Blacks

Debate: ‘Colonialism Is Conquest of Land, Labour Exploitation, Oppression – All at Once.’

In a reply to to Mahmood Mamdani’s response to her review of his book, Sharma says the world is not comprised of discrete, disconnected territories but of people brought together through the shared space of empire(s).

In my review of Mahmood Mamdani’s new book, Neither Settler nor Native – The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, I questioned two dichotomies used to frame his analysis of the colonial process in the United States. These were, first, the distinction between colonialism and racism and, relatedly, the distinction between the expropriation of land and the exploitation of people’s labour. I wondered what is lost when we try to separate out these practices.

Neither Settler nor Native – The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities by Mahmood Mamdani.

In particular, I did not think that we could account for the transatlantic slave trade if such dichotomies were maintained. Thus, I asked: ‘Can anyone whose labour is made exploitable, not always already be expropriated from the land?’ ‘Enslaved Africans were expropriated from land too,’ I argued, adding, that, ‘they were forcibly taken from their societies and put to work as enslaved labour by the same colonial state.’

Professor Mamdani replied to my review with a question of his own, asking: ‘Were enslaved Africans also expropriated from the land ‘by the same colonial state’?’ His answer was that, ‘On the face of it, this seems a tall claim, untenable in light of the historical research so far’. Let me clarify my argument, for I think it was misconstrued by Mamdani. My point was that the same imperial-state – the British Empire – was responsible for both the colonisation of what became its Thirteen Colonies as well as for a large portion of the transatlantic slave trade. Indeed, it was the most dominant force in the ‘evil trade’ between 1640 and 1807, when it was formally abolished. Both the expropriation of the land of those who came be categorised as ‘Indians’ (the ‘natives’ of the Thirteen Colonies) and the exploitation of the labour of enslaved people categorised as ‘Negroes’ were critical to the success of the British colonial project.

This is not because, as Mamdani argues, that, ‘after an early phase that focused on expropriating the labour of Indians, the US took a conscious decision to displace Indian with African labour’ (my emphasis). This is a teleological argument, one which reimagines a long and unpredictable history as having been predetermined. We cannot read the enslavement of Black people and the exploitation of their labour as simply part of some long-hatched plan premised on the settler colonial ‘logic of elimination’ of the Indians, as historian Patrick Wolfe argues.

In contrast to such arguments, historian Andrés Reséndez has shown that the massive loss of life of Indians across the Americas was largely a result of the harsh conditions of forced labour they endured. With their immune systems fatally weakened, they were made susceptible to diseases that were new to them. To corroborate his argument, Reséndez points out that ‘one year before Europeans began reporting smallpox [in 1509, 17 years after Christopher Columbus’s landing], Española’s Indian population had dwindled to 5% or less of what it had been in 1492’ (my emphasis). The enormous loss of life was the outcome of numerous factors, none of which were part of a preplanned ‘logic’.

Once brought together under the force of ‘blood and fire’ (as Karl Marx put it), both those people racialised as Indians and as ‘Negroes’ were classified by the British imperial-state as aliens and not as subjects of the British Crown. People in both groupings were enslaved (the proportion of enslaved Black people was far greater, however). Both were formally freed from slavery in the late 19th century. Both were excluded from the group of rights-bearing persons in the Thirteen Colonies. Both groups were infantilised and legally considered as dependents. With the independence of the US in the late 18th century from the British Empire, neither Indians nor Black people (free or enslaved) were legally regarded as US citizens.

These facts make it impossible to support the claim made by Mamdani that in the United States there are two groups of people: native Indians governed by customary law and all others governed by civil law. From the tenuous establishment of the first British colony in 1607 until the constitutional amendments of the immediate post-civil war era of the late 19th century – the Slave Codes (the first of which was enacted by the British colony of South Carolina in 1691) ensured that Black people were legally set apart from those racialised as White.

