Since 1987, Temple Emanuel of Kensington, MD, has devoted its Friday night Shabbat service at the beginning of the Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday weekend to a celebration of Dr. King. Over the years, our speakers have related stories and perspectives on the importance of Dr. King, the successes of the civil rights movement, and how that movement spurred so much progress. Now, when there is fear that this progress may be in jeopardy, we decided that it is time to reflect on how we can better communicate with each other so that we may, in Dr. King's words, continue the work of bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice.
To that end, we invited Temple member Will Saletan, a longtime writer for Slate magazine, to speak at our MLK service. A few months ago, he wrote a very perceptive article about how implicit bias has made cross-racial communication more difficult -- not just in law enforcement, but in a whole range of other parts of our lives. Below, with Will's permission, are his remarks from Friday evening. I believe that understanding these issues will help provide a stronger foundation for the work ahead.
(You may view and listen to the service by going to www.templemanuelmd.org, clicking on the box on the left side of the Home Page, and typing MLK into the Archive box. Cantor Boxt’s wise and timely discussion of this week’s Torah portion starts at 41:50, and Will’s presentation begins at 49:35.)
Remarks
in Honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.
William Saletan
Today, 65 years later, we’re still not a
colorblind society. But we’re in a different stage of the journey. Dr. King lived
in the era of desegregation. But he envisioned another era: the age of what he
called integration. He talked about it in January 1963, in a speech he titled, “A
Challenge to the Churches and Synagogues.” Here’s what he said:
Desegregation will break down the legal barriers and bring
men together physically, but something must touch the hearts and souls of men
so that they will come together spiritually … A vigorous enforcement of civil
rights will bring an end to segregated public facilities … but it cannot bring
an end to fears, prejudice, pride, and irrationality, which are the barriers to
a truly integrated society. … Here, then, is the hard challenge and the sublime
opportunity: to let God work in our hearts toward fashioning a truly great
nation.[1]
Those were Dr. King’s words. So how do
we do that? How do we overcome fear and prejudice? How do we let God work in
our hearts?
This wasn’t the focus of Dr. King’s
work. He was consumed by the struggle to desegregate America. But he did give
us a few ideas on how to begin the spiritual work that could eventually
integrate our country.
The first idea comes from a speech Dr.
King delivered in 1957, on the role of the church in healing racial division.[2] He
explained that prejudice arose from two sources. One source was “professional
hate groups.” But the other source was commonplace. The human mind, he argued,
was “confused by certain frictions that arise out of the ordinary contact of
diverse human groups.” He summarized the two sources of prejudice this way: “abnormally
aroused fears,” and “ordinary antagonisms.”
Ordinary. What a strange word. For many
of us, racism means hate. But for Dr. King, hate was only part of the equation.
The other part was the ordinary contact of diverse people. It’s almost as
though he believed that prejudice, to some extent, was normal. Not fair, not acceptable,
but, as a statement of human propensity, normal.
And not always visible, either. That’s a second idea we can
draw from Dr. King. In his writing about nonviolence, he addressed not just the
prejudice of whites but the anger of blacks. He acknowledged “our
natural resentment over the injustices that are constantly heaped upon us.”[3] And
he urged young black men not to resort to violence “even though our long years of
oppression sometimes arouse an unconscious resentment within.”[4]
Natural.
Unconscious. Dr. King wasn’t condoning racial bitterness or distrust. But he
was acknowledging it. He was saying that it’s understandable, and that
sometimes you’re not even aware of it.
So
how do we get at our unconscious prejudices? How can we overcome what we can’t
see?
To
answer that question, let’s turn to a third idea in Dr. King’s work: humility. In
1957, he delivered a sermon on self-centeredness, and, fittingly, he used
himself as an example. By this time, he was a celebrity, and he knew it had
gone to his head. “It’s a dangerous tendency,” he said, “that I will come to feel
that Im something special. … And one of the prayers that I pray to God everyday
is: ‘O God, help me to see myself in my true perspective. … Help me to realize
that I’m where I am … because of the fifty thousand Negroes of Alabama who will
never get their names in the papers.’”[5]
True
perspective. Each of us needs that. We need to set aside our vanity. We need to
see ourselves as we really are.
And then we need one more thing: a
commitment to change.
