My Thoughts on Martin Luther King Jr. and Black Lives Matter: A Meditation
By: Hal H. Harris
Tags: Culture, Politics, Race, Religion, BlackLivesMatter

In between late nights with my baby (momma is working the night shift), I’ve been reading Strength to Love, which Martin Luther King Jr. published in 1963. I felt it was pertinent to dive into the books he had published before his murder in 1968. The United States is currently burning down. The work he gave his life for — equality before the law and the rising of Black personhood to full citizenship — is under threat. He has every right to come back to us as a revenant. Yet vengeance does not stir his spirit to anger. In his afterlife, I want to understand how he continues to walk in the path of Jesus and preach peace to his enemies and love to his followers.

It is an easy read. The chapters read like sermons, filled with parables and parallelism. Some of my thoughts on the first three chapters. A quote from the first chapter grabbed my attention:

“Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge that is power; religion gives man wisdom that is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary. Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral nihilism.” — Martin Luther King Jr., “A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart”

In this age of Black Lives Matter, how do we move forward when science and religion are in such poor shape? Since King’s death, our nation’s scholars used the hard and soft sciences to research the impacts slavery and racism has had on Black people. We know so much more about epigenetics, weathering, cognitive bias, redlining, and structural discrimination. Yet the research of Black agony has not meaningfully changed the political environment of my country.

The presence of a malignant religion — a faith in an ordered superstructure of existence — prevents us from transforming the nation with our scientific findings. I am not referring explicitly to Christianity, though I cannot ignore that those who align their voting patterns most vocally are evangelicals who consistently vote against Black people’s interests. I am referring to white supremacy, the superstructure of the West. Even in those white people who proclaim allyship with Black Lives Matter, we see a hostility toward Black leadership, of them taking the voice and garments of our cause for their personal use instead of the political advancement of my people.

When I think of spiritual life, I think of 2Pac’s question — does Heaven have a ghetto? The lyric harkens back to the confusion I felt as a child growing up in a Brooklyn housing project. If this existence is a reflection of what awaits in the beyond, then I think it does. That is a problem. King wrote, in the third chapter of the book regarding the pain of his holy neighbor that “his agony diminishes me, and his salvation enlarges me.” Agony makes us reflexive; salvation makes us, as a species, contemplative. Our nation’s current conflagration is reflexive, and thus cannot lead to long-term change until we move into what it means to forge salvation from the past of the United States. Otherwise, we will enter into a divided life when we pass into history. I do not want what comes after my physical body to be a continuation of what we face now. COVID heightens my anxiety.