Also read: When India Proposed a Casteist Solution to South Africa’s Racist Problem

Paying attention to US immigration laws further upsets the idea that all non-Indians were governed (albeit not equally) by civil law. Following quickly on the heels of the formal emancipation of enslaved Black people in 1865 and their incorporation into US citizenship in 1868, the US enacted its first immigration law in 1875. From its independence 100 years earlier to the 1875 Page Act, entry to the US followed the imperial model of mobility controls and placed no significant restrictions on people coming in.

The Page Act constructed two new categories of people whose entry to the US was specifically barred: ‘Chinese coolies’ and ‘prostitutes’ (aimed specifically at restricting the entry of women from China). State governed mobility into the US was, from that point on, racialised.

Yet, it was still not until the 1924 US Immigration Act that the entry of people from Europe was restricted and regulated (incidentally, also the same year that Indians were made US citizens). This new immigration law did not affect all Europeans equally. Like its predecessors, the 1924 law was racist: largely concerned with restricting the entry of Southern and Eastern Europeans, along with all Jewish people regardless of where they were moving from.

Significantly, people categorised as migrants are, like Indians, governed through the plenary power doctrine. Such powers insulate the US government from constitutional challenges by migrants, who, today, are the only group legally categorised as ‘aliens’. The result was that, like ‘Indian tribes’, migrants remain under the control of Congress. Indeed, migrants are governed by a different set of laws – US citizenship and immigration laws – than are any US citizens. I will return to this issue later.

American Indian labourers, in 1906. Photo: US Reclamation Service, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Of course, the fact that the binary of customary/civil law does not hold in the United States doesn’t fully address the issue of whether all these people can be considered to be colonised. Mamdani expressly disagrees with such a formulation. In response to my review, he asks, ‘what is the difference, historically and politically, between natives and immigrants, particularly forced immigrants (slaves, indentured servants)’? and ‘why draw a distinction between [these] two oppressed groups’? His answer is that we must draw a distinction between natives and migrants, because ‘colonisation is the conquest of land. Control over labour may or may not follow’. ‘Blacks’, he argues, ‘have been a source of labour and Indians a source of land, resulting in different governance regimes’. Black people are forced to endure White supremacy while Indians face colonialism. Thus, he argues, ‘racial oppression and colonisation are not the same thing, and neither are the solutions they call for’.

Is colonialism, however, only the conquest of land? Imperial states take control over as much land as they can in an effort to expand imperial territories and establish the sort of social relations necessary for the accumulation of wealth and power. After all, turning land into territory, as geographer Robert Sack usefully notes, is a ‘strategy for influence or controls’. Capture of territory allows imperial states to control people. In particular, colonial projects require people whose labour be exploited. Land and labour, together, are the necessary components for any colonial project.

Also read: Bringing Down Statues Doesn’t Erase History, It Makes Us See It More Clearly

Christopher Columbus knew this when he recognised that “the Indians of Española [on which he made land in 1492) were and are the greatest wealth of the island, because they are the ones who dig, and harvest, and collect the bread and other supplies, and gather the gold from the mines, and do all the work of men and beasts alike” (quoted in Reséndez 2016, 28).

Thus, rather than continuing to see people categorised as Indians, Blacks, and migrants as separate groupings, each with their own incommensurable experiences, I believe it is more historically accurate – and politically transformative – to understand that they came into being within a single field of imperial power. People in these groups continue to co-exist together in a single field of power I call the Postcolonial New World Order, a world of nation-states and ever-expanding capitalist social relations.

In this regard, we must also take into account Whiteness. In the initial period of colonising what is now the United States, the idea that workers from Europe were White would have been nonsensical. Indeed, as historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker discuss in their 2012 book, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, all workers, including those from Europe, understood that ‘the “white people” were, in code or cant, the rich, the people with money, not simply the ones with a particular phenotype of skin color’. It was in the late 17th century when workers from Europe were decisively elevated above all others by colonial laws that invented the ‘White race’.

