Jamaal Bowman Is Just the Politician This Moment Needs

By Ryan Bort, Rolling Stone

25 June 20

The former middle-school principal built a campaign around the Black Lives Matter movement. Now he’s heading to Congress

enderson Clarke wasn’t sold on Jamaal Bowman.

“Don’t vote for no politician that’s not coming into your neighborhood and getting their hands dirty,” he said Friday, speaking to dozens of demonstrators who had marched on the evening of Juneteenth from Lincoln Park in New Rochelle, New York, to the front of his brother’s home a few blocks away. Exactly two weeks earlier, his brother, Kamal Flowers, was killed by New Rochelle police. Vigil candles were arranged in front of the wall behind Clarke as he spoke, along with balloons, ribbons, and poster boards with pictures of Flowers. “WE LOVE YOU,” was written on the wall above them. “KAMAL LIFE MATTERS.”

“If they’re not interacting with you, keep your vote,” Clarke continued. “I see the Mr. Bowman signs. He had a representative out here. I politely told his representative: ‘Until that man shows up right here he cannot get this vote.’”

Bowman would be speaking in Lincoln Park later that evening. But Clarke was here, now, pleading with the diverse group of demonstrators to engage with New Rochelle’s black population, pleading for educational centers, pleading for cops who understood the community, pleading for real, concrete justice — not chants, not marches, not glossy mailers featuring slick politicians promising change. “These rallies, I love ‘em,” Clarke said. “Don’t mean nothing.”

Jamaal Bowman’s challenge is to make all this mean something.

On Tuesday, the 44-year-old former middle-school principal toppled longtime Democratic stalwart Eliot Engel in the party’s primary for New York’s 16th District. Engel was seeking a 17th term in office, having represented the district — a diverse swath of the Bronx and suburban New York that includes New Rochelle — since 1989. Bowman, who had never run for political office before entering the race last June, appears to have won by more than 25 points.

“Our movement is designed to restore that faith, to restore that hope, to bring back the belief in what is possible, to root our values in everything we do,” he told supporters after sealing the victory. Bowman was buoyed by a platform built around racial justice and community engagement. As the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum this spring, so did Bowman’s campaign. Now, he’s tasked with using his and the movement’s values to bring about real, systemic change.

He firmly believes this is possible, but as he explained to me earlier on Friday following a press conference in Co-Op City, in the Bronx, it’s going to take “full participation,” both from the community and every level of government, right down to the school boards. “I feel this time it’s different,” Bowman told me of the potential for change following the demonstrations. “I also understand people from the African-American community who don’t have that same amount of faith because we’ve been bamboozled and hoodwinked throughout this nation’s history.”

The nation’s relentless oppression of people of color, exacerbated generation after generation by the hollow promises of the American Dream and the politicians who peddle it, are why many are skeptical as they plead for the kind of engagement Bowman has preached. “They have all these rallies. Everybody wants justice, everybody wants peace, but nobody ever interacts,” Clarke said in front of Flowers’s home. “The only way you’re going to know about this side of town, is to interact with this side of town.”

Clarke and demonstrators across America have made clear that this time has to be different. Too many people of color have died. Too many people of color continue to die. If politicians want to consider themselves a part of this movement, their role is to advance major reform by, to borrow a phrase, any means necessary.

But in the House of Representatives, Bowman — who will almost certainly win this November in the heavily Democratic district — will be attempting to make changes in a federal government ruled by a party in the thrall of a racist authoritarian. Even the leadership of Bowman’s own Democratic party is hesitant to embrace the full vision of police reform articulated by the Black Lives Matter movement. So if Bowman and progressives like him want to enact the agenda they’re talking about, from defunding the police to universal health care, they have to prove to people like Clarke that they’re worth the investment. As Bowman notes with his focus on “full participation,” reforming the current system is only possible with the engagement of people who’ve been systematically excluded — people who now need to be convinced that there’s a reason to come back in.

Raised by a single mother in a Manhattan housing project, Bowman was a public school educator for the past 20 years, the last 11 of which were spent as the founding principal of the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action in the Bronx. The school is renowned for its “radical care” ethos, and Bowman has long preached restorative rather than punitive justice, as well as a holistic approach to education based on love, understanding, and empathy.

