Christopher_Fici_STM_Extended_Paper_Gandhi-King_Final

Christopher Fici IE 350/ST 350 (Gandhi and King) Dr John Thatamanil and Dr Cornel West May 8, 2015 Radical Anticipatory Vision, Praxis, And The Anticipatory Community In The Exchange Between Gandhi and King S.T.M Extended Paper Those who approach and aspire, with great humility and vulnerability, to the prophetic are those personalities we can call the anticipators These personalities are those who have become so convinced, to the very marrow of their bones to the very core of their soul, that the status quo is untenable Their prophetic vision and praxis consists of blood, sweat, tears, intelligence, heart, and their footsteps in the streets Their praxis is a praxis of anticipation, and this anticipation is forward-looking while remaining rooted in the urgent spaces of the present time, while it also draws upon the wisdom of past ancestors and spirits embedded in the body of the Earth As we face the uncertainty of our own stricken age, an age stricken with the ongoing lynching of the black American body, of the body of the Dalit and other so-called “untouchables” in India, and the body of the Earth herself, the prophetic anticipatory vision of Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr and Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi remains for us as a guiding post and a guiding light, which, even in its imperfections, has by and large not lost any of its radical edge and potential In this paper I propose to carefully explore and explicate our contemporary understanding of the theory and praxis of anticipatory vision and the radical space of the anticipatory community through an exchange with the anticipatory vision and praxis of Gandhi and King How does the anticipatory vision of these two prophetic luminaries, along with the voices of those who called and critiqued them to something wiser and deeper, encourage, inspire, and enflame the incredibly urgent necessity for anticipation that we face today to create the beloved community governed by the liberatory assertion of swaraj, or self-rule? Anticipation at the Urgent Crossroads This is undoubtedly one of the rare crossroads moments in the history of humanity and the history of the Earth herself It is the moment of the rising of the anthropocentric age, in which the rapacious selfishness of the human species threatens the well-being and very survival of an obscene number of fellow planetary species and organic living processes of the Earth This coming into the anthropocentric age is part and parcel of the turbo-capitalist1 age that we find ourselves in, in which the transnational structure of corporatism is fueled by the tragic and ironic rise of the neo-liberal economic model of deregulation and privatization at the exact time in which economic simplification and sacrifice is absolutely necessary for our collective ecological integrity and survival As Naomi Klein writes: “Cutthroat competition between nations has deadlocked U.N climate negotiations for decades: rich countries dig in their heels and declare that they won't cut emissions and risk losing their vaulted position in the global hierarchy; poor countries declare that they won't give up their right to pollute as much as rich countries did on their way to wealth, even if that means deepening a disaster that hurts the poor most of all For any of this to change, a worldview will need to rise to the fore that sees nature, other nations, and our own neighbors not as adversaries, but rather as partners in a grand project of mutual reinvention.”2 The worldview that Klein anticipates is a A term I first encountered in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor by linguistic and environmental scholar Rob Nixon See also Turbo-Capitalism: The Hidden Effects of Free-Market Capitalism-Winners and Losers in the Global Economy by Edward N Luttwak Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 23 place where it is imperative to make the intersections between movements for racial, gender, and sexual justice and the movement for food/environmental/climate justice This is where the anticipatory vision of Gandhi and King helps to pull our understanding of anticipation beyond the exclusively ecological sphere of concern My previous and ongoing engagement with the praxis of anticipation has been largely focused upon the ecological application While the anticipatory community is never divorced from the ecological, I am learning to understand and express my understanding of the anticipator community as a space where the bonds of all kinds of interconnected hierarchy and hegemony can and must be shattered, creating a space of potential communion where all planetary beings are allowed to survive and thrive within and without from the integrity of their own existential experience of being, or the “content of their character” as proclaimed by King The anticipatory community is a space where the bonds and chains of anthropocentrism, racism, sexism, and casteism can be confronted and transcended This paper allows me an opportunity to broaden my definition and understanding of the praxis of anticipation which includes the ecological but which also broadens my ecological understanding of anticipation through intersections with the movements for racial, gender, sexual, and cultural justice My first encounter with the theory of the anticipatory community came from the work of Christian ethicist/eco-theologian Larry Rasmussen, who explained that the anticipatory community are those “home places where it is possible to reimagine worlds and reorder possibilities, places where new or renewed practices give focus to an ecological and postindustrial way of life Such communities have the qualities of a haven, a set-apart and safe place yet a place open to creative risk Here basic moral formation happens by conscious choice and not by default Here eco-social virtues are consciously cultivated and Martin Luther King, Jr, “I Have a Dream”, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr, edited by James M Washington (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986), 219 embodied in community practices Here are the fault lines of modernity are exposed.”4 The anticipator is thus one who confronts the existential homelessness