@bobsal u1553115,
bobsal u1553115 wrote:
“And I contend that the cry of ‘black power’ is, at bottom, a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro,” King said. “I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And, what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years.”
"…I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention."
King’s point, though subtle, is clear. He does not support violent tactics, including riots, but he argues that the way to stop citizens from rioting is to acknowledge and fix the conditions that they are rioting against. And in the larger context of that speech, he got a chance to explain how exactly that mending should occur. The Other America speech is, at its heart, a speech about economics. (That’s why it’s popular with Rand Paul.) The solutions included fair-housing legislation, a federal law ensuring fair access to justice—about 50 civil rights workers had been killed in Mississippi since 1963 and there had been not a single conviction, he noted—and the institution of a national guaranteed annual income, which could be paid for by ending the war in Vietnam.
https://time.com/3838515/baltimore-riots-language-unheard-quote/
The economics that produce inequalities of race, class, and gender are rooted fundamentally in the materialities and interdependencies built into industrial-consumerism. As long as people are lazy, they will want to pay others to clean their buildings, prepare their food and clean up after them, etc. Even if race disparities in consumption privileges end, there will still be class disparities because of all the people of any color who will want to consume without producing, at least not in roles that they don't want to work in. To have a truly free economy, people have to be free of the desire for things that aren't sustainable for everyone to have. That means, you look at unsustainable consumer culture and think, "that's not sustainable so I don't want that, even if other people who are richer than me are buying/doing it." When people only want the things that are sustainable and socially-responsible, there won't be a burden for anyone to shift away from themselves as a privilege of being a certain race/class/gender/nationality/etc. Take something like agricultural labor, and even most black Americans don't want citizens to take that burden back away from migrant workers, but to really be fair, we all have to contribute labor to our own economic foundations, as farmers, factory workers, etc. and our current economy is just set up for people to struggle over who gets the privilege of shifting burdens away from themselves, including black Americans, only they get disproportionately stuck with dirtier, lower-paying jobs because the history of burden-shifting was traditionally to shift the burdens to them. But you can't pretend that by equally sharing the burdens of the current industrial-consumer economy, it would suddenly become a good economy, because there are things that need reform, such as unsustainable consumption, transportation, and energy-use; so to demand equality with white culture that is unsustainable would just be shifting the privileges of unsustainability, and why would you want that? What people should want is to be liberated from unsustainability first and foremost, and ending race/class/gender descrimination should just be a part of that. The problem currently is we have standards of middle-class living that are unsustainable and unjust, so you can't transfer them to historically-deprived people and have them suddenly become sustainable and just; and yet as long as they don't change, those historically-deprived people are going to be suffering at the slowness of sustainable change.
