[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.This was an enormous undertaking, considering the extent to which the historic discourse on race and its attending phobias had become entrenched and systematically translated into laws and policies that reinforced pro-separatist arguments.Cook explains, “The conclusion that black men have been, for the most part, outside the performance and ethos of the liberal tradition in America—in terms of the premises, norms, and prom-ises of that tradition—is inescapable.” 14 The marginalized black mass, whilehaving limited interaction with the American mainstream, rarely participated as social equals.In most instances, the occasional community interactions, particularly those of a domestic nature, served as strange reminders of black folks’ ambiguous outsider status, and the stigma associated with their involun-tary racial polarization.15 King’s imagined paradigm, therefore, underscored the extent to which he essentially read, wrote, and worked to transform the theory of community into the actuality of beloved community.Remarkably, he does so from within a social context once described by E.Franklin Frazier as the alienated “nation within a nation.” In the fi nal analysis, it was his generous account of human nature created in the image of God with the possibility God had given for brotherhood that would ultimately represent the basis for King’s qualifi ed optimism in the formation of the beloved community.As such, King imagined an existence toward which individuals could move forward with the hope of experiencing reconciled relations and the eventual creation of beloved community.Within this context of beloved community, individuals could exercise mutual regard because they essentially wanted to and could, not simply because they had to and were thus compelled.While hatred and bigotry were common current realities, those realties were by no146p r a c t i c a l a p p l i c a t i o nmeans ultimately defi nitive, nor could they ultimately determine the fate of human destiny.King alluded to this point in his 1961 address to the Fellowship of the Concerned:And so the nonviolent resister never lets this idea go, that thereis something within human nature that can respond to goodness.So that a Jesus of Nazareth or a Mohandas Gandhi can appealto human beings and appeal to that element of goodness withinthem, and a Hitler can appeal to the element of evil within them.But we must never forget that there is something within humannature that can respond to goodness, that man is not totallydepraved; to put it in theological terms, the image of God is nevertotally gone.And so.the worst segregationist can become anintegrationist.16While familiarizing himself with the antislavery writings of Douglass and others at an early age, King entered the academy drawn to studies that would facilitate the task of discerning and developing a theological rationale for the social gospel he witnessed and deemed morally compelling as a youth.But he did so with a growing understanding that any long-term hope for constructive social transformation would prove futile apart from a clear determination that moral suasion could, in fact, awaken suffi cient goodwill and courage to amend and reform the remaining vestiges of the nation’s inequitable social condition.Long-term hopes for constructive social change required the implementation of a relevant social gospel that would lead to the development of a sustainable community of the beloved.As chapter 4 indicates, King’s studies led to a theological anthropology, much like the fi fth-century conceptions developed by John Cassian, and later embraced by Thomas Aquinas, which associated the image of God with humanity’scapacity to reason.It was that attribute within human nature that provided human beings with the ability to distinguish between, and the free will to choose, that which was either good or evil.Leaders could choose to establish despotic regimes, or as in the case of Jesus could be compelled to participate in and experience a community in which persons exercise their capacity to love others as self.Hence, King concluded that human nature was neither wholly depraved nor wholly innocent but, rather, that it possessed the faculty for both.Jesus could appeal to the element of goodness within humanity’s nature while Hitler could appeal to an element of evil [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]