Charlie Kirk and other young conservatives are launching a campaign to discredit the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. It’s a break from the older, historically inaccurate conservative tradition of pretending MLK was on their side.
MLK said:
I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
This is in alignment with conservative positions on how government, business, and other institutions should treat people of different races.
Do you disagree? Do you think somebody other than conservatives are embodying this in their policy demands better?
If you need to, I can show you policy proposals from conservatives’ opponents involving direct violations of this principle of not judging people by the color of their skin.
Conservative policy proposals pretend that no one discriminates, which is not what MLK said, he was talking about the actual end of discrimination.
Conservatives want the law to be blind to discrimination, so they can do it without consequence, and claim that it was merit-based.
Affirmative action, which affirms the discrimination that is present in our culture and takes action to correct for it, does not judge anyone, it explicitly removes a judgement call as to who is most deserving of something, in cases where it has been shown that leaving that choice up to people will result in discriminatory outcomes, by allocating some percentage of a given resource to account for those unequal outcomes.
The conservative perception that affirmative action is discrimination is based on the false premise that everyone has equal opportunity extended to them, and thus allocating some fixed amount of resources for a group is making the outcome inequitable for another.
In reality, the outcomes are inequitable if left alone.
Your use of that quote is in-line with conservative distortion of MLK’s beliefs.
Here’s a quote from MLK, explicitly about this topic:
Why is equality so assiduously avoided? Why does white America delude itself, and how does it rationalize the evil it retains?
The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.
And from the article:
In reality, King was a proponent of affirmative action, writing in 1965 that “a society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro.”
For a view into his less mainstream-publicized side, that you won’t hear quoted by the Fox News or CNN crowd:
The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.”
The proposals you’ll likely be linking to are an attempt to circumvent the people’s refusal to accept that we’re all the same, by giving additional support to those marginalized groups. Since you can’t force people to not be racist, the next alternative is to try and offset how that racism closes doors off.
Things like affirmative action policies are an imperfect attempt at offsetting facts like how identical resumes, but one with a traditionally black name, will get substantially less offers from a wide variety of companies than the one with a white name. It’s basically a “this is why we can’t have nice things” response to continued racism and people pretending that racism isn’t still a problem.