And this is not some one-time slip of the tongue for Bush. In Bush’s book written two decades ago, “Profiles in Character,” he wrote: “Since the 1960s, the politics of victimization has steadily intensified. Being a victim gives rise to certain entitlements, benefits, and preferences in society. The surest way to get something in today’s society is to elevate one’s status to that of the oppressed. Many of the modern victim movements — the gay rights movement, the feminist movement, the black empowerment movement — have attempted to get people to view themselves as part of a smaller group deserving of something from society. It is a major deviation from the society envisioned by Martin Luther King, who would have had people judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin — or sexual preference or gender or ethnicity.”

Not only does this completely ignore the historical and structural effect of America’s endemic anti-black racism, it also misinterprets King’s own understanding of this phenomenon.

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As King told an audience at Stanford University in 1967, he understood that the dismantling of legal segregation was in a way, the easy part. It was the structural racism, not written in law but on in the minds of men, that was harder to change.

He blasted “large segments of white society” for being “more concerned about tranquillity and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity.” He slammed what he calls the “white backlash” for being the cause of black discontent and shouts for Black Power, rather than the result of it, calling it “merely a new name for an old phenomenon.” And he declared that true integration “is not merely a romantic or aesthetic something where you merely add color to a still predominantly white power structure.”

You see, King wasn’t naïvely oblivious to structural racism and how it cloistered power and inhibited mobility and equality; he was acutely aware of it and adamantly opposed to it. It wasn’t about victimization, but honest appraisal. Most black people don’t want America’s prescriptions, pittances or pity, and never have.

James Baldwin told The Paris Review three decades ago that he refused to think of himself as a victim, and that “perhaps the turning point in one’s life is realizing that to be treated like a victim is not necessarily to become one.” As Baldwin explained it, “if I took the role of a victim then I was simply reassuring the defenders of the status quo; as long as I was a victim they could pity me and add a few more pennies to my home-relief check.”