Martin Luther King: “The road to freedom is a difficult, hard road. It always makes for temporary setbacks. And those people who tell you today that there is more tension in Montgomery than there has ever been are telling you right. Whenever you get out of Egypt, you always confront a little tension, you always confront a little temporary setback. If you didn’t confront that you’d never get out.
You must remember that the tensionless period that we like to think of was the period when the Negro was complacently adjusted to segregation, discrimination, insult, and exploitation. And the period of tension is the period when the Negro has decided to rise up and break aloose from that. And this is the peace that we are seeking: not an old negative obnoxious peace which is merely the absence of tension, but a positive, lasting peace, which is the presence of brotherhood and justice. And it is never brought about without this temporary period of tension. The road to freedom is difficult.”
This fear of tension is not the only reason people resist equality. For many people, the people at the upper levels of the hierarchy, inequality is a good thing. Even if their lives suck, they can always look down and see that someone — blacks, Latinos, Jews, women, gays, Catholics, depending on the era and the individual — is worse off. They’ll never be the bottom of the barrel. And when they look at the apex of the pyramid, they see people like themselves — white, male, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon (less significant these days but there was a time it was way important to come from that heritage) or whatever. That makes it easy to feel a kinship with the elite and the elect. To imagine, as the phrase goes, they’re not poor but a temporarily impoverished millionaire.
Once you taste that sense of superiority, it’s hard to believe other people don’t want the same thing. When they talk about equality, obviously they really want to usurp the status you have and put you in the inferior role. You’d never be satisfied with mere equality so clearly nobody else is.
Not everyone thinks that way. There are others who believe in equality but shrink from the steps it takes to get there. As Frederick Douglass put it, power concedes nothing without a demand. Never has. Never will. But when people make demands, things get tense. There’s confrontation, conflict, anger. Can’t people just wait patiently? Can’t they compromise? Surely only an extremist would demand full equality now!
MLK, again: “I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.”
On top of which, equality isn’t an extreme position, it’s the compromise. The opposite to white supremacy would be black supremacy; the opposite to male dominance would be female dominance. Equality is the sweet spot in the middle. The trouble is, we don’t reach even the middle ground without a lot of tension. The alternative to tension, as King says isn’t peace — it’s injustice.
