Weeds and Wheat: The Civil Rights Movement Remembered

Having come of age during the Civil Rights Movement, I consider it the finest moment of our nation. Not only was the cause impeccably just, but the evangelical, non-violent modus operandi of the Reverend King and his lieutenants was courageous, ennobling, fierce yet gentle, and boundlessly generous. In captivating our hearts, it was marvelously successful: by the end of that tumultuous decade of the 60s, racial inclusion was passionately embraced by all our major cultural institutions: academia, the churches, media, entertainment, sports, the government, political parties and the law. Twenty years later, in the 90s, my employer UPS put all of us management through diversity training where we learned that profitability and global capitalism had zero tolerance for the faintest trace of bigotry. Racism, as a historical and institutional force, was deader than the dinosaur. No doubt there are residual traces among old timers and the unavoidable ethnic, tribal rivalries endemic to male adolescents (think the West Side Story). A type of racism that I personally find despicable is the current practice by hoodlum, black teens in the cities of northern NJ of mugging undocumented Latino workers who are flush with cash on payday Friday...but you will not learn about that on public television. Nevertheless,  culturally racism is as taboo as animal sacrifice. In all of the worlds I have inhabited in my adulthood, I am in the minority as a white...and quite comfortable surrounded by descendants from Africa, Asia and Latin America...in Jersey City, at UPS operations in Newark Airport, teaching in urban Catholic schools, in our own modest residence for low income women, and in the many urban Catholic churches I attend. However cultural movements are complex and contradictory, like us human beings ourselves, and never pure but always infected with sin. The weeds and the wheat, prior to the Second Coming of our Lord, cannot be definitively separated. And so I identify three significant, unfortunate consequences of the Civil Rights Movement: the sexual revolution, the concentration of power in the federal government and the cult of victimization. None of these three weeds were intrinsic to the Civil Rights Movement itself, which was wheat of finest quality, but they were deeply involved with it and thereby given impetus. It was an unholy intimacy. Regarding the sexual and cultural revolutions that accompanied the King movement: the wives of the black leaders, but few others, were painfully aware of the virulent promiscuity (particularly with young white women) of the leaders of the movement. There seems to have been an implicit but strong compact of compliance between the sexual liberals and the civil rights leaders and that coalition remains the inner core of the Democratic Party to this day. And so, in spite of the immense legal and political advances, the black family emerged from that decade in worse shape than it began and has been getting worse since. Despite almost 50 years of the easy availability of contraception, today 2/3 of black babies conceived in NYC are aborted. And Afro-Americans are flawlessly pro-choice! The second catastrophe that issued from the Civil Rights movement was the moral approval of concentration of power in the federal government. Local governance in the South was not able to correct the deeply-structured racism so the intervention from the higher power was necessary, correct and immensely successful. This moral success, which should be considered an exception to a wholesome federalism served to consecrate the concentration of power in the federal government (which was the result of many and various historical forces throughout the 20th century) and accelerated the decline of intermediary organizations and the loss of a sense of subsidiarity even among Catholics. And so, we have the atomizatiion of the individual, the emergence of a enveloping Mother-State, and the weakening of smaller social units including the family, church, and smaller social bodies. Lastly, we have the cult of victimization that pervades our culture as all kinds of minorities claim the sacred shroud of victimhood and compensatory entitlement. This blend of self-pity, jealousy and impotence is the starkest contradiction of the original Civil Rights Movement with its ethos of quiet strength, forgiveness, courage and hope. We do well to honor the memory of Reverend King who is in the company of a very elite group of American moral heroes including Lincoln, Ceasar Chavez and Bill W of the 12-step tradition: all notable for their humility, wisdom and courage. But we do well also to renounce the legacy of sexual license, centralization of power and the culture of victimization that has instituted itself in all our major cultural institutions and elites.