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The whitewashing—and resurrection—of Dr. King’s legacy
金博士遗产的洗白和复兴
By Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
文/小艾迪·S·格劳德
ON SEPT. 20, 1966, IN THE SMALL TOWN of Grenada, Miss., Martin Luther King Jr. would not get out of bed.
1966年9月20日，在密西西比州的格林纳达小镇上，马丁·路德·金说什么也不肯起床。
Andrew Young, his closest adviser, tried everything.
他最亲密的参谋安德鲁·杨什么办法都试过了。
He used all the techniques they had learned over the course of the movement when any one of them faced debilitating exhaustion.
他把他们在那次运动中学到的，用来对付筋疲力竭的所有技巧都用上了。
Nothing worked.
却无一例外地都没奏效。
This was not exhaustion. King had fallen into a deep depression, and he would not budge.
因为金并不是觉得累了，而是陷入了深深的沮丧，并且丝毫不愿回心转意。
King’s bout hit in the midst of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s efforts to desegregate schools in Grenada County.
金这次发作正值南部基督教领袖联合会为废除格林纳达县各学校的种族隔离制度而努力的时候。
He had witnessed, once again, the human capacity for evil.
他目睹，而且是再次目睹了人类能邪恶到何等地步。
As 150 black students entered John Rundle High School and Lizzie Horn Elementary School, an angry mob gathered outside.
150名黑人学生踏入约翰·伦德尔高中和丽齐·霍恩小学时，一群愤怒的暴徒也聚集在了学校外面。
White students were dismissed at midday.
中午时分，白人学生们都放学了。
Half an hour later, black students emerged.
半小时后，黑人学生出现了。
The mob attacked the children.
暴徒便上前袭击了他们。
Grown men descended upon 12-year-old Richard Sigh and broke his leg with lead pipes.
一群成年男子突然袭击了12岁的理查德·赛，并用铅筒打断了他的腿。
Others laughed as they pummeled a girl in pigtails.
另一些人则笑着殴打了一个扎着马尾辫的女孩。
No wonder King went to bed.
难怪金躺到床上去了。
Near the end of his life, King confronted the uncertainty of his moral vision.
因为在他生命的最后时刻，金的道德愿景反倒变模糊了。
He had underestimated how deeply the belief that white people matter more than others—what I call the value gap—was ingrained in the habits of American life.
他低估了“白人比其他人种的人更重要”这一信念——我称之为“价值鸿沟”——在美国人的生活习惯中是多么的根深蒂固。
He saw that white resentment involved more than fatigue with mass demonstrations and demands for racial equality,
他看到，白人的不满针对的不仅仅是对大规模示威活动和呼吁种族平等的要求的厌倦，
and was not simply a sin of the South. It was embedded in the very psyche of white America.
而且，这一情绪也不单单是南方的罪过，这种情绪已经深深地植根于美国白人内心了。
In King’s final book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, drafted in early 1967,
在他的最后一本书，1967年初拟写的《我们将何去何从：混乱还是共同体？》中，
he argued in part that white supremacy stood in the way of America’s democracy,
金指出，“白人至上”在一定程度上阻碍了美国民主的发展，
that it was an ever-present force in frustrating the dreams of the nation’s darker-skinned citizens.
并且一直都在挫伤这个国家黑人公民的梦想。
At the heart of it was a distorted understanding of the meaning of racial justice.
这种观念的核心是对“种族平等”的误解。
He wrote: Negroes have proceeded from a premise that equality means what it says,
他写道：黑人从平等就意味着它的字面意思这个前提出发，
and they have taken white Americans at their word when they talked of it as an objective.
在白人说话间将其作为奋斗目标时，他们就相信了白人的话，对他们深信不疑。
But most whites in America proceed from a premise that equality is a loose expression for improvement.
但大多数美国白人是从平等就是改进的不那么精确的表达这一前提出发的。
White America is not even psychologically organized to close the gap—essentially it seeks only to make it less painful and less obvious but in most respects to retain it.
从心理的角度来讲，白色美国甚至根本就不是为了弥合这一鸿沟而组建起来的——实质上，它只是想让这一鸿沟变得不那么痛苦、不那么明显，而且在大多数时候，他们是想保留这一鸿沟的。
This is a devastating judgment about our so-called national commitment to progress.
这一事实无异于对我们所谓的，全国上下齐心协力追求进步的承诺下了一个毁灭性的决断。
It reduces racial justice to a charitable enterprise by which white people “do good” for black people.
因为它将种族平等贬低成了白人为黑人“做好事”的慈善事业。
This, in turn, provides white Americans with a necessary illusion that preserves the idea of innocence and insulates their conscience or, perhaps, their soul from guilt and blame.
这一认识又反过来为美国白人提供了一种必要的错觉，让他们始终觉得自己清白无辜，让他们的良心或者内心免于内疚和责备。
译文由可可原创，仅供学习交流使用，未经许可请勿转载。
