> But would King have opposed Kendism? Although conservatives like to quote his brilliant speech on the content of a man’s character, he was also quite explicitly in favour of quotas and discrimination measures if they favoured his group. As King said: ‘if a city has a 30 percent Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30 percent of the jobs in a particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas, as the case almost always happens to be.’
> King may have believed in all sorts of preferential treatment, not just on account of race but also income and class, but then he was quite explicitly a socialist. Racial equality was part of a more general belief in social equality between rich and poor (that these two goals inevitably and always clash is one of many problems making this dream not entirely realisable).
> As Matthew Yglesias has written: ‘Today’s conservatives often like to quote Martin Luther King Jr. as an apostle of “colorblind” policy as an aspirational goal. But King was a socialist who argued for a radical redistribution of material resources.’
> But would King have opposed Kendism? Although conservatives like to quote his brilliant speech on the content of a man’s character, he was also quite explicitly in favour of quotas and discrimination measures if they favoured his group. As King said: ‘if a city has a 30 percent Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30 percent of the jobs in a particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas, as the case almost always happens to be.’
> King may have believed in all sorts of preferential treatment, not just on account of race but also income and class, but then he was quite explicitly a socialist. Racial equality was part of a more general belief in social equality between rich and poor (that these two goals inevitably and always clash is one of many problems making this dream not entirely realisable).
> As Matthew Yglesias has written: ‘Today’s conservatives often like to quote Martin Luther King Jr. as an apostle of “colorblind” policy as an aspirational goal. But King was a socialist who argued for a radical redistribution of material resources.’