“I deeply love the students that I serve,” Bowman told me in Co-Op City. “I tried to do anything in my power to give them additional resources and support so they could do well in school and beyond. I talk about the politics of love over the politics of fear. … Fear is rooted in institutional racism. It’s this fear of what’s different, fear of the unknown, and looking at something that’s different as deficient. It doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t have to be a zero sum game. We can have a political system that works for the people and allows for the economy to thrive. It doesn’t have to be either.”

Bowman was tapped to run against Engel by Justice Democrats, the same organization that recruited Ocasio-Cortez to unseat longtime 14th-District representative Joe Crowley in 2018. Like Ocasio-Cortez and other Justice Democrats including Reps. Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Bowman is a progressive through and through, supporting Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and overhauling the criminal justice system. He has sworn off corporate PAC money, and throughout the campaign hammered Engel for his relationship with Wall Street, which he had sought to deregulate. Engel’s endorsements came from Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and other establishment Democrats. Progressive icons like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Elizabeth Warren — as well as the New York Times — all lined up behind Bowman.

As the campaign heated up, Bowman also attacked Engel for being out of touch with the district, particularly as it was ravaged by the coronavirus. Engel spent most of the spring in Maryland. His campaign reasoned that though he may not have been in New York as COVID spread, he was on the “legislative front lines,” helping to bring in relief for New York hospitals. “He did miss a couple of photo opportunities,” the campaign wrote in an email prior to the election. “But of course, he’s well known in this district for showing up. Unlike Mr. Bowman, who just became a Democrat in 2018 when he decided to run for office.

Bowman argued Engel also fell short as police brutality demonstrations swept the city, particularly earlier this month when Engel was caught on a hot mic saying he “wouldn’t care” about speaking at a demonstration if he “didn’t have a primary.” (Engel later said in a statement that he hadn’t wanted to “impose” on the borough president who was asking him to speak.) But to Bowman and to the community who voted for him, being on the ground for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations was not only not optional, it was essential, and his win can be credited largely to his recognition of this fact. Not only was Bowman present for the demonstrations, he has advocated for a new Reconstruction that would include the formation of a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission “to investigate, document, and assess the federal government’s role in America’s history of racism.” Before the killing of George Floyd sparked a nationwide reckoning over police violence, Bowman wrote an op-ed for NBC News in March describing multiple occasions in which he was racially profiled and arrested. He went on to decry former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg for stocking schools in communities of color with police and metal detectors, effectively criminalizing the students.

It’s through two decades working in the education system that the collective struggles of his presumptive constituents were laid bare. “I’ve been a middle school principal in the district for 10 years,” he told me in Co-Op City. “I’ve seen the problems first hand. I’ve had families lose their home. I’ve had children lose their parents to gun violence. I’ve had children suffering from mental illness. The impact of poverty on our kids and their learning. That’s something I’ve understood pretty intimately throughout my career as an educator.”

Bowman’s values are in lock-step with those of prominent Democratic socialists like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, but it speaks to his singular, almost apolitical concern for the community that he doesn’t go out of his way to brand himself as such. It seems like something that has barely even occurred to him. When he’s been asked if he’d describe himself as a socialist in interviews, his response is usually laughter followed by some sort of verbal shrug. When I asked him in the Bronx how he would have responded a year ago if someone told him he’d be taking calls with Bernie Sanders and nabbing a video endorsement from Elizabeth Warren, he acknowledged how surreal it’s been, but quickly demurred.

“I would have told whoever told me that to stay focused,” he said. “This is my first time running for office. I can’t compare it to anything else, even though I often compare it to when I opened up my school. In that context, you have to take things one day at a time and use every day to be better than your last day. Constant learning, constant growth, constant improvement. Surround yourself with amazing people and just see where it goes. For it to be where it is right now is humbling, it’s exciting, and we’re right on the doorstep to something — something huge.”

After Henderson Clarke spoke in front of his slain brother’s home, the demonstrators in New Rochelle marched back to the park, chanting for Governor Cuomo to get the state’s attorney general to open an independent investigation into the circumstances of Flowers’s death. According to the police, Flowers fled the scene after a car he was in was pulled over. The police said Flowers pulled a gun when an officer — later identified as Alec McKenna — attempted to tase him. McKenna fired six shots, one of which struck Flowers fatally. Flowers’s family, and the New Rochelle NAACP, are skeptical, and want answers. Flowers was only 24 years old. His daughter is 6.