and rootlessness of the contemporary planetary being, the reality of being alienated from our collective planetary oikos, or household She confronts the absurdity of attempting to transcend our planetary limits through our rapacious economy while still living on the Earth and remaining dependent on the Earth for our sustenance and well-being She embodies the empowering humility and vulnerability of living by these limits, and she expresses the free creativity and spirituality which emanates from the transvalued power of her humility and vulnerability The anticipator is one who understands that the process of creation within the homespace of the anticipatory community must be a process of re-creation and re-discovery Whether in a religious and/or spiritual and/or cultural context, she is determined to unearth the embedded Earth-honoring wisdom existent in the textual and historical spaces of personal and collective human experience She understands that this Earth-honoring wisdom is both of a timeless nature and also of a process-oriented kind of substance The best wisdom needed for anticipation speaks directly to the common complex essence of human nature and spirit, and it is also flexible, malleable, and sensitive to the variance of human experience and desire as it arises from particular soils and elements and groundings The anticipator then is determined to apply this wisdom to the recovery of our inherent harmonious relationship wity her fellow planetary being and with the Earth This determination is the conscious reclamation of our moral agency and the assertion that eco-social virtues, such as selflessness, service, and sustainability, must be the fundamental values which define our personal and collective planetary experience The anticipator does not also shy away from acknowledging the other inherent element of human nature, which is the tragic compulsion towards existential alienation from one's own Larry L Rasmussen, Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 227 self and from other planetary beings, and the economic and ecologic alienation which then results in the external fabric of civilization She is no reverent romantic of humanity, yet she also never loses a sense of the hopeful in relation to the potential of human nature and spirit to transcend its own alienation She participates in a constant vigilance of the selfless against the selfish, in which “the kind of people we strive to be, the kind of life we seek to live, and the kind of path we wish to take in getting there are all made conceptually more difficult by shifting from the ego to the ecosphere as the center of moral attention and method.” This shifting of our ontological and existential foundation from the rotten core of the self-centered yet selfdenying ego space towards the self-less yet self-affirming ego-less space is the foundation of the praxis of anticipation, and the fundamental value at the heart of the anticipatory community Gandhi and King as Anticipators Gandhi and King were inside-outside practitioners of anticipation Both worked within and outside the halls of the hegemonic Both were invested, in specific contexts, in the project of the reconstruction of the nation-state as a space for their anticipatory vision and praxis, and both were at times drawn towards the dissolution of the prevailing nation-state model because it became an impossible space for what they were envisioning Both were invested, in specific contexts, in attempting to modify and work within models of social organization directly linked to the hegemonic, by attempting to inject pragmatic and prophetic models of the counterhegemonic, and both were invested at times in the complete counter-hegemonic overthrow of the hegemonic As we try to recover the actual from the idol in understanding Gandhi and King, we must understand them as fluid, process-oriented, fallible figures and we must understand the movements they led in the same way Rasmussen, 223 We must also be careful not to be too rigid in trying to explain or proclaim that their theory (or theology) primarily fed into and created their praxis and vice-versa whether their praxis primarily fed into and created theory (or theology) While in certain contexts it was indeed their praxis which fed into their theory in the classical model of liberation theology proclaimed by Gustavo Gutierrez, the ground of the spirit was also always the fountain of their praxis Nevertheless we can agree with Gutierrez that for Gandhi and King “theology which has as its point of reference only 'truths' which have been established once and for all-and not the Truth which is also the Way-can only be static and, in the long run, sterile theology thus understood, that is to say linked to praxis, fulfills a prophetic function insofar as it interprets historical events with the intention of revealing and proclaiming their profound meaning.” Gandhi and King are both prophets of the strange and fluid space between the modern and the post-modern If the modern is to be understood as the formation of society based on the principles of free-trade economics and the prospect of unlimited growth of capital, a process largely defined by white supremacy whether American or British, then Gandhi and King are both a kind of post-modern prophet calling us beyond the pratfall of the modern They are post-modern prophets deeply committed to the pragmatic, in which they avoid the pitfalls of theoretical abstraction which many post-modern scholars are tempted to in their own thought and praxis They are also post-modern prophets in that neither Gandhi and King separated their politics, especially their radical politics, from their religious grounding Ahimsa and Satya as the Anchor of Gandhi's Anticipation Gandhi's anticipatory vision of the Indian nation to come, freed from the fetters of British empire, was of a nation deeply disciplined and moored in values which are distinctly different from the Modi-led vision of the India in our times, a India which not only continuously Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), 10 threatens the life of those at the rancid bottom of the artificial social pyramid of caste, but which also threatens the organic material reality of our Mother Earth with its devotion to