The Beloved Community, as described by Dr. King, is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it.

Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood.

In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict.

Dr. Bernice King

I have spent the last few days ruminating and reflecting on Dr. Bernice King’s words above. It is a modern incarnation of the ideals her father, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King spoke to and wrote about more than 50 years ago. 

In my reflections, the first thoughts I had were around the idea of vision, and the hope and the frustration embedded therein. 53 years after the killing of MLK, we are still speaking about and dreaming of a variant of his original dream, over 57 years ago. That this dream is still not fully realized is sobering, and could, if we allowed it to, lead to a leaching of hope and be cause for what we so often see around us: lethargy, learned helplessness, and, ultimately a dilution of, and a rejection of, the vision; of the dream. 

That would be a mistake. There are twin sirens that can derail us from faithful, steadfast, and relentlessly reliable and resilient praxis: one, the disappointment and futility that come from realizing just how far we are from King’s original optimistic and faithful vision; the other siren is clutching to a disingenuous strain of optimism that bears no resemblance to King’s clear eyed and audaciously realistic version of the same;  solely focusing on the gains that have indeed been made since Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech in 1963, and, in so doing, can and has made white people entirely too self congratulatory; resting on the laurels of gains procured largely with little of white people’s sustained labor, and, in the intervening decades, overtly and covertly clawed back, if not in the laws themselves, then by rendering the laws and attendant attitudes and mores and cultural shifts diluted or even impotent. 

The past 30 years in particular have seen this distressing shift. Since Rodney King’s brutal assault at the hands of police, America has been confronted with just how much of the dream is still deferred. Yet, after conflations and their subsequent flashes of interest and promises to do better as individuals and as a collective society began to happen at what have become predictable cycles, little has changed. 

Certainly, not the metrics. America is more segregated in the 21st century than it was in the mid-20th century, when the modern civil rights movement emerged. This dovetails with the dynamics of the school system from pre-k to post graduate, of the modern workplace, where org charts look little different than the days of Mad Men, to churches where Dr. King, were he alive today, could still make, with piercing accuracy, his observation that the most segregated time in America was Sunday Morning. 

And certainly in the last decade, the unfinished business of the first and still greatest stain in America’s collective character has been laid bare and engendered disingenuous surprise from dominant culture, and knowing and rueful and resigned expressions from Black people–from the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin doe eyed and so young in his hoodie, to what amounted to almost weekly killings and brutalizations of Black people, Black women, and children and men, with the same responses; the shock and outrage; the calls for change; the pivot from a fickle news cycle, the renewed apathy, and a return to a status quo that did nothing more than to set up the next wave of murders and oppression. 

And. Particularly in the last couple years, when emboldened agents of the state effectively declared open season on Black people, with the collusion, and sometimes, the seeming encouragement of government. There is still the same dynamic being played out since post slavery times with lynchings; the only difference is that in this more modern era, the killings and brutality are state sanctioned. 

Again, this is not new. When we talk about the fact that more Black people are being felled, that is only a partial truth. We cannot compare modern day statistics with those of a century, or even a half century ago. 

Rodney King ushered in a new era of visibility, and at least initial accountability (it would take another conversation entirely to talk about the paltry numbers of killers actually held to account for the bald and brazen taking of Black lives; Breonna Taylor being only the most notable example), a visibility not had during the time of Dr. King, who lived in era of the surreptitious. 

But, again, for all the visibility, for all the cameras in the hands of citizens who provided and still provide irrefutable evidence, for all the audio, for all the hand wringing, for all of the wash rinse repeat of the news cycle where yet another Black life is devalued and or lost, resulting in glazed over eyes in white cohorts and (by now) dry weeping with stony faces in Black and brown cohorts. 

So no, the dream outlined by Dr. Martin Luther King at the March on Washington, ten short days after my own birth in 1963 has not been realized. Not even close. Not even cosmetically, actually. 

That means we have to return to the well of his words again and again and again, those of us who actually want a full realization of this dream.