A lineup of speakers was scheduled to address the crowd in the park, after which food was to be served. It was a warm, idyllic summer evening. Kids chased each other around the perimeter of the basketball courts, the rims still removed to prevent social crowding in what was once a hot spot for the coronavirus. Bowman wasn’t present for the march, but he would speak last in the park, and as he waited he stood talking with residents, his jacket off, wearing a mask with the Wu-Tang Clan symbol and “Bring Da Ruckus” written across it. Most of the crowd present supported his candidacy.

“I like his platform,” Donna Harris-West, a 59-year-old who has lived in New Rochelle nearly her entire life, told me. “If we don’t educate the children, what kind of future do we have? This young generation out here, that’s my future. When I get older, I want to know that we have people in Congress worried about our health care. Right now they don’t care. It’s too many old white men who need to go. I’m sick and tired of the same old mess. The Democrats are taking this vote for granted, and I’m hoping Jamaal gets in there and makes some serious change.”

As speakers took the microphone to address the crowd, Clarke made his way over to Bowman. The two spoke for several minutes, each taking turns gesturing to emphasize their points. The conversation ended with a handshake and a half hug before Clarke returned to the other side of the basketball court. After a rousing speech by Andom Ghebreghiorgis, a special education teacher who was running against Engel before dropping out and endorsing Bowman, the incumbent’s remaining challenger grabbed the microphone.

Bowman took the opportunity to dig deep into America’s history of systemic racism: the original sin of slavery, how emancipation is not freedom, how as a black man in America he’s never felt comfortable in his own skin, and how Henderson Clarke told him minutes earlier that his dead brother’s 6-year-old daughter still asks him when daddy is going to wake up.

He concluded with a plea for people to come out and vote. “This is not to send me to Congress alone to make laws and pass policy,” he said. “This is about all of us going to Congress together and doing everything in our power to turn this country upside down, until black lives truly matter and until we deal with the issue of institutional racism once and for all.”

The crowd cheered. Ghebreghiorgis came up and gave him props. As the foil was removed from the trays of food and people lined up to eat, Bowman returned to his previous spot on the basketball court. I asked him about his conversation with Clarke. “He represents a community that has been ignored for far too long by elected officials,” Bowman said, his glasses still foggy from the speech he’d just delivered. “There’s a lack of trust and a lack of faith in a system that has disenfranchised them and marginalized them. He was asking me where are the resources for our community? Why don’t elected officials ever come around here. New developments are going up, but where are the resources for us? It’s a sense of anger and rage and frustration and feeling neglected by the government that’s supposed to serve him.”

Clarke told me over the phone on Wednesday that he voted for Bowman. He said he appreciated the candidate coming up to New Rochelle, but he also said that talk is cheap. “We have no facilities. They shut down our parks. We have no playgrounds. They shut down our boys’ club. That was the only thing we had in our neighborhood and they took that from us. We wake up and go to the store and we see 10 or 11 police concentrated in our area. It has us feeling like we’re targeted. Nobody’s trying to help. I told Mr. Bowman, if you want our vote, you have to help. I’m not going to feel comfortable just because you’re from the Bronx and talking to me with your urban dialogue. That don’t mean nothing. We’re frustrated. We’re not compromising with politicians who just talk the talk but don’t get their hands dirty.”

Bowman understands Clarke’s skepticism. “Once you run for office you’re now a politician,” he told me on the basketball court. “The attitude is like, ‘Fuck politicians,” and I get that. I was on the other side before. That’s why I’m running. I’m running because I’m the kind of person who can listen to him, absorb him, love him, and say that I come from the same place, man. … Everybody has a story. That story bridges the gap between culture and religion and even class. But you have to be a listener and a learner and you have to have empathy. You have to approach every relationship with empathy first. We work for the people. We have to connect with the people.”

I made sure not to take up too much of Bowman’s time. A group of potential constituents were waiting to tell him their stories. Now that he appears headed for Washington, it’s going to be on him to bridge the gap — from them, across the basketball court to Clarke, over to Co-Op City in the Bronx, down to Washington, D.C., and throughout America’s marginalized communities, the voices of which may have grown a little louder on Tuesday night.