the dam-and-development model of the turbo-capitalist ideal Again, in contrast to Modi, Gandhi's understanding of Hinduism, by and large, was a critique and a corrective to the expansion of the capitalist modus operandi in India We will return shortly to the radical anti-imperialist, anti-turbo-capitalist elements of Gandhi's anticipatory vision, but first let us explore the foundations of Gandhi's anticipation through the fundamental anchor of ahimsa, or nonviolence, and satya, or truth, both values to be found wanting in the contemporary Indian nation Gandhi's anticipatory vision, rooted in ahimsa, represents both the existential and the political attempt at nonviolence as a foundational liberatory praxis which attempts to overcome the reality of oppression, both internally (existentially) and politically (externally) Even if the praxis of ahimsa can never be perfect or ideal, it is nevertheless, for Gandhi, a methodology which can penetrate the presence of oppression in such a way as to bring forth, in both the body and spirit of the oppressed and also the oppressor, that which can confront transcend the very reality of oppression In his conversation with Benjamin Mays, as related by Sudarshan Kapur, Gandhi responded to Mays' doubts about the collective potential of ahimsa for mass social change by asserting that “non-violence cannot be preached It has to be practiced Non-violence, when it becomes active, travels with extraordinary velocity, and then it becomes a miracle the mass mind is affected first unconsciously, then consciously When it becomes consciously affected there is demonstrable victory I would say that a minority can much more in the way of non-violence than a majority.” In intimate connection with ahimsa at the foundation of Gandhi's anticipatory vision and praxis is his deep devotion to satya Gandhi's experimentation with the nature and substance Sudarshan Kapur, Raising Up a Prophet: The African-American Encounter With Gandhi (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 95 of truth was the engine of his anticipation Satya was not simply one thing cast in eternal stone for Gandhi, but instead a kind of flowing river the practitioner always rode upon, discovering new vistas and realizations that could further inform or even deconstruct previous understandings and experiences of truth Relative and absolute ideas of truth constantly pulled upon each other in a complex tension Satya in Gandhi's vision of anticipation was always based on being an exemplar of such truth, of having a performative nature with such truth that was deeply rooted in the pragmatic, even sometimes at the expense of the consistently theoretical Gandhi insisted that “for those who say God is love, God is love But deep down in me I say God may be love, but God is Truth If it is possible for the human tongue to give the fullest description of God, for myself I have come to the conclusion that God is Truth But two years ago I went a step further and said Truth is God You will see the fine distinction between the two statements: God is Truth and Truth is God.” For Gandhi satya is the “what” of being, which as John Thatamanil mentioned in our course discussions, has parallels to the concept of the ground of being as presented by Paul Tillich Satya is both a fluid foundation behind epistemelogical knowledge and ontological knowledge, and the relation between Satya can also be understood as being related to the Hindu concept of cit, or the light of consciousness which illuminates reality in whatever context we may be in Critically for Gandhi satya is tied to the practice of tapas, or austerity and self-restraint This mood of restraint is deeply sacrificial to the very core of one's being, “for the quest of Truth involves tapascharya, self-suffering, sometimes even unto death There can be no place in it for even a trace of self-interest In such selfless search for Truth, nobody can lose his bearings for long Therefore the pursuit of Truth is true bhakti, or devotion Such bhakti is 'a bargain in which one risks one's very life.' It is the path that leads to God It is the talisman by Raghavan Iyer, The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi Vols I-III (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 165 which death itself becomes the portal to life eternal.” The non-violent resister who embodies Gandhi's vision and praxis of anticipation can only truly participate in the ongoing fluid discovery of satya, according to Gandhi, by the purification of the mind, citta-suddhi, which is linked to the disciplined purification of the body Gandhi's insistence on tapas raises two challenging and necessary points in relation to our own contemporary vision and anticipation First, if we live in a civilizational space which is ultimately not life-giving and sustainable, whether in relation to black bodies, Dalit bodies, or the body of the Earth, what must we sacrifice in order to transcend what is death-dealing and unsustainable? What must we sacrifice in order to anticipate something different than a society stratified into “haves and have-nots, divided between those whose wealth offers them a not insignificant measure of protection from ferocious weather, and those left to the mercy of increasingly dysfunctional states?”10 Especially as economically privileged peoples we must learn to locate in our lives those “unnecessary necessities” which must be sacrificed so that those who genuinely need can genuinely receive This requires overcoming our aversion to humility, an aversion programmed into us by the over-competitive fabric of turbo-capitalist mores, in order to become liberated from our existentially and ecologically harmful compulsions and habits Gandhi teaches that “the true connotation of humility is selfeffacement Self-effacement is moksha (salvation) If the acts of an aspirant after moksha have no humility or selflessness about them, there is no longing for moksha or service Service without humility is selfishness and egotism.” 