MLK’s philosophy was not color blindness. This is just what people hear if they listen to one line from one speech from his entire career.
He also explicitly stated that programs that specifically benefited black people and only black people as a mechanism to address prior injustice would be justified.
“A society that has done something special against the negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the negro”.
Sure, but that's not important to the point I'm making. If you asked almost everybody even two years ago what "racism" or "anti-racism" meant, and what Atticus Finch stood for, you would have gotten some version of "colour blindness" and probably some reference to MLK, because that one speech is what they consider the best expression of the view. Whatever else MLK said is irrelevant - it's about the specific idea that most people associated with anti-racism.
The modern "anti-racists" have very different beliefs, which would have very little support if the implications were spelled out clearly to everyone, and therefore these beliefs need to be laundered and disguised as something more respectable. Hence the language games.
Of course it is important. Because it is moral justification for why "color blindness" is morally superior to alternatives pushed by a subset of anti-racists. By referencing MLK, a figure often revered as a moral compass, your post presents anti-racists as a corrupted extension of the valid work done in the 60s.
My point is that if you want to complain about modern anti-racists, you are very likely also complaining about MLK's beliefs too. That can be a thing you can do, but your moral foundations become less automatically rock solid and require some justification.
The point was not that modern anti-racists are wrong because they disagreed with MLK on some topics, it was that they are wrong because they completely reject colour blindness, of which MLK’s famous statements are one well-known example. Perhaps I should have picked a different person or just not mentioned him.
Again: It’s about the specific idea, not a person. And the idea is what is being hijacked, to mean almost the opposite of what was generally accepted.
No, it was already very well accepted that you shouldn’t throw white people in jail for crimes they didn’t commit. It was not well accepted if the accused was black. The challenge was to persuade people (many of whom were racists) to see the accused man as equal to a white man before the law, and deserving of the same treatment as a white man would have received. In other words, to persuade people to be blind to his colour in their assessment of the case.
There are plenty of novels about defending people against crimes they didn’t commit. This one is about much more than that.
> it was already very well accepted that you shouldn’t throw white people in jail for crimes they didn’t commit.
I can agree in general, but the case in To Kill a Mockingbird is a little more complex than that. Tom Robinson actually committed the offense of having sex with a girl whose father didn't approve of him. This was shoehorned into the legal system by accusing him of the crime of "rape". This approach is quite current today under the name "statutory rape", and is applied in a race-blind manner.
So it's plausible that if Tom Robinson had been a comparably undesirable white, something very similar would have happened. A lot of things that did happen were specific to him being black, but the very basic framework of the case wasn't.
The whole point of the story is that he is black and gets treated unfairly (accused of a crime) because of that. It’s fundamentally about the racial discrimination that was rife at the time.
Take that one element away by making him white, and it remains an interesting story but now it’s about something very different, and I doubt it would be as famous today. It’s also not clear Harper Lee would have bothered to write it.
> Take that one element away by making him white, and it remains an interesting story but now it’s about something very different, and I doubt it would be as famous today.
It would be Bridge of Spies, which makes the same comments on what it should mean to be a lawyer, and on the nature of mob justice, while making the two changes that the defendant is (1) white and (2) actually guilty of the same offense he's charged with.
He also explicitly stated that programs that specifically benefited black people and only black people as a mechanism to address prior injustice would be justified.
“A society that has done something special against the negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the negro”.