Published: 6/21/2021 8:00:10 AM
When my students read Martin Luther King’s essay “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience,” they’re surprised to find that love is a complicated concept. Love is not a feeling, which is why King said he’s glad Jesus didn’t ask us to “like” one another. It’s hard to like people who make you angry and afraid.
For King, love is a way of being. It keeps us whole as individuals, even as it helps us get along. Personal integrity and social justice are two sides of the same coin. But this kind of nuance gets lost in the cynical realm of mass-mediated politics.
Luckily, King gave us a few simple rules. One of these is quite relevant to debates about the teaching of so-called “divisive concepts,” as seen in states from Idaho to my home state of New Hampshire. The rule is, as we’re striving to make the world better we must focus on systems rather than individuals. It’s easy to blame a few bad apples for spoiling the rest. It feels good to hurl insults. But the sweet high of righteousness is not the point, because love is not a feeling. Vengeance is a kind of “internal violence of the spirit,” as King calls it. We’re only hurting ourselves.
So, I find it odd that proponents of bills like New Hampshire’s HB 544 reject the idea of systemic racism. King asked us to focus on the system not because it’s inherently flawed, but because people are inherently capable of good. That is, if we can rise above self-righteousness long enough to love them.
It’s ironic that folks who cite “divisive concepts” as reason to cut funding for DEI training and school curricula also want to funnel state taxes to religious schools. The Bibles in these schools include the very Gospels where Jesus says, “Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division” (Luke 12:51).
This irony reflects our willingness to violate another of King’s principles: the ends do not justify the means. The means must also be pure. This is nearly impossible to follow when mistrust and suspicion have become a commodity. We hire professionals to sow seeds of doubt about everything we claim to value, from the electoral process to our institutions of news reporting and journalism.
The goal of these bills is not to cultivate tolerance and understanding. It’s to brand as toxic anything connected to the work of racial justice activists and their allies. As the superintendent of my child’s public school noted, the bill in our home state “looks to solve a problem in New Hampshire that doesn’t exist.”
Neither DEI professionals nor school teachers are conspiring to indoctrinate white students into an ideology of self-hatred, or non-whites into habits of racialized scapegoating. Such claims only have to sound convincing to those predisposed to believe it. Like the vote recounts in Arizona, this low bar of plausibility makes any initiative worth the effort as long as it recalibrates the balance of power and trust.
Given that penalties include debarment or sanctions from state boards, these bills go beyond providing guidance. They weaponize the process of accountability. Even if they don’t pass, they reposition a coalition of mostly white, male, conservative politicians as the arbiters of supposedly neutral discussions of race and gender.
These claims of neutrality are disingenuous. Such bills are ideological Trojan horses, smuggling in a willfully naive theory where prejudice is an exclusive matter of individual choice and personal character. The legislative equivalent of “all lives matter.” They impose rhetorical blinders which compel us to see only individual racists. Lone actors. Bad apples. This individualistic view has been driving the debate over police brutality for years.
In other words, such bills do precisely what they claim to ban, by endorsing a questionable ideology of race that assumes the worst intentions of those who are passionate about justice.
All of this comes at a cost. Through the politics of cynicism, we suffer the internal violence of the spirit King warned about. The path forward is non-violence and love, for ourselves and our enemies. But it’s a tough path. Truth is painful. Forgiveness hurts.
Love is not a feeling. It threatens to change everything that’s familiar. In fact, downright dangerous. King knew this well. Yet he still urged us to move beyond the “negative peace” of status-quo complacency, to the positive peace of justice.
Love is a divisive concept. Keep on teaching it.
(Kevin Healey is an Associate Professor of Communication at UNH, where he teaches classes on ethics, religion, and digital culture. His recent co-authored book, “Ethics and Religion in the Age of Social Media,” won the 2020 Book of the Year Award from the Religious Communication Association.)
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