Conservatives Exploit King to Promote 'Colorblind' Politics

Summer 2003

By Barbara Miner

It is one of the travesties of American history that conservatives have transformed Martin Luther King Jr. into this country's most-often quoted opponent of affirmative action.

Conservatives routinely argue that race no longer matters, that the way forward on race relations is to adopt a "colorblind" approach, and that constitutional law must be irrevocably "colorblind." To bolster their argument, they incessantly quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 "I Have a Dream Speech" that children will one day live in a nation where they will "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Read any number of conservative opinion pieces and you get the same message: To uphold King's dream, strike down affirmative action.

As scholars have noted, however, using King to argue against affirmative action is profoundly ahistorical. King was fighting against Jim Crow laws in which race was used to deny opportunity and equality. That is far different from affirmative action policies that use race to expand opportunity and make real the rhetoric of equal rights for all.

Clayborne Carson, a historian at Stanford University and editor of King's papers, has taken sharp issue with the conservatives' misuse of King. First, he notes that the term "affirmative action" was not widely used in King's lifetime. Second, he writes that "the complete text of King's speech makes clear that his dream was of a future that did not yet exist." Third, Carson emphasizes that King's statements reveal "that he sought reforms that were far more extensive than the affirmative-action programs now in place" - that he wanted equality in reality not just in rhetoric.

King himself, in fact, advocated "preferential treatment" for African Americans. In his 1964 book Why We Can't Wait, he wrote:

Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man is entering the starting line in a race 300 years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up with his fellow runner. - B. M.

Summer 2003