But as Clarke stressed to me over the phone, having a voice is only the beginning. “Voting is where it starts,” he said. “But the vote don’t count for nothing. It’s what you do after you’re elected that’s important.”

Martin Luther King's Giant Triplets: Racism, Yes, but What About Militarism and Materialism?

By Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch

25 June 20

 

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Today, in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests, TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich considers the all-American version of “extreme materialism” that Martin Luther King called out more than half a century ago. And when it comes to the overwhelming urge to get one’s hands on the goods, among the looters of this moment two groups are almost never mentioned: the Pentagon and the police.

Yet, in 1997, the Department of Defense set up the 1033 program as part of the National Defense Authorization Act to provide thousands of domestic police forces with “surplus” equipment of almost every imaginable militarized kind. Since then, thanks to your tax dollars, it has given away $7.4 billion of such equipment, some of it directly off the battlefields of this country’s forlorn “forever wars.” For items like grenade launchers, mine-resistant armored vehicles, military rifles, bayonets, body armor, night-vision goggles, and helicopters, all that police departments have to fork over is the price of delivery. The Pentagon has, in fact, been so eager to become the Macy’s of militarized hardware that, in 2017, it was even willing to “give $1.2 million worth of rifles, pipe bombs, and night vision goggles to a fake police department,” no questions asked. That “department” proved to be part of a sting operation run by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). “It was like getting stuff off of eBay,” a GAO official would say. Only, of course, for free.

The militarization (or, thought of another way, the commercialization) of the police has been remarkably on pace these last 23 years, while the Pentagon’s ever-soaring budgets for its ever-sinking wars could be thought of as the great American commercial success story of this century. With more and more taxpayer dollars in its wallet, it’s been on a remarkable looting spree. Ask yourself: has there been a weapons system it couldn’t have, a military base it couldn’t establish, a war expense Congress wouldn’t fund even while cutting back on crucial aspects of the domestic budget like infrastructure programs or disease-prevention spending? No wonder the Pentagon could supply all those police departments with a cornucopia of goods with which to turn themselves into over-armed occupying forces in this country.

It’s never thought of that way, but the Pentagon and the police have essentially been looting the coffers of the American taxpayer for a long time now and, in the Trump era, the process has only intensified. Nonetheless, as Bacevich points out, even with protests over racism filling the streets of America, protests over defunding the Pentagon have yet to surface in any significant way. Perhaps it’s finally time. Tom

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

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Martin Luther King’s Giant Triplets
Racism, Yes, But What About Militarism and Materialism?

n the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Americans are finally -- or is it once again? -- confronting the racism that afflicts this country and extends into just about every corner of our national life. Something fundamental just might be happening.

Yet to state the obvious, we’ve been here before. Mass protests in response to racial inequality and discrimination, including police brutality, have been anything but unknown in the United States. Much the same can be said of riots targeting black Americans, fomented and exploited by white racists, often actively or passively abetted by local law enforcement officials. If Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, was correct in calling violence “as American as cherry pie,” then race-related urban unrest is the apple-filled equivalent. 

The optimists among us believe that “this time is different.” I hope events will prove them right. Yet recalling expectations that Barack Obama’s election in 2008 signaled the dawn of a “post-racial America,” I see no reason to expect it to be so. A yawning gap, I fear, separates hope from reality.

Let me suggest, however, that the nation’s current preoccupation with race, as honorable and necessary as it may be, falls well short of adequately responding to the situation confronting Americans as they enter the third decade of the twenty-first century. Racism is a massive problem, but hardly our only one. Indeed, as Martin Luther King sought to remind us many years ago, there are at least two others of comparable magnitude.

MLK Defines the Problem

In April 1967, at New York City’s Riverside Church, Dr. King delivered a sermon that offered a profound diagnosis of the illnesses afflicting the nation. His analysis remains as timely today as it was then, perhaps more so.

Americans remember King primarily as a great civil rights leader and indeed he was that. In his Riverside Church address, however, he turned to matters that went far beyond race. In an immediate sense, his focus was the ongoing Vietnam War, which he denounced as “madness” that “must cease.” Yet King also used the occasion to summon the nation to “undergo a radical revolution of values” that would transform the United States “from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” Only through such a revolution, he declared, would we be able to overcome “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”

The challenge confronting Americans was to dismantle what King referred to as the “edifice” that produced and sustained each of those giant triplets. Today’s protesters, crusading journalists, and engaged intellectuals make no bones about their determination to eliminate the first of those giant triplets. Yet they generally treat the other two as, at best, mere afterthoughts, while the edifice itself, resting on a perverse understanding of freedom, goes almost entirely ignored.

