Archival tape – Martin Luther King Jr:

“My four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream.”

[Theme Music Starts]

ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack. This is 7am.

The iconic words of Martin Luther King Jr are now being used to further the exact causes that the civil rights activist would have opposed.

In the United States, conservatives quoted him to celebrate The Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action based on race in university admissions.

Here, they’re being used by people like Peter Dutton to rally support against the Voice to Parliament.

Today, writer, lawyer and contributor to The Saturday Paper, Nyadol Nyuon, on why the right is stealing language and history, and how it threatens to divide us.

It’s Tuesday, August 8.

[Theme Music Ends]

ANGE:

So Nyadol, we've recently heard Peter Dutton and other conservatives use some pretty unexpected quotes to push their agenda. They've been using the language of Martin Luther King. How have they been using those progressive radical ideas to support conservative ones?

NYADOL:

Yeah. When I heard Peter Dutton quote Martin Luther King famous speech, the I have a Dream speech to say that Australians should not support voting for the Voice, because we should judge each other based on the content of our character, and not the colour of our skin…

Archival tape – Peter Dutton:

“The great progress of the 20th century's civil rights movements was the push to eradicate difference, to judge each other on the content of our character, not the colour of our skin.”

NYADOL:

As a Black person who experiences life in a very particular way, especially for those of us for who King is not just an image, is a person that literally gives you a tool for living a life, I can only compare it to somebody destroying something of significant value to you.

Archival tape – Peter Dutton:

“The Voice, as proposed by the Prime Minister promotes difference, and is sadly a symptom of the madness of identity politics which has infected the 21st century. The Voice will re-racilaise our nation, at a time when we need to unite the country.”

NYADOL:

You have to misremember Martin Luther King, you know. You have to take him outside the context of the life he lived. You have to take him outside the history of the things he was fighting against.

Archival tape – Martin Luther King Jr:

“We must also realise that the problem of racial injustice, and economic injustice, cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.”

NYADOL:

When you divorce and detach that language from the reality that gives it a sense of meaning, then it becomes something abstract that you can use and repurpose for your own goals.

They are using Martin Luther King to essentially cover up conservative ambitions or intentions. It’s far easier to sell it if it’s coming from somebody like King.

ANGE:

And it is really incongruous and strange to hear the conservative side of politics use that kind of rhetoric. But what kind of deeper purpose does it serve for them to take that language of racial justice and use it in a way that suits them?

NYADOL:

Well, obviously, I think one thing is to try and claim the higher moral ground, and to say, “No, someone like Martin Luther King actually stands for the values we stand for.” So reading the work of Stanley Fish, who writes this interesting book called There is No Such Thing as Free Speech, and we are the better for it. He explains this tactic where this approach that he calls an article of neo-conservative faith, which is first extracting events from the historical context in which they make sense, and then interpreting them under a veil of willed ignorance. If you can flatten out events, people, concepts, if you can flatten out Martin Luther King out of the historical context he exists in, you can then use them as if the reality that gave birth to these things did not exist, right. And so, yes, if you decontextualize the fact that Peter Dutton is engaged in some of the most horrible racial politics, if you can misremember African gangs…

Archival tape – Peter Dutton:

“…people are scared to go to restaurants at night time because they’re followed home by these gangs. Home invasions and cars are stolen, and we just need to call it what it is. Of course it's African gang violence.”

NYADOL:

If you can misremember him walking out of, you know, the apology to Indigenous people,

Archival tape – Peter Dutton:

“I failed to grasp at the time the symbolic significance to the stolen generation of the apology.”

NYADOL:

Then you can present him as somebody who cares about equality. And that's what I think is very disorienting for people when you try to engage with this narrative, because the facts just don't match the reality of what is being said. And it is a dangerous tactic when it's successful.

ANGE:

And I think here we’re not just talking about language, we're talking about ideas that have very real impacts. And we've just seen, in the US, these ideas have led to the US Supreme Court making this historic decision to end affirmative action, which is something I think a lot of people thought would never be taken away. Can you tell us a bit about just how significant that decision was, and why the court did that?

NYADOL:

So the U.S. Supreme Court decision is to gut affirmative action in relation to race, to consider race as part of college admission.

Archival tape – Reporter 1:

“All right. If you're just joining us, we are following breaking news this morning. The Supreme Court has just issued a major ruling on affirmative action.”

Archival tape – Reporter 2:

“Colleges and universities will no longer be permitted to take race into account when reviewing the college applications.”

NYADOL:

But it doesn't actually deal with affirmative action in any other context. So, for example, one of the biggest forms of affirmative action is legacy, essentially having an advantage because your parents donated to the institution, or you're connected to the institution. That's one of the biggest ways in which people get admitted into college in the United States. More than consideration of race, right. So in order for you to think that affirmative action based on race is a form of special privilege towards Black people in the United States, you really have to ignore a lot of history of why affirmative action was necessary. You can trace the Supreme Court decision in 2023 to a similar decision that the Supreme Court of the United States made just 20 years, or less than 20 years, after the abolition of slavery.

Congress essentially tried to pass a law in 1875, which is that the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the purpose of the law was to grant equal protection to the newly freed black population. And the Supreme Court nullifies that act on the basis that it was time for the newly freed enslaved population, that it was time for them to stop being, quote, “the special favourite of the law”.

