American Hypocrisy Is Alive And Well

I'm always amazed this time of year, MLK Birthday celebrations, that a man as articulate as Dr. King, who spoke so eloquently on his own behalf, and with voluminous documentation of what he thought, we-Black Americans when we pause to honor his life and work, reference so little of it. A Black child born when his birthday was declared a national holiday will turn 40 this year. If they attended an annual MLK celebration every year since infancy, they'd be very aware of who Dr. King was, but totally uninformed about who he is.

I would posit the real stumbling block in America is not its history of slavery or genocide, but a collective character flaw that's a dominate trait of the American personality, hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is defined as the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform. This character flaw as a cultural or societal trait makes it impossible to deal with any facts or circumstances that detract from the creation myth of America. As we commemorate Dr. King's birthday this week, I thought I'd write about American hypocrisy and a MLK speech that you've probably never heard of.

May 10, 1967, MLK gave a speech at the Hungry Club Forum. The Hungry Club Forum was an initiative of the Butler Street YMCA in Atlanta. It was a place where sympathetic white politicians could meet with Black leaders. Here's what he said at the Hungry Club Forum, “We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can't really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.”

This speech would be precursor of a speech he would give a week later at the University of California, Berkeley, that would go down in history as America's Chief Moral Dilemma. The tragedy of the Berkeley speech is he could have given it last week, almost word for word.

The major reason we make a little incremental progress followed by ballistic White backlash is, what I would dare say, the almost pathological hypocrisy of the American personality. The White American identity is built on a lie, or at best a half truth. Any historical claim against America that contradicts that identity, challenges fragile white self-esteem, is always rejected out of hand.

Let's talk about assets and liabilities for a minute. A balance sheet is divided into two parts, assets and liabilities. Assets are the resources your company owns, while liabilities are what your company owes. When you buy an operating company or inherit an equity interest in an operating company, you own the totality of the company, its assets and its liabilities. You don't get to say I'll take the assets, but not the liabilities. Any claims that were liabilities of the previous owner now belong to you. How they happened, the fact that you had nothing to do with the transaction that created them doesn't mitigate the fact they're your liabilities now because it's your company.

I think this metaphor of the relationship of assets and liabilities to ownership is a useful way to understand the relationship of current citizens of the United States to the history of the country. And it explains why they don't get to pick and choose the history they like. When you become a citizen of a country, by birth or petition, you acquire a heritage. The heritage is the full range of the inherited traditions, monuments, objects, and culture of that society. Its entire history, the good, the bad and the ugly. This heritage is not a gift, it's an entitlement by virtue of your citizenship, no one can take it from you, and you can't give it back, unless you renounce your citizenship. It's your claim on your country's assets and your country's liabilities claim on you. Like the new or present owner of a company you are now the beneficiary of the assets and responsible for the liabilities.

I would also use this metaphor to contextualize Dr. King's speech at the Lincoln Memorial. He began the speech by saying, “When the architects of our great republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…” He continues on to explain why he and a quarter of a million others are in DC that hot August day, “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.