This broadening of the racialised definition of Whiteness was a critical aspect of containing solidarity amongst the subjugated. It was also crucial to the rulers’ strategy of ‘divide and conquer’, both within any particular colony as well as across the broader field of empire. The power of states – and of capital – grew in direct proportion to the consolidation of a White identity. Arguably, the success of strategies used to Whiten workers was an early moment in the imperial turn to biopower. Convincing (most) White workers that they were inherently superior to all others – and must be given preferential treatment, or else – was a key part of the process of making White settler colonies.

I am, of course, not saying anything that Mamdani has not already stated throughout his large and important body of work. Indeed, my own thinking of these matters owes a great debt to his. In his work on Uganda, Rwanda, Darfur and elsewhere, he brilliantly analyses just how much advantage imperial rulers gained by making distinctions between colonised people – and how these continue in today’s nation-states. Divided from one another through the law and its identitarian affects, people’s ability to resist ruling relations was – and remains – profoundly weakened. Again, as Mamdani has shown, the differentiation between native and migrant (and native and settler) have been particularly useful.

However, it is important to add that it is crucial that we not continue to see the world through an autochthonous lens (‘autochthons’ or ‘the indigenous’ being those who are regarded as the people of a place and, as such, the only ones with the legitimate right to govern). The world is not actually comprised of discrete, disconnected territories, each belonging to those people whom states define as its natives. People categorised as natives and non-natives are not wholly discrete people whose concerns are incommensurate. Rather, since at least 1492, all of us have been brought together through the shared space of empire(s). In this sense, colonialism is not only the conquest of land, it is not only the exploitation of labour, it is not only the denigration and oppression of the colonized: it is all these things all at once.

Also read: Kashmir Is the Test Bed for a New Model of Internal Colonialism

Imperial space was comprised of multiple colonies as well as multiple trading routes capturing and moving the workers necessary for the accumulation of wealth and power. In its early stages, it was forged by what historian Marcus Rediker calls the “four violences”: the expropriation of the commons both in Europe and in the Americas; African slavery and the middle passage; exploitation and the institution of wage labour; and the repression organised through prisons and the criminal justice system. Feminist philosopher Silvia Federici adds to our understanding of these shared experiences by showing that the persecution of women and the containment of their liberty were crucial elements in the globalising capitalist project of imperialism.

Thinking about colonialism as a set of practices carried out within an imperial space that encompassed many people across vast areas of the globe, is not about ‘seeking to expand and virtualise the notion of the native’, as Mamdani claims I wish to do. Neither is it to turn colonialism into ‘a metaphor which can incorporate all other forms of dispossession’. I understand colonialism to be about the expropriation of land, its transformation into sovereign/state territory, the exploitation of labour, and the denigration of the colonised. These are violent acts that most people in the world have experienced.

Colonialism expanded and accelerated after the formation of various European empires from the late 15th century onward, and particularly after the formation of the British Empire, which was the first to globalise capitalist ruling relations. However, as many scholars are showing us, these practices took place prior to the formation of European empires and, continue to be practiced in the so-called national liberation states.

Answering ‘the hard question of historical injustice’, as I believe both Mamdani and I wish to do, can be done – is better done, I would argue – by reorienting ourselves with a view afforded to us by the world that we’ve inherited, a world borne of – and still wrought by – violent strife and deep inequality but a single, shared world, nonetheless. The project of decolonisation – the project of freedom writ large – is and always has been, by necessity, a shared one.

Nandita Sharma is professor of sociology, University of Hawaii at Manoa and author of Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020).

The Storming of the Capitol Hill Is a Wake up Call for All

It is not a case of exceptional deviation but an advance warning for every country where the leadership has a problem of accepting diversity and people would like to play ball with mythmaking.

It is difficult to forget the iconic picture of the racist, homophobic and xenophobic mob that stormed Capitol Hill on January 6. The objective was to put pressure on the US Senate not to certify Joe Biden’s election though it is a largely ceremonial but necessary event. It is not a case of exceptional deviation but an advance warning for every country where the leadership has a problem of accepting diversity and people would like to play ball with mythmaking.