I’m not suggesting that members of the grand coalition of Americans today fervently campaigning against racism favor extreme materialism. Many of them merely accept its reality and move on. Nor am I suggesting that they consciously endorse militarism, although in confusing “support” for the troops with genuine patriotism some of them do so implicitly. What I am suggesting is that those calling for fundamental change will go badly astray if they ignore Dr. King’s insistence that each of the giant triplets is intimately tied to the other two.

Defund the Pentagon?

The protests triggered by the recent murders of George Floyd and other black Americans have produced widespread demands to “defund the police.” Those demands don’t come out of nowhere. While “reform” programs undertaken in innumerable American cities over the course of many years have demonstrably enhanced police firepower, they have done little, if anything, to repair relations between police departments and communities of color.

As an aging middle-class white male, I don’t fear cops. I respect the fact that theirs is a tough job, which I would not want. Yet I realize that my attitude is one more expression of white privilege, which black men, regardless of their age and economic status, can ill afford to indulge. So I fully accept the need for radical changes in policing -- that’s what “defund” appears to imply -- if American cities are ever to have law enforcement agencies that are effective, humane, and themselves law-abiding.

What I can’t fathom is why a similar logic doesn’t apply to the armed forces that we employ to police huge chunks of the world beyond our borders. If Americans have reason to question the nation’s increasingly militarized approach to law enforcement, then shouldn’t they have equal reason to question this country’s thoroughly militarized approach to statecraft?  

Consider this: on an annual basis, police officers in the United States kill approximately 1,000 Americans, with blacks two-and-a-half times more likely than whites to be victimized. Those are appalling figures, indicative of basic policy gone fundamentally awry. So the outpouring of protest over the police and demands for change are understandable and justified.

Still, the question must be asked: Why have the nation’s post-9/11 wars not prompted similar expressions of outrage?  The unjustified killing of black Americans rightly finds thousands upon thousands of protesters flooding the streets of major cities. Yet the loss of thousands of American soldiers and the physical and psychological wounds sustained by tens of thousands more in foolhardy wars elicits, at best, shrugs. Throw in the hundreds of thousands of non-American lives taken in those military campaigns and the trillions of taxpayer dollars they have consumed and you have a catastrophe that easily exceeds in scale the myriad race-related protests and riots that have roiled American cities in the recent past.

With their eyes fixed on elections that are now just months away, politicians of all stripes spare no effort to show that they “get it” on the issue of race and policing. Race may well play a large role in determining who wins the White House this November and which party controls Congress. It should. Yet while the election’s final outcome may be uncertain, this much is not: neither the American propensity for war, nor the bloated size of the Pentagon budget, nor the dubious habit of maintaining a sprawling network of military bases across much of the planet will receive serious scrutiny during the political season now underway. Militarism will escape unscathed.

At Riverside Church, King described the U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” So it unquestionably remains, perpetrating immeasurably more violence than any other great power and with remarkably little to show in return. Why, then, except on the easily ignored fringes of American politics, are there no demands to “defund” the Pentagon?

King considered the Vietnam War an abomination. At that time, more than a few Americans agreed with him and vigorously demonstrated against the conflict's continuation. That today’s demonstrators have seemingly chosen to file away our post-9/11 military misadventures under the heading of regrettable but forgettable is itself an abomination. While their sensitivity to racism is admirable, their indifference to war is nothing short of disheartening.

In 1967, Dr. King warned that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” During the intervening decades, his charge has lost none of its sting or aptness.

America’s National Signature

Given their size and duration, the protests occurring in the wake of the murder of George Floyd have been remarkably peaceful. That said, some of them did, early on, include rioters who resorted to looting. Smashing windows and ransacking stores, they walked off not with milk and bread for the hungry, but with shopping bags filled with high-end swag -- designer shoes and sneakers, purses, clothing, and jewelry lifted from stores like Prada and Alexander McQueen. Also stolen were smart phones, handguns, even automobiles. In-store surveillance systems recorded scenes reminiscent of Black Friday doorbuster sales, though without anyone bothering to pass through a checkout counter. Some looters quickly attempted to monetize their hauls by offering to sell purloined items online.

