Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [104]
“King began to see that Malcolm was right in what he was saying about white people,” Cone explains. “Malcolm saw that white people did not have a conscience that could be appealed to to bring justice for African Americans. King realized that near the end of his life. He began to call most whites ‘unconscious racists.’ ”
The crude racist rhetoric of the past has now been replaced by a refined, polite variety. We pretend there is equality and equal opportunity while ignoring the institutional and economic racism that infects our inner cities and fills our prisons, where a staggering one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 is incarcerated. There are more African American men behind bars than in college. “The cell block,” the poet Yusef Komunyakaa, told me, “has replaced the auction block.”
The fact that prisons and urban ghettos are populated primarily with people of color is not an accident. It is a calculated decision by those who wield economic and political control. For the bottom third of African Americans, many of whom live in segregated enclaves in cities such as Detroit or Baltimore, little has changed over the past few decades. Life, in fact, has often gotten worse. But this is not a narrative acceptable to the liberal class, which speaks of a postracial America. The liberal class continues to insist that hard work is the route to a better life.
In the last months of his life, King began to adopt Malcolm’s language, reminding listeners that the ghetto was a “system of internal colonialism.”
“The purpose of the slum,” King said in a speech at the Chicago Freedom Festival, “is to confine those who have no power and perpetuate their powerlessness. . . . The slum is little more than a domestic colony which leaves its inhabitants dominated politically, exploited economically, segregated and humiliated at every turn.” Coming close to a teaching Malcolm had long espoused, King concluded that the chief problem is economic, and the solution is to restructure the whole society.
“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was, as King and Malcolm knew, a meaningless slogan if there was no possibility of a decent education, a safe neighborhood, a job, or a living wage. King and Malcolm were also acutely aware that the permanent war economy was directly linked to the perpetuation of racism and poverty at home and abroad.
In a speech titled “Beyond Vietnam” given at Riverside Church a year before his assassination, King called America the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” That quote doesn’t make it into many Martin Luther King Day celebrations. The New York Times, expressing the indignation of the liberal class, attacked King for his antiwar message. King’s stance on the Vietnam War and demands for economic justice at the end of his life caused many in the liberal class, including members of his own staff, and allies within the white political power structure, to turn against him. King and Malcolm, in the final days of their lives, were solitary prophets.
“There are many ways in which Malcolm’s message is more relevant today,” said Cone, who also wrote A Black Theology of Liberation:King’s message is almost entirely dependent on white people responding to his appeals for nonviolence, love, and integration. He depends on a positive response. Malcolm spoke to black people empowering themselves. He said to black people, “You may not be responsible for getting yourself into the situation you are in, but if want to get out, you will have to get yourself out. The people who put you in there are not going to get you out.” King