11 Yet the call towards self-suffering and the wholesale giving up of self-interest by Gandhi can ring hollow to those at the opposite end of privilege, who have already given up so much, to the point and often beyond of survival, and whose physical and metaphysical Ibid., 163 10 Klein, 52 11 Mohandas K Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 396 spaces needed to be uplifted in abundance rather than denied in austerity Tapas is not the universal talisman Gandhi claims it is, and we are made uncomfortable by the egoistic undertones of this assertion from Gandhi himself The socially and economically privileged cannot insist or command those without this privilege also be humble and selfless This kind of assertion is patronizing in an entirely self-defeating manner and it does not honor the organic transvalued power of the humility and selflessness already inherent amongst peoples who are oppressed, nor does it allow us to hear and learn from them how we can be humble and selfless in our own lives There are few things more urgently important as we shape and form our own contemporary vision and praxis of anticipation than learning what we must appropriately sacrifice and how to make that sacrifice Swaraj and Satyagraha as Structure and Method of Gandhi's Anticipation Swaraj, or self-rule, forged in the foundation of satya, is the structure of the Gandhian anticipatory community, Satyagraha, truth-force or soul-force, forged in the foundation of ahimsa, is the methodology behind the vision and praxis of anticipation in the Gandhian anticipatory community For Gandhi, swaraj is “when we learn to rule ourselves It is, therefore, in the palm of our hands Do not consider this swaraj to be like a dream There is no idea of sitting still The swaraj that I wish to picture is such that, after we have once realized it, we shall endeavour to the end of our life-time to persuade others to likewise But such swaraj has to be experienced, by each one for himself One drowning man will never save another Slaves ourselves, it would be a mere pretension to think of freeing others.” 12 We find in the anticipatory community shaped by Gandhian vision and praxis a clearly determined intersection between the personal and the collective The functional progressive momentum of the external community is determined by the fabric of the consciousness and character of 12 Judith Brown ed Mahatma Gandhi: Essential Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 142 The Beloved Community as Anticipatory Community King's own comprehensive program for the beloved community focused on five fundamental elements: nonviolence and racial harmony and reconciliation, which we have discussed above, the reclamation of the God-given and human-given right of agency, economic fairness and equity for all people, and most prominently later in his ministry, a strident anti-materialism and anti-imperialism King's focus on the reclamation of the Godgiven and human-given right of agency for black people in America emanated from his ability to see through the hypocrisy of a nation founded on distinct liberative values which had failed, in the most obscene ways, to live by those values King understood the democratic values of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to be a promise rather than a deception The redemption of the American experiment would come, King insisted, when the foundational values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were freely available for all people to choose To reclaim their right to agency given freely by God and promised by the foundational documents of the nation, the grassroots people of the civil rights movement needed to demonstrate what that agency looked like in action King proclaimed that “one day the South will recognize its real heroes They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: 'My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.' One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”48 The beloved community was and is the space where the water of the great wells of democracy are always available and always being dug deeper by the community's inhabitants The right to the ballot was also an essential element of the reclamation of agency for the community, especially in the South where a black reclamation of the electoral and political levers was imperative as these levers were stripped from them after the initial hopeful burst of Reconstruction, instead morphing into a widespread pattern of disenfranchisement enforced the ghastly ropes of the lynch mob The right to vote was the first and fundamental civil right that King was concerned with, and without this right the actual formation of the beloved community had no hope of taking root in any kind of sustainable way The viciousness of the response against the enfranchisement of the black community in the South showed that the adversaries of the civil rights movement understood the power of the ballot The power of the ballot not only insured the upliftment of the black community within the beloved community, but the upliftment of all those on the margins King understand the connection between these contexts when he wrote in 1965 that “when the full power of the ballot is available to my people, it will not be exercised merely to advance our cause alone We have learned in the course of our freedom struggle that the needs of twenty million Negroes are not truly separable from those of the nearly two hundred million whites and Negroes in America Our vote would place in Congress true representatives of the people who would legislate for the Medicare, housing, schools, and jobs required by men of all color.” 49 The reclamation of agency leads to the third fundamental element of the beloved community, economic fairness and equity for all peoples The beloved community was and is the space where the right to labor was held sacred, where the rapacities of those who own 48 Martin Luther King, Jr, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, The Radical King, 144 49 Martin Luther King, Jr, “Civil Right No 1: The Right to Vote”, A Testament of Hope, 183 the levers of production are held in check by the power and influence of those who wield the levers of production, ensuring that the products of such production are used for the benefit of the community as a whole King understood and fervently endorsed the connection between the civil rights struggle and the struggle of the labor movement, as he said “to find a great design to solve a grave problem labor will have to intervene in the political life of the nation to chart a course which distributes the abundance to all instead of concentrating it among a few The strength to carry through such a program requires that labor know its friends labor has no firmer friend than the twenty million Negroes whose lives will be deeply affected by the new patterns of production.”50 In broadening the scope of his concern and inspiration to the poor people of America and of the world, King was a prophetic anticipator of the unsustainability of the capitalist economic model, and also of the ethical void inherent in capitalism itself, as well as the effect of the capitalist system of production upon the elements of the earth He insisted that “one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring It means that questions must be raised 'Who owns the oil?' 