’re much more vocal, have a strong tendency toward bloc voting, and are backed unhesitatingly by the media.

The few pro-white advocates and organizations were smeared as “hate-mongers.” They were actively suppressed by the government, such as with the false flag church bombing in Birmingham which killed four black girls. Other than that, when America was still 90% white and expectedly would remain so indefinitely, perhaps it was easier for some to imagine that pro-white advocacy wasn’t even necessary. After all, wasn’t our entire political system based on the rule of the majority? What possibly could go wrong?

This trajectory carried on. White advocacy became a major taboo, and the majority had hardly any open support in their own government. This probably could have been avoided if more people had spoken out, but the climate of intimidation was intensifying. Meanwhile, minority complaints became more strident, and politicians catered to them increasingly. This didn’t result in evenhandedness regarding race relations as promised, but rather a complete inversion. The blowhard politics of the 1960s eased somewhat when the militants left the scene, but the ratcheting process continued slowly during the next few decades.

White ethnocentrism was anathema, while non-white ethnocentrism was encouraged, reaching the point of shrill vilification. In every social conflict, the majority had to yield. This is hardly the equal treatment the public was promised. It’s impossible to make all sides equally happy in a pluralistic society, but in this case, minorities were appeased at every turn. As the decades went on, this condition became business as usual, thought to be normal or even just. What began as a struggle for equality absurdly resulted in the majority itself becoming second class citizens.

Accelerating Towards the Cliff

When politicians fail to represent their own people, and there are barriers to effecting change by other means, a rapid decline in status inevitably follows, bringing significant consequences. Equal opportunity becoming preferential treatment was just the first step. In the government, the early egalitarians were idealists for the most part. Then came the cynical opportunists like LBJ. As time went on, this worsened into barely-disguised hostility by much of the political class for the country’s founding population. With characters like The Squad in Congress, the mask is off. To a large degree, non-whites can self-segregate and opt out of multiracialism if they wish, but white living spaces are up for grabs. Minorities can have their professional associations, activist organizations, and other institutions. Meanwhile, pro-white groups can’t organize and operate normally. This brings tremendous interference such as universal condemnation by the media, lawfare, government meddling, censorship, and so forth. Minority cultures are celebrated, but we’re expected to be ashamed of our own glorious heritage.

Also in recent times is the idea that white people don’t exist and shouldn’t exist. (Strangely, the first notion—a gift from Leftist academia wrapped up in layers of casuistry—doesn’t invalidate the second notion as a fallacy of the stolen concept.) This is taken to heart by ethnomasochistic whites. By now, cultural Marxism effectively has become a religion, unfortunately a bizarre death cult. Among minorities, feigned helplessness and moral posturing gave way to aggression, and finally to gloating.

Although decolonization had become quite fashionable long ago as the legitimate nationalist aspirations of native peoples, now whites were told that we had no right to our own countries anywhere in the world, not even in Europe. As for the USA, the demographic change that Ted Kennedy long ago promised us would never happen is now considered to be inevitable and even laudable. As Bill Clinton once put it, “Along with our founding, which was an act of genius, and the freeing of slaves in the Civil War and the long civil rights movement, this will arguably be the third great revolution of America, if we can prove that we literally can live without having a dominant European culture.” Then on February 17, 2015, (Vice President) Joe Biden promised us the following:

An unrelenting stream of immigration—Non-Stop! Non-Stop!—folks like me who are Caucasian, of European descent, for the first time in 2017 we will be an absolute minority in the United States of America. Fewer than 50-percent of people in America from then on will be white European stock. That’s not a bad thing, that’s the source of our strength!

Over the decades, with strident suppression of pro-white advocacy and increasing hostility by the government, America’s founding population fell to the bottom of the ethnic pecking order. To make a very long story short, the trajectory further carried us into politically correct snippiness, then to Clown World’s pearl clutching, cancel culture went into high gear, and critical race theory emerged as an invasive species from its Ivory Tower hothouse richly nourished with bovine organic fertilizer. Finally, the Long Hot Summer of Floyd led into the Great Awokening. Apparently, this is what stopping “hate” looks like. One shudders to think what could be next on this trajectory if it were to run its course.

Abroad, the situation is hardly better. The Eurocrats abandoned the gradualist “boil the frog slowly” strategy. They flooded ancient white homelands with remarkably poorly behaved third-world welfare tourists, a greatly unpopular operation. Criticism of these measures brings censorship and jail time in these “liberal democracies,” one element of two-tier policing policies. The treasonous leaders of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand similarly pursue replacement migration, likewise against the will of the people. What do the vibrant cultural enrichers think about being let into the Land of Milk and Honey, pampered at massive public expense, and permitted to behave atrociously? If they consider these governments to be remarkably foolish or insane, then they do have a point about that.

Rhodesia and South Africa submitted to “international opinion” even before all this. They soon descended from orderly first-world countries into dysfunctional hellholes where whites are a hated minority in the country their forefathers had cultivated and industrialized. The promises of a “rainbow nation” living in happy racial harmony—an echo of MLK’s dream abroad—turned out to be a textbook example of what happens to a people that loses control over its destiny. This is what the Endless Night looks like.

MLK’s True Legacy

On all counts, the nay-sayers had been proven right; every dysfunction they predicted came to pass. As for the egalitarians, they had nothing to show for it but a track record of failure. The great social experiments launched in the 1960s were doomed from the start. No matter how many good intentions are brought to bear, lofty sentiments pronounced, mountains of money expended, or politicians swear on a stack of Bibles that their program will succeed, it’s just not going to work. Even if a miracle occurred, causing blacks and whites to forget about the troubled past, this wouldn’t create a multiracial paradise. The inconvenient truth is it’s impossible to equalize populations with differing genetic characteristics.