Certain right-wing commentators wasted no time in using the looting to tar the protest movement as little more than an expression of nihilism. Tucker Carlson of Fox News was particularly emphatic on this point. Americans taking to the streets in response to George Floyd’s murder, he said, “reject society itself.” 

“Reason and process and precedent mean nothing to them. They use violence to get what they want immediately. People like this don’t bother to work. They don’t volunteer or pay taxes to help other people. They live for themselves. They do exactly what they feel like doing... On television, hour by hour, we watch these people -- criminal mobs -- destroy what the rest of us have built..."

To explain such selfish and destructive misconduct, Carlson had an answer readily at hand:

“The ideologues will tell you that the problem is race relations, or capitalism, or police brutality, or global warming. But only on the surface. The real cause is deeper than that and it’s far darker. What you’re watching is the ancient battle between those who have a stake in society, and would like to preserve it, and those who don’t, and seek to destroy it."

This is vile, hateful stuff, and entirely wrong -- except perhaps on one point. In attributing the looting to a deeper cause, Carlson was onto something, even if his effort to pinpoint that cause was wildly off the mark.

I won’t try to unravel the specific motives of those who saw an opportunity in the protests against racism to help themselves to goods that were not theirs. How much was righteous anger turned to rage and how much cynical opportunism is beyond my ability to know.

This much, however, can be said for certain: the grab-all-you-can-get impulse so vividly on display was as all-American as fireworks on the Fourth of July. Those looters, after all, merely wanted more stuff. What could be more American than that? In this country, after all, stuff carries with it the possibility of personal fulfillment, of achieving some version of happiness or status.

The looters that Tucker Carlson targeted with his ire were doing anything but “rejecting society itself.” They were merely helping themselves to what this society today has on offer for those with sufficient cash and credit cards in their wallets. In a sense, they were treating themselves to a tiny sip of what passes these days for the American Dream.

With the exception of cloistered nuns, hippies, and other vanishing breeds, virtually all Americans have been conditioned to buy into the proposition that stuff correlates with the good life. Unconvinced? Check out the videos from last year’s Black Friday and then consider the intense, if unsurprising, interest of economists and journalists in tracking the latest consumer spending trends. At least until Covid-19 came along, consumer spending served as the authoritative measure of the nation’s overall health.

The primary civic obligation of U.S. citizens today is not to vote or pay taxes. And it’s certainly not to defend the country, a task offloaded onto those who can be enticed to enlist (with minorities vastly overrepresented) in the so-called All-Volunteer Military. No, the primary obligation of citizenship is to spend.

Ours is not a nation of mystics, philosophers, poets, artisans, or Thomas Jefferson’s yeomen farmers. We are now a nation of citizen-consumers, held in thrall to the extreme materialism that Dr. King decried. This, not a commitment to liberty or democracy, has become our true national signature and our chief contribution to late modernity.

Tearing Down the Edifice

At Riverside Church, King reminded his listeners that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which he had helped to found a decade earlier, had chosen this as its motto: "To save the soul of America." The soul of a nation corrupted by racism, militarism, and extreme materialism represented King’s ultimate concern. Vietnam, he said, was “but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.”

In a tone-deaf editorial criticizing his Riverside Church sermon, the New York Times chastised King for “fusing two public problems” -- racism and the Vietnam War -- “that are distinct and separate.” Yet part of King’s genius lay in his ability to recognize the interconnectedness of matters that Times editors, as oblivious to deeper maladies then as they are today, wish to keep separate. King sought to tear down the edifice that sustained all three of those giant triplets. Indeed, it is all but certain that, were he alive now, he would call similar attention to a fourth related factor: climate change denial. The refusal to treat seriously the threat posed by climate change underwrites the persistence of racism, militarism, and extreme materialism.

During the course of his sermon, King quoted this sentence from the statement of a group that called itself the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” Regarding race, it appears that the great majority of Americans have now rejected such silence. This is good. It remains an open question, however, when their silent acceptance of militarism, materialism, and the abuse of Planet Earth will end.

Andrew Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular, is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new book is The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

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