'Who owns the iron ore?' 'Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that's two-thirds water?'51 There are questions that must be asked.”52 By 1966, King was openly endorsing the possibility and need for America to move in the direction of democratic socialism in order to insure economic fairness and equity for all people At this time, in the cauldron of the economic department of the University of Chicago, the acolytes of Milton Friedman were forming the alchemy of capitalism's most disturbing incarnation, the neo-liberal, free-market model which was already beginning to overpower people-powered and people-centered progressive social movements in South America, and which would become within the next few decades the dominant global economic model, 50 Martin Luther King Jr, “If the Negro Wins, Labor Wins”, A Testament of Hope, 204 51 For a contemporary example of this question, see the report “Water War: Dry in Detroit” by VICE News, August 19, 2014, https://news.vice.com/video/water-war-dry-in-detroit 52 Martin Luther King, Jr, “Where Do We Go From Here”, A Testament of Hope, 250 leading to proclamations of “the end of history” after the fall of the Soviet Union King sought a synthesis of economy beyond the degrading and dehumanizing elements of capitalism and communism In 1968, he envisioned a Poor People's Campaign which would touch and raise the nation's conscience towards the impoverished in the same way the March on Washington had touched and raised the nation's conscience towards the black community earlier in the decade King understood that there was no place in the beloved community for anyone to be economically impoverished He anticipated communal spaces where everyone's economic dignity would be honored to the utmost, and in the true spirit of anticipation, he attempted to actively create these spaces of economic dignity in the present day This insistence upon economic fairness and equity for all, in combination with his increasingly anti-militarism, which we will touch upon shortly, made King more of a threat than he had ever beento the wielders of hegemony Obery Hendricks comments that “the indictments King offered of capitalism and the class inequality that bedeviled American society during his travels were considered extremely inflammatory by members of the power elite He made it clear that what he advocated was a revolutionary movement and revolutionary action that would 'raise certain basic questions about the whole society [T]his means a revolution of values' that for him went beyond issues of race To King that meant, as he said more than once, that 'the whole structure of American life must be changed.' He indicated that he was even willing to engage in 'nonviolent sabotage' to shut down the nation's capital so the needs of the poor would get the full attention of those who held the purse strings and the reins of power '[O]ur struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality,' he proclaimed The class nature of the campaign's aspirations was potentially the greatest internal threat to America's capitalist order the nation had ever seen.”53 Combined with his increasingly public anti-militarism and anti-imperialism, King had 53 Obery M Hendricks, Jr., “Why Martin Luther King Had to Die”, Huffington Post, published April 4, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/obery-m-hendricks-jr-phd/why-martin-luther-king-ha_b_5087253.html become “most significant and effective organic intellectual in the latter half of the twentieth century whose fundamental motif was radical love.”54 King saw the war in Vietnam as the very battle for the soul and image of America At the very moment in which his faith in the American Dream was being most tested, he continued to frame his struggle in the language and in the hope of the redemption and realization of this dream King was by no means a traditional American exceptionalist, but the grounding of his faith in Christ and the grounding of his faith in the radical democratic values of the Constitution never led him to the outskirts of separatism and black nationalism, even as he became more sympathetic to these valuesystems in his radical evolution The King who said, in response to the escalation in Vietnam, that “I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism”55 is the radical King The beloved community of the radical King is simply not a post-card one can purchase at his monument, nor is it simply a neat concept to be tucked away in detached historiographical, sociological, or theological examination of King's legacy His legacy is not to be left in some magically reconciled past to be used for shallow and ignorant attempts at reconciliation in our present day The beloved community is a space where we participate in the active anticipation of a world beyond the hypocrisy of un-sustainable ways, means, and beliefs we dare to call life-giving, when actually they are death-dealing King confronted this death-dealing visage, confronted the ever-present specter of his own death, and from the ground of his faith, he refused to compromise his sacred calling We truly understand the anticipatory vision and praxis of King when we understand how his anticipation was so dangerous to the definers of the status-quo that he paid for it with his life 54 West, “The Radical King We Don't Know”, location 177 55 King, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”, The Radical King, 211 The