It is beyond any doubt that the US, which was a deeply divided society, was held together by rule of law, institutions, decorum and political savviness. Its constitutionalism faced deep faultlines when a barbaric belief system was encouraged to trump the rule of law. It was both a function of historical overhang and inappropriate stirring of the mob.

Why did it happen? Is it because Donald Trump as the president moulded the opinion of the white people as such? Citizens’ mental space is not a “tabula rasa” nor it is like moulding clay. It is nonetheless moldable by directing already developed minds by way of reinforcing what they are predisposed to. Trump got 11 million more votes compared to his 2016 tally, even though it was seven million votes less than Biden’s. But the former’s claim of the election being stolen was almost a spectral vision though it was an incontrovertible loss for Trump, whose lies had fed the grievances of his supporters. Clearly, Trumpism has prospered on marketing a lie that he was a victim among his acolytes despite it being baloney.

Trump, with his myriad weaknesses, spoke convincingly to something in those 71 million people. The belief was that white people are supreme and the US is only for them. He instilled the fear which majoritarian leaders often reinforce. The fear of the minority and the deep-rooted anxiety that the minority would take away something which the majority holds. It is based on the fear of the “other” too.

Post-9/11 inflammation of fear was strategic but not the same. For that matter, any supremacist or majoritarian view is premised on fears of “others” becoming equal or even surpassing “us”. An underdog fixation is planted and everyone always looked to paint herself as an underdog. Though even a white working class person is not worse off than a working class person of colour, Trump in turn had offered to end the “American carnage”. It required building up a cult-like figure who gave the assurance that their anxiety was correct and he was the one to defend them.

But the subscript was he required a kind of authority, unfettered and unaccountable. Majority insecurity is often heightened by these populist figures relentlessly pointing to the alleged “appeasement” of the minority, often propped by social media.

Also read: Modi, Trump and Democracy in the Age of ‘Alternative Reality’

Anarchy very often helps tyrants because the latter can address the worst instincts of a mob because he himself is ruled by these same instincts, says the Economist.

US President Donald Trump gives an address, a day after his supporters stormed the US Capitol in Washington. Photo: Donald J. Trump/Twitter via Reuters

Pervasive mythmaking

Democracies have their institutions to calm those anxieties down. Debate and deliberation in the legislature tone down the inflammation. But if someone who is stewarding the ship stokes hateful sentiments and undermines democratic institutions, the latter will clearly prove themselves to be unequal in keeping pace. Everything said and done, democracies are not built to handle the combination of lies, half-truths and mythmaking without checks and balances.

Every nation and regime is built on some well-meaning, sometimes innocuous and often expedient mythmaking. The US was built on the myth of white homogeneity, which was Janus faced with supremacy. This led to native Americans being pushed to the reservations. Slavery enabled the continuance of exploitation and racial prejudices.

Whether it is acknowledged or not, genocides did happen in both events. This was the background of the nation’s mythmaking of the ‘land of the free and bounty’. Both the monikers were for the European settlers until 1961, when Black people were given civil rights. But deep discriminations continued relentlessly because of the design of the structure. Resultantly, slavery could be abolished but not the related myths harboured in the societal structure.

This was fertile ground for history to be twisted to make the interpretation parochial and inward-looking. The myth attained a life of its own when the protector became a predator and institutions were becoming sclerotic.

It only required someone like a president to decorate it with yarn, heightening majority supremacist feeling directly or indirectly. Others will be around to twist facts, making hateful attributions and drawing convoluted conclusions from the correct facts. These are ingredients of mythmaking and they will have to go on regardless to sustain themselves.

Ironically, this myth was hurting white people too, with exacerbating economic and racial inequality. Rule of law can be roadblocked here. But given that institutions can be captured, it becomes a glide path when the impediments are either attenuated or removed. Everyone involved in this lie was wrong that mobs can be confined to the designated side of the political spectrum when they were being instigated.

