What an interesting coincidence that Barack Obama will be sworn in as president the day after we celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. Will Obama finish King’s work of equality — which is also the unfinished work of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Lyndon Johnson?
Many societies have been divided into a dominant group and a minority group. And by “minority group” here I don’t mean a mere numerical minority (e.g., the Episcopalians). I mean a group that is sharply differentiated from the dominant group and systematically treated disdainfully and injuriously. Usually the minority group will be a numerical minority, but not always: think, for example, of blacks in South Africa during the apartheid era, and think of Catholics in Ireland during the age of the Protestant Ascendancy. A minority group is in a society, but it is not of that society.
Now, whenever a society is divided into a dominant group and a minority group, it becomes necessary for the dominant group to “prove” that it is superior and the minority group inferior. For if this great difference is real, then the division of society into two very unequal groups is morally justified: The dominant group deserves to be on top, the minority group deserves to be on the bottom — and a very lowly bottom at that. The dominant group, in other words, must develop what may be called an “ideology of difference” to justify its dominance.
There are two audiences for this ideology. On the one hand, the minority group must be persuaded that it deserves to be treated in a radically unequal way; for if it is not persuaded, there is a danger that it may rebel against its bad treatment. On the other hand, the dominant group has to be persuaded that it deserves its many unequal privileges; for otherwise it might be troubled by a bad conscience, and it might not feel free to use the iron fist needed to retain its position of dominance.
And so in medieval and early modern Europe, where Jews were a minority group and Christians the dominant group, Christians (not Christianity itself, but its adherents) developed an ideology that justified the inferior position of the Jews by accusing them of three great deficiencies: they stubbornly clung to a once-true religion that had been superseded by the ultimately true religion; they had killed Jesus Christ, the God-man; and they loved money to such a degree that they had become an utterly unspiritual people.
In the United States (and its colonial predecessor, British America), where for hundreds of years blacks were the minority group and whites the dominant group, whites developed a racist ideology that purported to prove that blacks were inferior by nature: lazy, imprudent, dishonest, over-sexualized, and prone to violence, not to mention just plain stupid. Clearly, it was held, society would work only if whites were supreme and blacks accepted this white supremacy with docility.
The theory that blacks are radically inferior in many ways was drilled into white heads for centuries. Hence today, 40 or 50 years after the great successes of King and the civil rights movement, it’s not surprising that there are whites who retain anti-black prejudices. But the lesson of black inferiority was for many centuries drilled into black heads, too. Thus it is also not surprising that even today many blacks — despite the fact that the nation decided during the 1960s, under the leadership of King and Lyndon Johnson, that America should be a truly equal-rights society — continue to have strong feelings of inferiority.
And, of course, if you feel inferior, you will very probably behave in an inferior way; it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. This widespread feeling of inferiority among African Americans explains more than anything else, I would argue, the great and very disappointing underachievements of blacks. Their income is lower than that of whites, their poverty rates higher, their educational achievements less, their out-of-wedlock birth rates and crime rates much higher, etc. I am not blaming blacks for this; nor am I blaming today’s whites; I am blaming a vicious ideology that was drilled into African Americans for centuries and cannot be discarded in a day.
I have just said that I am not blaming blacks, but this is not entirely true, for I do blame many black leaders. Martin Luther King Jr. was truly a brilliant leader, one of the greatest of all American leaders, perhaps the only non-president who can be put in the same category with Washington and Lincoln and FDR. But since King’s death, it has been the bad luck of African Americans to be cursed with demagogues who, doing very bad and out-of-date imitations of King, have taught blacks that they cannot make progress in the world without the neverending help of whites; in other words, that they are incapable of either group or individual self-reliance. But to teach this is nothing other than to reinforce the old idea that blacks are, by nature, inferior.
Of course, in the years since the death of King, many have overcome their feelings of inferiority and made notable achievements that would have been impossible in the pre-King era. Yet many others — millions of others — remain burdened with these feelings. We all pay a price for this, for their underachievements are America’s underachievements.
Now Barack Obama is becoming president of the United States. Will his rise to the summit of American government and society finally free all blacks from their inherited feelings of inferiority? If you’re African American and you believe at some level of your mind (perhaps an unconscious level) the old racist myth that your ancestry incapacitates you from effectively competing with whites, will you be able to hold on to that belief in the face of a daily awareness that a man of African descent is now the single most important person in the world’s most important country?
We’ll have to wait and see. But what a marvelous thing it will be if the Obama presidency, whatever else it may do or fail to do, succeeds in liberating African Americans from their ancient feelings of inferiority. Then at last — at long, long last — the dreams of Jefferson, Lincoln, LBJ, and Martin Luther King Jr. will be realized.