Okay, here’s my question: if you believe the “extreme manifestations” of contemporary civil rights and racial justice rhetoric are easy to separate from the more reasonable and traditional manifestations, are there any major ideas endorsed by MLK that you still oppose today?
https://twitter.com/jamessurowiecki/status/1413108333192622080
And if yes, do you believe you would you have criticized King in 1967 prior to his death or not?
Can you cite some major national civil rights or racial justice advocates directly and unreservedly promoting these ideas? (Slides from random DEI trainings don't count)
https://twitter.com/JamesSurowiecki/status/1413117570354384898
The reason this is important is that the tactic being adopted is to take random chaff about racial inequality (e.g., bad DEI trainings) and to pretend these are the main thrust of racial justice and civil rights advocacy today, meriting the current backlash
But this is nonsense in at least two respects:
1. These radical new ideas are either things that MLK et al. believed in the 60s, or else fringe ideas that you have to go looking for
2. Racial justice thinking is WAY MORE popular today than during the supposedly "traditional" era
1. These radical new ideas are either things that MLK et al. believed in the 60s, or else fringe ideas that you have to go looking for
2. Racial justice thinking is WAY MORE popular today than during the supposedly "traditional" era
MLK would have endorsed, and indeed campaigned for, virtually every modern-day civil rights argument with substantial uptake among progressives. The idea that we've somehow broadly graduated to another tier of radicalism is ahistorical
https://twitter.com/JamesSurowiecki/status/1413112911812251651
Of course you occasionally run into outright racial separatists and the like - but rather famously, those existed in the "traditional" civil rights era too! And they were much more intellectually influential than they are today.
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