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Every society runs the risk of falling into this trap which we saw in the US. Instead of the country trying to be better, it starts looking inward, convinced that attempts to progress are of second-order importance. Meanwhile, that part of the stagnating society keeps on protesting even if they are more privileged.

Mere hoarding of rights, wealth and privilege cannot take the country forward. This is evidenced by China sneaking up on the US, in terms of trade, manufacturing and military, while the US was busy playing on the fears of the relatively better off. Fragmented societies find it difficult to be prosperous societies because there is too much suspicion and a lot more violence.

The learning should be to make societies less divisive and not to hammer it into a homogeneous template. It is the job of the leadership to mediate to keep things calm, understanding sober and discourse civil. In no event should they be tempted to stoke the fire of anxiety. If they do, the country will be in peril, hurtling down the path of no return.

Meanwhile, nurturing democratic institutions, mitigating too much inequality, taming money in politics and enabling checks and balances suffer endlessly. Is the politics of the 21st century ready for a rewind? That is the question.

Satya Mohanty is former secretary to the Government of India. With inputs from Sukanya Mohanty, an independent social commentator. Views are personal.

Swimming While Black

Jeremiah Perry, who drowned on a school trip this summer, could not swim. That’s because learning to swim is one of those intersections where race, space and class collide.

Why did the black boy drown? Because he couldn’t swim.

And he couldn’t swim because learning to swim is one of those intersections where race, space and class collide. Black people in the United States drown at five times the rate of white people. And most of those deaths occur in public swimming pools.

Jeremiah Perry drowned on a school trip last summer. The group of 33 teenagers and their teachers were enjoying a classic Canadian experience – canoeing in the wilderness. The group stood out in Algonquin Park because most of the kids were black. And finding black people in the woods is rare.

The swimming ability of the group quickly became a key issue in the preliminary investigation into Perry’s death. It turned out that half of the kids could not swim.

Swimming lessons

Swimming lessons are a rite of passage for most Canadian children. But race complicates the splashes, shrieks and laughter in swimming pools.

In Canada, immigrants are less likely to learn to swim or to swim as recreation. Most Canadian newcomers hail from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Jeremiah Perry was a recent immigrant from Guyana.

In my old multicultural Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale, some 90% of the kids learning to swim were white. In my new neighbourhood of Regent Park, which started with Toronto’s oldest social housing project, more than half the population are people of colour and recent immigrants. They don’t appear to like swimming because the free municipal pool still overflows with white people. Yet the park around the pool is filled with brown and black people enjoying the outdoors and frolicking in the sprinkler fountains. For them, taking the step from outside to inside the swimming pool seems to be as hard as trying to swim across the Atlantic Ocean.

‘No trees in the water’

Warm seas and golden sandy beaches and are standard icons in tourism images of the Caribbean. So too are hotels with deep blue swimming pools. Surrounded by so much water, one would expect Caribbean people to be expert swimmers. They are not.

The majority of Caribbean swimming pools are owned by hotels and cater to tourists. Race colours the pools. Most of the people in the pools are white visitors, while those cleaning or serving cocktails at the pool-side bar are black locals.

Seen through this lens, as shown in the classic movie, Smile Orange, hotel swimming pools are the continuation of the old colonial project — white people at play, cooling off in the water, in a country club style setting. Black people at work, sweating in the hot sun. Not allowed in the pools.

Most people in the Caribbean don’t have access to swimming pools. If they want to learn to swim, they must do so in a natural body of water such as the sea or a river.

As a child in Jamaica, my grandmother forbade us to go to the sea. “There are no trees in the water,” she warned us. Every year some child drowned, going out of their depth, silently sinking to a salty, watery grave.

