63 conflicto, reconciliación y hermandad Martin Luther King was also a proponent of engaging the world as it is. King was a Christian realist. He was influenced by the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, the leading figure in a Christian realist tradition that stretches back to Augustine. In King’s words, “Niebuhr made me aware of the complexity of human motives and the reality of sin on every level of man’s existence,” including “the glaring reality of collective evil.”1 Niebuhr shined his spotlight on the persistence of inordinate selflove as the root of the suffering that marks the human condition. In Niebuhr’s and King’s work, the elusiveness of justice does not excuse Christians from seeking it. Both championed realism as an impetus to take responsibility for “a tolerable justice” in this world, even though ultimate justice would have to wait until the next. What does Christian realism mean for my engagement with American racism? It means I cannot sit back and assume that racism was eradicated in the 1960s. I must seek out knowledge about the plight of my black and brown brothers and sisters. Some critics like to say George Floyd was no hero, given that he had a criminal record. Why might a young black man in America be more likely to have encounters with law enforcement? Well, let’s talk for a minute about the War on Drugs. Let’s start back in the 1970s, when most black Americans had not attended college and had grown up in segregated schools. Factories moved from the cities to the suburbs, most black families in the cities did not own a car, and most cities did not have public transportation that extended to the suburbs. So in 1970, 70% of black men had bluecollar jobs; by 1987, only 28% did. This meant that black families were very vulnerable economically. And then drugs arrived. How did the federal government respond to drugs in the 1980s? With, quite literally, a war. From 1981 to 1991, the administrations of President Reagan and President Bush increased the Department of Defense’s antidrug allocation from $33M to $1.042B, and the Drug Enforcement Agency’s spending from $86M to $1B. At the same time, they lowered the Institute on Drug Abuse’s budget from $274M to $57M, and the Department of Education’s antidrug budget from $14M to $3M.2 In other words, drug use was a matter for the military and for prisons, not for treatment or education. 1 King Jr. M. L., Strength to Love 148 (1963). 2 These and other data regarding the War on Drugs are taken from Alexander M., The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010).
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