Reflections On MLK Week

Bloggers from the ITT List reflected today on these words of Martin Luther King and the history of racism in public discourse during their lifetimes:

“Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.” —Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

For ITT List writers, the resurgence of neoconservative pundits heralds a new era of poorly-hidden racism, hovering like “a dirigible of discrimination, a giant, pungent bag of putrid air in a Macy’s parade.” But what MLK really seems to be talking about is togetherness in opposition to non-togetherness. In his phrasing, the nebulousness of “love” derives a paradoxical fullness through its emptiness as a signifier: love in a political, social context is anything other than hate, anything other than non-cooperation. To say, as King does, that life reaches its “harmonious,” “free,” and “illuminated” character in love – in the absence of hatred – is also to assert a more radical understanding of life. Life may be understood as those collected moments of existence perceived – our store of memories, the sum of our experiences – but this conception must also include the total sum of all individual experiences – i.e., the collective sum of the sums. “Life” then, as the simple sum of individual sets, may be complicated by its interrelationships in society. This may be what King is thinking about in an apparent cliché which says so much while seeming to say nothing at all, or which paraphrases the Christian rockers Kids in the Way’s crossover hit “Better Times” from their album A Love and Hate Masquerade: “I drew a line in the sand / Made my simple demand…”

What is compelling about King’s collected thoughts is their accessible simplicity. Though the above is impossible to really understand, we all feel as it we understand it, somehow, and that he is encouraging us to get together in a meaningful way. This is what our events this week approximate: we are able to reexamine everything or are invited to. Love, then, becomes the perspective from which discrimination and racism must be approached. If we can collectively agree that love – togetherness, cooperation, non-hatred, whatever – is our positive public good, then we can work backwards, eliminating those embarrassments that appear only in the “illuminating” light of the type of life we have imagined into existence.

–Gabe Tourek