Drowning in racism

I learned to swim in England, where weekly swimming classes were a standard part of the school curriculum. A report from the Amateur Swimming Association showed that there is a pent up demand for swimming from black people in England. Most don’t go to the pool because they don’t see other black people swimming. The same report indicated South Asians are the least likely to venture into the water.

Swimming and African Americans are not a classic pairing either. Imagine a pool party. The black people mingle around the pool, while the white people are in the pool.

African Americans’ antipathy towards swimming is rooted in segregation and racism. It was not so long ago that public beaches and pools in the United States displayed “Whites Only” signs. Blacks who entered these beaches were chased off or got a good beating. Pools were drained if a black person got in. One black person contaminated the whole thing.

Segregation continues today, but it is more subtle. Most white children learn to swim in pools that are in private recreational clubs in the suburbs. Black children often contend with poorly maintained and over-crowded public pools in the urban centres — if pools exist at all.

If parents can’t swim, it is less likely that their children will learn to swim. Parents fear of drowning means they are unlikely to sign up their kids for swimming lessons, even when these are available.

Drowning while black

I like to do laps in the swimming pool for an hour or so. Front-crawl up the length of the pool and breast-stroke on the return. Dreadlocks streaming down my back. Keeping time with the clock. Every so often I will get the look. Whether from a black or white person, it expresses surprise that I am at ease in the water. Sometimes, it starts a conversation.

How many times have I heard that black people can’t swim because our bones are too dense? Or we can’t float as our big bottoms drag us down under the water?

These comments attempt to use genetics to explain the low rate of swimming among blacks. Scientific racism is nothing new when it comes to the black community. Its original purpose was to justify slavery.

The echoes of past stereotypes continue to shape Black lives. In the case of swimming, scientific racism now claims that black people are less likely to swim as, our muscles don’t twitch at the right speed.

These explanations avoid looking at how swimming and systemic racism intersect. They do so on so many levels in my local pool. The pool’s general advertising reaches middle-class white people from outside the neighbourhood, they drive to it attracted by its award-winning architecture. The pool has done little outreach targeting the black community, including advertising swimming lessons for its children.

Swimming to the future

Swimming is part of the cultural capital of a middle-class lifestyle. The poorer you are the less likely you are to learn to swim or visit a pool. The spectre of colonialism lurks. The high drowning rates among black people is merely another symptom of the after-life of slavery.

Olympic swimmers are the apex of achievement in sport. For a long time, black people were absent from the elite swimming teams. The first black person to win an Olympic medal in swimming was Enith Brigitha in 1976 Montreal Olympics. She was from Curacao in the Caribbean and swam on the Dutch team. In 1988, Anthony Nesty from Suriname became the first black man to win an Olympic gold in swimming.

Each decade the number of black swimmers at the Olympics Games increases. The latest was Simone Manuel, the first black woman to win a gold for the US in swimming at the 2016 Rio Olympics.

Black swimmers at the Olympics gives hope that swimming is shifting from a white sport to a more diverse one. As attitudes shift, more black children should learn to swim and the drowning rate should fall.

Jacqueline L. Scott, PhD Student, University of Toronto

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

50 Years After Martin Luther King’s Death, His Radical Ideas Live On

On the the 50th anniversary of the assassination of civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King Jr, a scholar argues how three particular works from 1957 to 1967 illustrate how King’s political thought evolved from a hopeful reformer to a radical critic.

Martin Luther King Jr. has come to be revered as a hero who led a nonviolent struggle to reform and redeem the United States. His birthday is celebrated as a national holiday. Tributes are paid to him on his death anniversary each April, and his legacy is honoured in multiple ways.

But from my perspective as a historian of religion and civil rights, the true radicalism of his thought remains underappreciated. The “civil saint” portrayed nowadays was, by the end of his life, a social and economic radical, who argued forcefully for the necessity of economic justice in the pursuit of racial equality.

Three particular works from 1957 to 1967 illustrate how King’s political thought evolved from a hopeful reformer to a radical critic.