Grassroots Critique of King's Vision and Praxis of Anticipation In engaging with the voices and vision of those critical to King, both in the context of his anticipation in his own time and in the context of our own time, we must be again be careful not to paint with too broad a stroke The critique of King must engage with the process of his anticipation James Cone, in explaining King's relation to Malcolm X, the person often considered to be the polar opposite to King, insisted that to understand King and Malcolm properly, we must not see them as opponents but as two liberation fighters who were coming closer together before their untimely ends Nevertheless, whilst acknowledging that there is also a certain shallow comfort in criticizing King as a figure who was too quick to compromise with the political establishment of white supremacy, there are voices on the radical spectrum whose critiques of King are important to acknowledge and unpack if we are to understand more honestly the radical King and the his anticipatory vision and praxis Let us take a brief survey of some of these critical voices in order to question, and perhaps even fill in, some of the gaps in King's anticipation King was a devotee of the American Dream, and his devotion to this dream did not actually disintegrate even as began to deepen his confrontation with the power structure of the American nation Malcolm X, and the Black Power movement which was his legacy, believed that America, as a concept and as a reality, was bankrupt and not worthy of redemption Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was not to be found in a document written by slaveholders, but in the ground of black being, in the rhythm of black existence For Malcolm and those that followed him in his vision, freedom was not mystically embedded in the original ground of America Instead America itself was an obstacle to this freedom, the root source of the murderer, the raper, and the lyncher of the black body For Malcolm this condemnation of America was also a condemnation of the hypocrisy of Christianity itself In 1960 in Boston, Malcolm said that “where ever you find dark people or non-white people today trying to get freedom, they are trying to get freedom from the people who represent themselves as Christians; and if you go to them and ask their their picture of a Christian, they'll tell you 'an exploiter, a slavemaster.' In America the definition would be one who promises you equal rights for a hundred years and never gives it to you.” 56 Malcolm represented the clarity of vision of someone who has seen American history, and the Christian hypocrisy embedded within, for what it truly was and is The grotesqueness of the reality of this history convinced Malcolm that there was no way the original democratic values of the Constitution and Bill of Rights could transcend the historical record and the contemporary reality These values were forever compromised by the racist and genocidal legacy of white supremacy over black people Malcolm “could not resist exposing what he regarded as the sheer stupidity of black, middle-class leaders talking about America as if it is 'our country.'”57 Malcolm added that “being born in America doesn't make you an American if birth made you an American, you wouldn't need any legislation, you wouldn't need any legislation, you wouldn't be faced with civil-rights filibustering in Washington, DC right now.” 58 Like a Dalit person born into a Hindu society, yet not being given any of the so-called benefits of being part of the Hindu society, Malcolm and his radical compatriots saw black people at the bottom of the pyramid of an American caste system which, despite the lofty words of the founders, was never meant to include them If we examine American history through the lenses of the experience of Native Americans, especially the book American Holocaust by Davis Stannard, and the autobiography of Malcolm X along with the work of James Baldwin, and also The Shock 56 Malcolm X, speech given May 24, 1960 at Boston University, from Democrat and Chronicle published January 29, 1963, 15 57 James H Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 198 58 Malcolm X, “Ballot or Bullet”, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements ed by George Breitman (New York: Grove Press, 1994) Doctrine by Naomi Klein, who expertly unpacked the imperial menace of neo-liberal freemarket economics which emanated from the American academy, it is hard to have faith in the concept of America and the so-called hope of the American Dream I say this knowing that my own lack of faith in America is wrapped up in numerous complex layers of hypocrisy and privilege which I benefit from as someone born white in America Yet my spiritual grounding compels me to doubt this dream and to work for something more, and I am not sure this something more could or should be called the realization of the American Dream In this I, and many others, sit uneasily with King, and we wonder how the radical King may have evolved in his understanding and attachment to the American Dream if he had not been killed Indeed, as the civil rights movement morphed into the Black Power movement in the late 1960s, a new insistence on black people, especially black people stuck in the ghettos of American cities, brutally overseen by the police, as colonized people within the American nation began to arise The Black Panthers, and their philosophy as articulated by Huey Newton, formed their own anticipatory vision, and through the Ten-Point Program, attempted to create their own anticipatory community The Panthers “graphically introduced the public to a new vision of black politics Like the leaders of the earlier Civil Rights Movement, the Panthers continued to focus on black liberation Yet, rather than appeal for a fair share of the American pie, the Panthers portrayed the black community as a colony within America and the police as an “army of occupation” from which blacks sought liberation In their view, the racist power structure was the common enemy of all those engaged in freedom struggles.” 