It was a striking moment, in a day filled with them.
On Tuesday afternoon, during Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s hearings, Senator Ted Cruz quoted Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of a world where children would be judged “not by the color of their skin, but by the substance of their character” — before sharply questioning Judge Jackson about her views on critical race theory.
He held up two books by Ibram X. Kendi that he said were assigned or recommended to a school where she sits on the board of trustees, and described their content as “exactly the opposite” of Dr. King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
“Do you mind,” he asked, “that these ideas are taught to children?”
It was a salvo entirely focused on the current battles over critical race theory, a once obscure academic discipline that has emerged as a powerful political weapon for the right. From the floor of the Senate to the report of the Trump administration’s 1776 committee, it’s painted as the antithesis of the color-blind America that Dr. King supposedly wanted to create.
But some scientists who listened to the hearings said they saw a known distortion.
Tommie Shelby, professor of philosophy and African American studies at Harvard and editor of “To Shape A New World,” a collection of essays on the political philosophy of Dr. King, said those who are “selectively picking words” from Dr. King during the 1963 March on Washington did not “study it very closely”.
“It is clear from the broader speech that King thought we were a long way from achieving that ideal and that race-conscious policies would be needed in the meantime,” he said.
The moment also crystallized a long-running political battle over Dr. King and his most famous words.
“The Right has been looking for arguments to back off against affirmative action and what they see as reverse racism,” said historian Nicole Hemmer, the author of “Messengers of the Right,” a study of conservative media. “And quoting King, instead of a white one, gets that gloss of moral cover.”
Critical race theory is increasingly being used by conservatives as a shorthand for various teachings about race. It originated in the late 1980s at Harvard Law School, where both Mr. Cruz and Judge Jackson (whom he also questioned about her views on the DailyExpertNews’ 1619 project) were students at the time.
Critical race theory is a critique of the legal system and the ways in which inequalities can be enforced and perpetuated by apparently color-blind laws. But it is not, argue the proponents, a rejection of Dr. king.
In an opinion article in The Los Angeles Times in January, lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the founders of the movement, Dr. King “a critical race theorist before it was named”.
She quoted Dr. King’s 1967 book “Where Do We Go From Here?”, in which he wrote that “the doctrine of white supremacy was embedded in every textbook and preached in practically every pulpit,” enshrined it as “a structural part of culture.”
“Contrary to numerous claims by the right, King did not condone color blindness,” she wrote. “It wasn’t the cure to dismantle the ugly realities that white supremacy had spawned.”
While politicians across the political spectrum are on Martin Luther King Jr. Day quotes from Dr. King, conservatives (and some liberals) have called Dr. King not always liked. During his lifetime, he was often denounced as a communist and an “external agitator” and was subject to extensive scrutiny by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
A few months before King’s assassination in April 1968, a Harris Poll showed that he had a 75 percent disapproval score — at least 25 points higher than in 1963, the year of the March on Washington.
The picture began to soften after his murder, but his reputation remained low with many on the right. In 1983, Republican Senator Jesse Helms led a filibuster of the proposed federal holiday in his honor, calling King a proponent of “action-oriented Marxism” that was “incompatible with the concepts of this country.”
President Reagan eventually came out for the holiday, which he signed into law that year. In 1986, at a ceremony in the capital where Coretta Scott King attended, he urged America to “never, ever abandon the dream” of “a truly colorblind America”.
That emerging ideology of color blindness, which invoked affirmative action as a form of “reverse racism,” has been embraced by some black intellectuals, including Shelby Steele, the author of the 1990 bestselling book “The Content of Our Character,” and economist Thomas Sowell. .
Understand the Critical Race Theory Debate
The 2003 Supreme Court ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger, which backed affirmative action, accelerated conservatives’ embrace of the “content of their character,” Ms Hemmer said, aided by the expansion of conservative talk radio and blogs. “There’s more room to multiply it,” she said. “Suddenly everyone seems to be using it.”
There was also a wider effort to get Dr. King and his morality-based politics for the right. In “Martin Luther King’s Conservative Legacy,” a 2006 paper for the Heritage Foundation, Carolyn Garris urged conservatives to lay claim to Dr. King and push back against ‘the decades of its appropriation by liberals’.
“King was not a staunch conservative, but his core beliefs, such as the power and necessity of faith-based association and self-government based on absolute truth and moral law, are deeply conservative,” she wrote. “Modern liberalism rejects these ideas, while conservatives put them at the center of their philosophy.”
Others on the right have the sanctification of Dr. King used as a way to bolster the founders’ reputations, at a time when attention to their slave ownership tarnished their cultural prestige. Conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza invoked Dr. King as a vindication of Thomas Jefferson and the words of the Declaration of Independence, while Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and black historian John Hope Franklin ally with the opponents of true equality.
A large photo of Dr. King during the March on Washington also appears on page 2 of the report of the Commission of 1776, established to promote “patriotic education,” which describes the “I Have a Dream” speech as “rejecting hateful stereotypes based on racialized group identity,” and casts affirmative action as a betrayal of Dr. King.
On the right, one of Dr. King embraced Alveda King, a conservative evangelical Trump supporter who visited the White House in 2019.
In the early 1990s, Ms Hemmer said, Democratic politicians still quoted the passage about the “content of their character” in the context of events such as the police beating Rodney King. But today, she said, liberals and progressives are more likely to quote other texts, such as Dr. King’s 1963 Letter From Birmingham Jail, in which he wrote that the greatest obstacle to racial progress was not the Ku Klux Klan, but “the white moderate who is more committed to ‘order’ than to justice.”
And among scientists there is much more attention for the radicalism of Dr. King, who is not seen as antithetical to figures like Malcolm X. They emphasize his opposition to the Vietnam War and his support for the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 and what some see as his support for reparations. The context may have changed after the passages of the civil and voting rights laws and the rise of the Black Power moment. But Professor Shelby said it’s not just a matter of separating the early and later Dr. king.
He said many would benefit from reading Dr. King’s book “Why We Can’t Wait” written in 1963. “Our society has been doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years,” wrote Dr. king. “Then how can he be included in the mainstream of American life if we don’t do something special for him for a while?”
for dr. King, Professor Shelby said, justice means “sometimes treating everyone equally, and sometimes treating people differently.”