King’s support for white moderates

For much of the 1950s, King believed that white southern ministers could provide moral leadership. He thought the white racists of the South could be countered by the ministers who took a stand for equality. At the time, his concern with economic justice was a secondary theme in his addresses and political advocacy.

Speaking at Vanderbilt University in 1957, he professed his belief that “there is in the white South more open-minded moderates than appears on the surface.” He urged them to lead the region through its necessary transition to equal treatment for black citizens. He reassured all that the aim of the movement was not to “defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding.”

King had hope for this vision. He had worked with white liberals such as Myles Horton, the leader of a centre in Tennessee for training labor and civil rights organisers. King had developed friendships and crucial alliances with white supporters in other parts of the country as well. His vision was for the fulfilment of basic American ideals of liberty and equality.

Letter from Birmingham Jail

King was arrested for protesting the treatment of blacks in Birmingham. Credit: Wikipedia

By the early 1960s, at the peak of the civil rights movement, King’s views had evolved significantly. In early 1963, King came to Birmingham to lead a campaign for civil rights in a city known for its history of racial violence.

During the Birmingham campaign, in April 1963, he issued a masterful public letter explaining the motivations behind his crusade. It stands in striking contrast with his hopeful 1957 sermon.

His “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” responded to a newspaper advertisement from eight local clergymen urging King to allow the city government to enact gradual changes.

In a stark change from his earlier views, King devastatingly targeted white moderates willing to settle for “order” over justice. In an oppressive environment, the avoidance of conflict might appear to be “order,” but in fact supported the denial of basic citizenship rights, he noted.

“We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive,” King wrote. He argued how oppressors never voluntarily gave up freedom to the oppressed – it always had to be demanded by “extremists for justice.”

He wrote how he was “gravely disappointed with the white moderate … who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.” They were, he said, a greater enemy to racial justice than were members of the white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and other white racist radicals.

Call for economic justice

By 1967, King’s philosophy emphasized economic justice as essential to equality. And he made clear connections between American violence abroad in Vietnam and American social inequality at home.

Exactly one year before his assassination in Memphis, King stood at one of the best-known pulpits in the nation, at Riverside Church in New York. There, he explained how he had come to connect the struggle for civil rights with the fight for economic justice and the early protests against the Vietnam War.

He proclaimed:

“Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam.’ It can never be saved so long as it destroys the hopes of men the world over.”

He angered crucial allies. King and President Lyndon Johnson, for example, had been allies in achieving significant legislative victories in 1964 and 1965. Johnson’s “Great Society” launched a series of initiatives to address issues of poverty at home. But beginning in 1965, after the Johnson administration increased the number of U.S. troops deployed in Vietnam, King’s vision grew radical.

King continued with a searching analysis of what linked poverty and violence both at home and abroad. While he had spoken out before about the effects of colonialism, he now made the connection unmistakably clear. He said:

“I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.”

King concluded with the famous words on “the fierce urgency of now,” by which he emphasised the immediacy of the connection between economic injustice and racial inequality.

The radical King

King’s “I Have a Dream,” speech at the March on Washington in August 1963 serves as the touchstone for the annual King holiday. But King’s dream ultimately evolved into a call for a fundamental redistribution of economic power and resources. It’s why he was in Memphis, supporting a strike by garbage workers, when he was assassinated in April 1968.

He remained, to the end, the prophet of nonviolent resistance. But these three key moments in King’s life show his evolution over a decade.

This remembering matters more than ever today. Many states are either passing or considering measures that would make it harder for many Americans to exercise their fundamental right to vote. It would roll back the huge gains in rates of political participation by racial minorities made possible by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. At the same time, there is a persistent wealth gap between blacks and whites.

Only sustained government attention can address these issues – the point King was stressing later in his life.

King’s philosophy stood not just for “opportunity,” but for positive measures toward economic equality and political power. Ignoring this understanding betrays the “dream” that is ritually invoked each year.

Paul Harvey, Professor of American History, University of Colorado

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.