So in order to arrive again at that decision, the court had to intentionally forget that it's just been 20 years since the abolition of slavery, and that there was widespread discrimination against the black population at the time that the decision was made.

But this becomes the core of why the court rejects this protection. It claims that to accept it is a form of favouritism, and it is again kind of the same reasoning that you find in the decisions in 2023 of the Supreme Court nullifying affirmative action based on race. It is again the very similar reasons that supports what Peter Dutton says about the Voice today when he quotes Martin Luther King and say that to support constitutional recognition in Australia is to give a special voice to First Nations people that others Australians don't enjoy.

ANGE:

After the break, what could be under threat here in Australia if we’re convinced to forget our history.

[Advertisement]

ANGE:

So, Nyadol, the US has ended affirmative action in relation to race. And meanwhile in Australia we are seeing Conservative figures and politicians use similar tactics to the ones used in the US. How likely is it that this recontextualizing of history and the subversion of language is just the first step in Australia following the US down this path and worsening racial inequality?

NYADOL:

Well, I don't think it's actually even limited to racial inequality. If you look at how Peter Dutton is crafting his public posture, the issues he's championing, they are very consistent with some of the positions that Republican parties are taking in the United States. For example, there is this very conservative cultural war point in the United States, right, where there is this idea that Marxist communists are educating our kids in school.

Peter Dutton and the Conservatives have been in power for the last ten years, or more, and the last sort of national curriculum was introduced under that government. But soon after the election, Dutton complains about how schools are indoctrinating young people, right.

And so I think that we are already seeing a Conservative party in Australia that is modelled around the Conservative parties in the United States.

And I think the key purpose for this approach is, sadly, in my view, not to support the people that I think Peter Dutton claims they're supporting, who they tend to craft as, you know, the white working class. It is essentially a function of dividing people, pitting them against this so called minorities and identity politics who are taking over and disadvantaging working class people. In effect, what I think happens is that those people are given somebody to hate, you know, somebody to be seen as the thing that caused the problem, in order for the status quo — that disproportionately favours certain group of people — to remain unchanging and not reformed.

ANGE:

I'm wondering what the kind of real life implications could be here in Australia if you're saying that this trend of conservative figures eroding our understanding of racial justice is already happening. What's the logical conclusion here, do you think, when we think about, for example, university admissions in Australia, or programs directed at racial justice and so on, what could be under threat?

NYADOL:

The obvious thing is the Voice, the Voice loses, right? Because they sell a version of equality that is fictitious. It's a fiction, right? The idea that First Nation people asking for a kind of remedy is a form of favouritism towards them that is unfair to mainstream Australia, right? If that argument win, the Voice fails. But it is a ridiculous argument. Yeah. And it's not consistent with a concept of real equality. If conservatives want to quote Martin Luther King as a standard, what King says — if you do more than just Google a quote from him — is that when a society has done a special harm to a group of people, it must do something special to remedy that harm. I look at even the slogan that the No campaign use as a good tool to analyse what is happening. You know this “if you don't know, vote ‘No’”, this elevation of wilful ignorance as a form of conducting personal affairs and national issues, right? It invites you to not think about the history of this country and how it was formed. It invites you to refuse to deal with the realities of today, of what indigenous experiences are, of the disparities in health and education, it invites you to ignore that, in order to adapt a comforting narrative that allows society never to change at all.

ANGE:

And just finally, how effective do you think this tactic of distorting progressive ideas will be? Could it actually be influential, do you think, for a large mainstream section of society, or will it just cater to people who maybe already think this way?

NYADOL:

It is influential, and it has been influential. The deep danger about this approach of taking things out of their historical context is how effective it can be. And I think it's predominantly effective because it allows people, especially those in the mainstream, to keep their hands clean. It allows them to rationalise that in fact, what is being done, it's not wrong, it is the right thing to do. We are just opposing favouritism towards one race of people. We are in fact the real victims, because other people are being given the favour we don't have. It allows them to rationalise their position, it allows them to claim the higher moral ground, and then it allows them to refuse change to occur which allowed them to sustain the status quo, that advantages them above others. In a way, sadly, that's why it's successful.

But no matter how much power they have to impose their version of history, however fictitious, the people who have lived that history never buy that bullshit, because they know what their life is. So they will continue to agitate for the change. They will continue to push for that change because it's the life not only of themself, but the dignity of their children, of the people that they care for. And they'll continue to fight for that.

ANGE:

Nyadol, thanks so much for speaking with me today.

NYADOL:

Thank you very much for having me.

[Advertisement]

[Theme Music Starts]

ANGE:

Also in the news today…

The ACT government is looking into whether it was unlawful for an inquiry into the trial of Bruce Lehrmann to be given to the media ahead of its release.

Walter Sofronoff KC’s board of inquiry chose to give the embargoed report to both the ABC and The Australian newspaper, without informing the territory’s government first.

And..

The Matildas have beaten Denmark in their knockout round of the Women’s World Cup in Sydney.

Australia will proceed to the quarter finals of the world cup for only the second time in the team’s history. The Matildas will face the winner of the France vs Morocco match, which is being played tonight in Brisbane.

I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am. We’ll be back tomorrow.

[Theme Music Ends]