What If MLK Had Committed Rape: A Thought Experiment: An Exchange

 Dear Professor McWhorter:

If I heard you correctly on this last Glenn Show, then your words took me aback. Paraphrase, “Even if MLK was a frequent gang rapist, we’d honour him (the same?) nonetheless.” As if him doing it once weren’t enough. 

If Stalin was revolutionary in the treatment of animals, then would PETA salute him?” 

No charge of presentism can lighten the horror of gang rape. Again, if I heard you correctly, “It was a different time.” I get that time can heal some wounds. But it can also wound some heels as we learn more over time about their villainy. 

True, the shock of some kinds of wrongdoing fades over time’s elapse. 

So we read great centuries old racist and ethnicist authors and live with their vile attitudes, their art predominating with us. 

But some evil is beyond toleration. Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler and Mao aren’t getting any kind words from sensible people. Theirs is evil on a vast scale. Physically harsh crimes, especially sexually violative ones, against the body and the vulnerable, infinitely more restricted in scope, ignite their own deep going singular shock. 

Say Dickens or Shakespeare were abusive pedophiles. Could we read and celebrate their genius the same way? I think not. The stench of their actions would befoul every page. Our experience of their art would inevitably be compromised. 

MLK’s hypothetical evil would hobble him even more. He’s still our  contemporary, murdered not so long ago. He doesn’t get what benefit time’s passing might offer him. Plus, righteousness and moral authority are of his essence, among the keys to the power of his moral force. But be he known to be a gang rapist, then his assertion of moral authority would have been at minimum an uphill struggle. Be he known as a serial gang rapist, that assertion couldn’t take its first step up the hill. 

More complicated is if we were to find out about his depredations after his death. There then would be no easy living with his evil. He might face institutional dishonour, his day taken away from him, schools and streets named for him unnamed. 

In either case, he would not be a lesson in how we learn to live with complexity, the great and terrible in some people. Rather, he’d be a lesson in how some kinds of the latter overwhelm the former, shrinking them. 



Sincerely,

Itzik Basman

Response from John McWhorter:

Itzik --

I'm being clinical in what I said. I'm saying that the Usual Suspects will pardon gang rape if it's about King, not that they should.

But yes, I'm faking a little. Honestly if we knew Shakespeare was a gang raper I do NOT think we would think less of the plays. But yes, MLK lived more recently.

So, do I think we should give his gang-raping a pass? No -- but frankly, Itzik, I don't think it should "cancel" him.

We should know that he was disgusting (as in violent, pitiless) about women and magnificent about humanity and progress. The two should be able to exist together.

No -- I would not look at King's face and always see a rapist. He was many things, and the other part was, in the grand scheme of things, more important.

Especially -- yes -- in that there was no Me, Too in his era. We can assume he likely thought he was being "naughty," but not cosmically immoral. As in, that's what he THOUGHT. He couldn't think beyond his era. Weinstein is one thing in 2010; MLK in 1965 is another.

None of this is ironclad, though.

John