Which is what his daughter, Dr. Bernice King, does above, as she reimagines her fathers dream for this modern era. 

When she speaks to ‘a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it’, she is echoing what her father asserted, first fairly covertly (at least when he was under the white gaze; it occurs to me that most of the speeches and sermons he gave that have been preserved were at least in part for the white gaze and for white sensibilities) than more and more overtly, that racism and white supremacy are primarily economic constructs, and that confronting supremacy necessarily entailed and entails exposing this deeply hidden and rarely discussed root. We do the same here. Money is welded to power dynamic, which is welded to colonization and global forces. That is to say, that while the individual effort is necessary (if only for the pivot to the macro) it is wholly insufficient if not cleaved to the collective, the international, global, both in governments who make laws, and to the corporations who make and move money and resources–and who have outsize sway over governments themselves. For our purposes here, it means that we, even as we do our vital and crucial internal work, must always be mindful of the fact that this internal work cannot be only an exercise in interior peace and exterior civility; it means that we will find out that our indoctrination into supremacy happened at the same time as our inculcation into systems of wealth, which happened at the same time as our indoctrination into the dynamics of power; the toxic triad that is embedded into white supremacy. This is why we hit on money and power so very hard. It is why the first iteration of the civil rights movement was only a partial and fragile success–because they considered this three legged stool of racism radioactive and knew white people would twitch; it is also why it is the only way forward now. 

So for us, in this Beloved Community, we keep our eyes on this basic decency, and then we go further. We can and do go beyond the minimum standard of human decency, and dare to risk a common humanity. 

Which leads us to the second paragraph, where the King Center says, ‘Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood.’  Here, we agree, and again, we go further in an overt insistence of radical eye to eye, parity and mutuality that refuses either top down or bottom up dynamic. Absent this radical stance, we feel that the eradication of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be incomplete and only dermis deep. When I consider ‘inclusion’, for me that implies a default position that then can condescend to include–and that inclusion can happen in multiple ways: grafting, subsuming, enmeshing, engulfing. Our vision eschews that narrow view of inclusion, which can all too often put the onus upon the marginalized hoping to be seen, acknowledged, and affirmed by the dominant default, rather than movement and effort and accommodation being made by those holding power, wealth, and social capital.   

In the last paragraph, the King Center speaks of how our universal relational lives should be led when they say, ‘In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict.’ Again, we agree, and again, we go further. In our dedication and commitment to internal process, and also to a critique of how this work has been done in the past, we are led to query and confront different words and phrases with rigor. We confront the uncomfortable truth that so many international (and domestic) conflicts have the three legged stool of money, power, and global dynamics and pressures and historical contexts which have supremacy built in, and no durable solutions will be found until these things are squarely faced–much like internal work is a non negotiable part of a durable personal praxis, so must be our efforts as local, national and global citizens. 

That means we will absolutely need to take a hard look at anything that would hearken back to a supposedly better and more unified and reconciled time. Again, we need to unpack this carefully and fully and unflinchingly. As we look at 600 years of colonization, we need to ask ourselves is reconciliation possible–when there was never any sort of ‘conciliation’ worthy of the name? At what point in our shared global history was there a time of true peace, power sharing and non color based oppression? For most of the globe, wistfully gazing at a time which might have been seen to have a quieter timbre and time, however brutally enforced, is a luxury afforded only to the people and the culture and written history (also brutally distorted) of Europeans and their progeny around the world. At what point can white people, as a group, ever reach back to a time when they were trustworthy to those they systematically oppressed?

So as we do our work here at Lace on Race, and as we delve deeper into the six principles and six steps of nonviolence as outlined by the King Center, I want us to keep our own stance, convictions and sensibilities in mind. We will not refute; they are, like the statement here we just delved into, deeply valuable, and in alignment with our ethos and our North Star. I look forward to walking with you in this month where we honor Dr King, and I am glad we can, together, go deeper into his legacy and his charge for us in these present times. That it all is still relevant is, yes, sobering. It is also galvanizing. Let us begin.

Return to The Bistro for further discussion.