59 In order to respond to this situation of colonization, the Panthers insisted, somewhat ironically, on their constitutional right to self-defense If the police could kill with impunity in black communities, then the Panthers felt that black people has no other realistic option than arming themselves to protect themselves Turning the other cheek would simply mean being 59 Joshua Bloom and Waldo E Martin, Jr, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2013), 61 shot in that cheek by a racist policeman The arming of the black community, as Newton understood, would create a kind of martial power which would give substance to their political power Newton argued that “when black people send a representative , he is somewhat absurd because he represents no political power He does not represent land power because we not own any land He does not represent economic or industrial power because black people not own the means of production The only way he can become political is to represent what is commonly called a military power— which the Black Panther Party for SelfDefense calls Self-Defense Power Black People can develop Self-Defense Power by arming themselves from house to house, block to block, community to community, throughout the nation.”60 King was criticized, and he himself accepted such criticism, that his message was better suited to anticipate and create the liberation of black people in the more rural contexts of the American South rather than the urbanized ghetto spaces of the American city Yet King would never compromise his vision of nonviolence despite the acceptance of this criticism For King, the gun was not an insurer of manhood and courage, but a tool of fear King said that he knew “that I was much more afraid in Montgomery when I had a gun in my house When I decided that, as a teacher of the philosophy of nonviolence, I couldn't keep a gun, I came face to face with the question of death and I dealt with it And from that point on, I no longer needed a gun nor have I been afraid Ultimately, one's sense of manhood must come from within.”61 While this is a genuine and admirable realization of King's, for a person or a family in much more impoverished circumstances that his own, struggling to maintain not only their dignity but the very fact of life on an everyday basis, King's sure faith in his somewhat condescending insistence on non-violence can ring very hollow and very unrealistically In the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore today, as well as in Dalit communities in India 60 Huey P Newton, “The Functional Definition of Politics,” Black Panther, published May 15, 1967, 61 Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Testament of Hope”, A Testament of Hope, 323 facing up to and resisting the still ever-present threat of lynching, we find that the antagonism between King's message of nonviolence and Malcolm and the Panthers' message of selfdefense still exists to the highest degree Even as we unearth the radical King who so clearly and eloquently revealed and proclaimed resistance against the massive global forces of hegemony grounded in white supremacy, turbo-capitalism, and the lyncher's gun and rope, there is still an incredibly visceral doubt that non-violent civil-disobedience is the best method to overcome the awesome power of this hegemony We can appreciate how far King's version of satyagraha anticipated and created a more racially equitable reality for black people in America We can also question and even doubt how effective satyagraha can be in our own task of anticipation, as we aspire and struggle to progress even farther beyond what King helped to lay out for us It is a frightening task, when we consider that the global hegemony of turbo-capitalism is literally invested in the destruction of the planet The last time in human history that a similar economic hegemony was in place, which was the empire of slavery in the American South, a horrific civil war was needed to remove such hegemony 62 Do we require the same? We can continue by acknowledging, through the example of the Black Lives Matter movement, that revolutionary anticipatory change is not just possible in the 21 st Century but is happening everyday This change is the upwelling of people reclaiming their physical, psychological, and spiritual spaces This change is also a movement in which women, such as Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi63, and Thenmozhi Soundararajan64, are taking on a leading role, transgressing and transcending the male supremacy and misogyny King and Malcolm and the Panthers were never able to properly confront, address, and overcome 62 Christopher Hayes, “The New Abolitionism”, The Nation, published April 22, 2014, http://www.thenation.com/article/179461/new-abolitionism?page=full 63 Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement”, The Feminist Wire, published October 7, 2014, http://thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/ 64 “About”, Dalit Nation!, http://dalitnation.com/about-3/ The anticipators of today resonate with Ella Baker, who “did not support a 'leader-centered' approach to organizing a movement, and felt no special awe for King.” 65 The method inspired in part by Baker is participatory democracy, which calls for grass-roots direct action with a minimum of top-down bureaucracy or hierarchy This participatory democracy is “consistent with limiting the personal ego and being able to organize a group of people and help them develop their leadership capacity The real value of local community leadership is that it strengthens faith in people that are seen daily, the barber, the teacher, the garbage collector; the elders; everyday people This psychological reinforcement, when multiplied throughout the community creates an increased sense of trust.”66 Baker adds “The major job was getting people to understand that they had something within their power that they could use, and it could only be used if they understood what was happening and how group action could counter violence even when it was perpetuated by the police or, in some instances, the state.”67 The beloved community as anticipatory community is now in the hands of those of us who understand more clearly the radical King and understand more clearly how much more radical we have to be, if to be radical is to activate within us, in the different contexts of our lives and beings, that which allows us to overcome the