When Martin Luther King was a young seminarian,
he wrote a paper on theology and human nature. He discussed what he called “the
habit of perpetual repentance.”[6] He
explained that this habit “helps to keep our conscience awake; it preserves us
from the sin of self righteousness; it helps us to concentrate on our sins,
rather than the sins of others.” Years later, he wrote that in the
post-segregation era, those who had practiced or benefited from oppression “must
search their souls to be sure that they have removed every vestige of prejudice.”[7]
Dr. King was speaking of repentance as
a cleansing of the heart. But the labor he described—a habit of perpetual
reflection that keeps our conscience awake, keeps us focused on our own
failings, and searches our souls for vestiges of prejudice—can also be
understood as a cleansing of the mind. Over time, we don’t just accumulate sins.
We also develop biases. To clean out these biases, we need a regular practice
of mental hygiene.
In the age of integration, this is one
of our hardest challenges: to root out the unconscious bias that often results from
the ordinary contact of diverse people. In social science, there’s a name for
this problem: implicit bias. Studies have found this bias, to some extent, in
all of us. Every time you’re surprised to meet a black doctor or a gay athlete,
every time you interrupt a woman but not a man, you’re experiencing or
practicing implicit bias.
And here’s the crucial point: You don’t
have to hate anyone to absorb or transmit this kind of bias. It doesn’t make
you a bad person. It just makes you normal. If you’re a cop, and you’ve some
bad experiences with young black men, you may develop implicit biases against
young black men. If you’re a young black man, and you’ve had some bad
experiences with cops, you may develop implicit biases against cops. It’s natural.
But it holds us back from becoming a better country. It gets in the way of
justice and opportunity. And sometimes, in the heat of the moment, it ends with
an innocent person being shot to death.
I know how awful it sounds to call any
kind of prejudice normal. But it’s really important. To work on implicit bias,
we have to tone down the conversation so that we can begin to acknowledge these
biases in ourselves. The word racism has become so presumptively loaded, so accusatory,
so unthinkable that it’s automatically denied by just about everyone. We have
to find a way to open hearts and minds. Not just other people’s hearts and
minds, but our own.
When I think about implicit bias, I
don’t think of Dr. King. I think of the young civil rights activist who was
with him when he died: the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Many people see Rev. Jackson as
a flawed man. And he is. But that’s what makes him a model of what we must do
today.
In 1993, at the age of 52, Jesse Jackson
gave a speech about crime in Chicago. He told the audience, “There is nothing more
painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear
footsteps and start thinking about robbery -- then look around and see somebody
white and feel relieved.”[8] That is implicit bias.
That is a man recognizing implicit bias in himself. That is a man recognizing
that nothing—not his religious training, not his progressive politics, not the
color of his skin—protects him from the universal tendency to prejudge others.
But that wasn’t Rev. Jackson’s finest
moment. His finest moment came a decade earlier, in one of the ugliest episodes
of his life. In 1984, in a conversation he thought would stay private, Jesse Jackson
referred to Jews as “hymies.” When his comment was reported, he denied saying
it. Then he said it was no big deal. As confidently as Donald Trump now denies
being a racist, Jesse Jackson categorically denied that anything in his life
showed any hint of anti-Semitism.
It took him five months to stop making
excuses and face his weakness as a human being. In July 1984, from the podium
of the Democratic National Convention, Jesse Jackson spoke these words:
If,
in my low moments, in word, deed or attitude … I have caused anyone discomfort,
created pain, or revived someone’s fears, that was not my truest self. If there were occasions when my grape turned into a raisin and
my joy bell lost its resonance, please forgive me. Charge it to my head and not
to my heart. … I am not a perfect
servant. … As I develop and serve, be patient: God is not finished with me yet.”[9]
God is not finished with me yet. That is the wisdom we need
today. Not self-righteousness, not self-flagellation, but the simple, profound
understanding that we are imperfect creatures -- and that by God’s grace, we have
it in our power to strive every day to be better. So let us heed the words of
Dr. King. Let us let God work in our hearts.
[1]
“A Challenge to the Churches and Synagogues,” Jan. 17, 1963.
[2]
"The Role of the Church in Facing the Nation’s Chief Moral Dilemma,"
April 25, 1957.
[3]
Address at the Fiftieth Annual NAACP Convention, July 17, 1959.
[4] Address to MIA Mass Meeting at Holt
Street Baptist Church, Nov. 14, 1956.
[5] "Conquering Self-Centeredness” (sermon delivered at
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church), Aug. 11, 1957.
[6] “How Modern Christians Should Think of
Man,” Nov. 29, 1949 to Feb. 15, 1950.
[7] Address to the Southern Baptist
Theological Seminary, April 19, 1961.
[8] Bob Herbert, “A Sea Change On Crime,” New York Times, Dec. 12, 1993.