In the 1990s, the “nature versus nurture” debate reignited concerning the hereditary nature of intelligence. It turned out that the egalitarian viewpoint had been bolstered by misleading arguments, falsified data, and massive pressure (intimidation, media hit pieces, the reductio ad hitlerum, etc.) With much more data since the early days, and with advanced genetic technology including research into the human genome, things became a lot clearer. Although the egalitarians don’t have a leg to stand on, they still fight tooth and nail to preserve their worldview. It’s still controversial, though the debate would be as dead as disco if objective researchers could say that race is real and meaningful without being called Nazis.

Speaking of fraudulent reputations, MLK’s saintly nature and his legacy are just a smidge overhyped. Although the media spin machine grudgingly acknowledged that he plagiarized half of his doctoral dissertation, little to nothing is said about far more damaging revelations such as misuse of funds, the reverend’s grotesque sexual misconduct, and extensively documented Marxist connections. While posing as a man of peace, his disorderly demonstrations routinely provoked official reactions so that he could complain about police brutality while his pawns got arrested. The phony messiah himself certainly would have dreaded an honest judgement of the content of his character!

Simply put, in the 1960s, much of America was fooled by an overrated demagogue selling egalitarian fairy dust. He wasn’t the only one, but at the time, he was the most prominent. Although some conservatives now revere him for the colorblind ideals he sometimes pronounced, that wasn’t the real MLK. Instead, one would have to credit Comrade Stanley David Levison’s eloquent speechwriting for his golem.

It’s Time to Wake Up from MLK’s Dream

Again, during the 1960s, it was more plausible for some to believe that these untested interventions had a chance of working. (It’s much like how some Marxist sympathizers during the Great Depression thought Communism might be worth trying because capitalism seemed doomed.) But by the 1970s, there should have been no grounds for egalitarian illusions, and certainly not by the 1980s. Unfortunately, there’s still no shortage of idealistic do-gooders with little real personal experience of diversity, unprincipled politicians selling out their own people, and sneaky Zionists maliciously pushing the egalitarian line. When social experiments fail far beyond the possibility of repair, it makes logical sense that they should be abandoned.

By now, the egalitarians simply can’t admit that they were wrong all this time about race being only a matter of skin color. It would be too painful to confess that all along they were recklessly incompetent, wasted an astronomical amount of tax money on social levelling schemes, harmed the minorities they were trying to help, did incalculable damage to the founding population, and greatly destabilized the country—or even that MLK was a false prophet. Rather than acknowledge that races have meaningful differences, the egalitarians make increasingly desperate efforts to keep their house of cards from collapsing.

Instead, they’ve doubled down on these social engineering projects, much like so many other faulty Leftist utopian projects. Fitting the familiar pattern, they never admit that their failure resulted from faulty premises. Instead, the blame goes to people who didn’t believe in the program enough. In earlier times and places, Trotskyists and saboteurs were declared responsible for why the Five-Year Plan didn’t work. These days, “racists” catch the heat. This pointedly does not include truculent and ill-behaved minorities who didn’t get the memo about peace, love, and universal brotherhood. Only whites can be “racist,” according to the currently touted special definition.

The excuses became less concrete and plausible as time went on. Blaming de jure segregation for differing average socioeconomic outcomes no longer worked after it was dismantled. Then de facto segregation had to go, and freedom of association went out the window along with it. This led to a number of bizarre initiatives spanning decades, from forced school busing programs all the way to dumping Haitians and Somali “refugees” into nice towns and cities. When tangible explanations wore thin, then structural this, institutionalized that, and the legacy of blah-blah-blah took the blame. Finally, it was white privilege, effectively some sort of an invisible spectral force field in which all whites are entangled, even including the most self-effacing Leftists desperate to shed their phony guilt.

It Doesn’t Have to be This Way

Time travelers from 1965 who wanted to see how bright our post-racial future would be might assume that they’d gone sideways into the Twilight Zone. Worse, if the egalitarian trajectory continues, then all roads lead to ruin. America will descend into the third-world conditions which already can be seen in blighted urban no-go zones. Europe won’t be far behind.

The only good news is that this is not inevitable. It is, however, what happens if we do nothing. Past generations failed to speak up in sufficient numbers. We don’t have to make the same mistake. In fact, there’s no time like the present. Although it’s difficult to resist The Agenda, the price of conforming is unacceptable. It’s time for a change. As Kai Murros put it:

The age of guilt is over. We will not apologize for our achievements. Our history cannot be used as a weapon against us. We are in debt to no-one. Our glorious past is a matter of pride and joy to us. Whatever we have done in the past only inspires us today for even greater deeds tomorrow. Those who feel that we have wronged them should be happy they are still alive.

We don’t have to continue skidding passively into decline in hopes of fulfilling an unrealizable dream. We can reject moral blackmail that demands endless self-sacrifice. We need not allow our cultural virtues to be weaponized against us. Neither must we be mesmerized into compliance by false guilt complexes. We don’t have to put up with truculence and ingratitude. It’s not our duty to serve everyone else’s interests at the expense of our future. We can refuse to participate in our own dispossession. Our descendants don’t have to be a hated minority in the nation their forefathers built, unable to control their destiny and ultimately to dissolve into a global melting pot during the Endless Night. We can say no.

Multiracialism and globalism will never deliver on their promises. Now it’s time for something different. The answer to the race problem is very simple. Stop the hate—separate!