death-dealing hegemony which permeates our bodies and our communities Conclusion I must admit at the end of our course together and at the end of this essay that a suspicion I have been harboring for the last few weeks has been confirmed This is the feeling that as a Hindu, I am actually more inspired by King than I am by Gandhi This is a kind of 65 David J Garrow, Bearing The Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: HarperCollins, 1986), 141 66 K Tutashinda, “The Grassroots Political Philosophy of Ella Baker: Oakland, California Applicability”, The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.3, no.9, June-July 2010, 27, http://www.jpanafrican.com/docs/vol3no9/3.9GrassrootsPolitical.pdf 67 Ibid., echo of King's own assertion that Gandhi represented, in his vision and praxis, a distinct ideal realization of the ministry and mission of Jesus, and the meaning of Christianity There are two reasons for this realization First is that my adherence to the aspect of Hinduism which encourages radical pluralism, a kind of global permeation between different cultures which is the antidote to the homogenization of free-market globalization Radical pluralism requires that one's localized struggles against hegemony and oppression must be connected to the planetary struggle against the nearly all-consuming menace of turbo-capitalism In this aspect of his anticipation, King was more progressively realized and expressive than Gandhi This is not a critique of Gandhi's anti-imperialist chops per se, but just that King was developed in this regard, especially in relevance to our contemporary situation, and thus he better represents what I feel is the sacred responsibility of the contemporary Hindu to this radical pluralism which is against any kind of cultural or economic hegemony Secondly, and more importantly, King was much more advanced than Gandhi was against the very idea that society should be arranged in any kind of vertical hierarchy Gandhi's contradictions in relation to his assertions against untouchability alongside his adherence to the social structures which create caste oppression are less intensely and essentially found in King's own anticipation King was certainly not a model of a warrior for gender equity, but one of the primary motivations of his anticipation was to socially, economically, and culturally level the playing field so that all people may exercise their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness Is it unfair for me to hold King over Gandhi in this way because King was American and therefore had no real understanding or attachment to the caste system as practiced in India? One can certainly make this argument, but again, as someone who is trying to understand what it means to be a progressive Hindu in the 21 st Century, who understands that to be a progressive Hindu means to be radically anti-caste and radically against any kind of hegemonic hierarchy, King's example is more inspirational on a pragmatic and spiritual level than Gandhi King better represents the heart of the spiritual culture of India which is radically against caste than Gandhi ever actually was Perhaps this is a case of one being more likely to criticize those who live in our house than those who are guests in our house The theological branch of the Hindu tree which I adhere too is not one in which Gandhi sits on too comfortably in either a systematic or pragmatic way There is a certain baggage I have to deal with in encountering Gandhi that I don't have with King, especially as an American who was raised to understand King as a great historical saint In encountering the radical King, my understanding and devotion to his example of anticipation only goes But this is also the same, if less intensely, with Gandhi This course has convinced me that Gandhi and King indeed are great allies for our contemporary anticipation, and has given me the tools to understand these personalities in a much more thorough and honest way As we walk forward, with great uncertainty and courage in our own anticipation, we can walk in the footsteps of these personalities, knowing that what they have laid out for us, imperfect as it is, is a path to be honored and held sacred Bibliography -Ambedkar, B.R Annihilation of Caste London: Verso, 2014 -Baldwin, Lewis V., and Paul R Dekar, eds In An Inescapable Network Of Mutuality: Martin Luther King, Jr and the Globalization of an Ethical Ideal Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013 -Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo E Martin, Jr Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013 -Cone, James H Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1991 -Gandhi, Mohandas K An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth Boston: Beacon Press, 1957 -Mahatma Gandhi: Essential Writings Edited by Judith M Brown New ed Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 -The Essential Writings of Mahatma Gandhi Edited by Raghavan Iyer Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993 -Garrow, David J Bearing The Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference New York: HarperCollins, 1986 -Gutierrez, Gustavo A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1988 -Kapur, Sudarshan Raising up a Prophet: The African-American Encounter with Gandhi Boston: Beacon Press, 1992 -King, Jr., Martin Luther A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr Edited by James Melvin Washington San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986 -The Radical King Edited by Cornel West Boston: Beacon Press, 2015 -Klein, Naomi This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014 -Prime, Ranchor Vedic Ecology: Practical Wisdom For Surviving The 21st Century San Francisco, Calif.: Mandala, 2002 -Rambachan, Anantanand A Hindu Theology of Liberation: Not-Two is Not One Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2015 -Rasmussen, Larry L Earth-honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key New York: Oxford University Press, 2013 -Tolstoy, Leo The Kingdom of God Is Within You (public domain) -Wilfred, Felix Dalit Empowerment 2nd ed Delhi: Cambridge Press, 2007 -X, Malcolm Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements Edited by George Breitman New York: Grove Press, 1994