Beloved Community
No. 7 | 2021
Beloved Community
Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a vision for global equality. In this vision, poverty, hunger, and homelessness are not accepted as inevitable; they are the result of injustice, and they can be undone. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry, and prejudice are replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. International disputes are resolved through peaceful means and reconciliation, not military force. Love and trust triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice prevails.
In 1956, at a victory rally following the Supreme Court decision to desegregate Montgomery’s buses, Dr. King explicitly ties this vision to the practical goals of nonviolent struggle and reconciliation: “The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community…. Political and economic power are ingredients in the objective that we seek in life. And I think the end of that objective is a truly brotherly society—the creation of the beloved community.”
Belief
“COVID, Black Lives Matter, the election—it feels like a distraction. Like we’re being told to look over here while something really bad is happening over there. I’m not voting. Trump is just a figurehead. I can’t see what is happening.”
“I hate what’s happening to our city. It’s worse here than anywhere else. The looters are destroying what was once beautiful. We’ve lost our collective sense of kindness. It used to be her…just look at this city. It’s tragic.”
“The Neighborhood Association wants us to protest in support of Black Lives Matter. But what will that fix? Protesting won’t change anything. And defunding the police while asking for more protections…it makes no sense.”
These are the kinds of things that some of my white neighbors are saying about BLM.
It’s hard to reframe that kind of thinking, or even to loosen its grip. My instinct is simply to slow things down. To build in a pause. A pause can make room for learning. Real learning, which is rarely comfortable. At least, that’s been true for me. And it feels like one of the ways we might move closer to the Beloved Community.
Learn
I’ve been reading Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Rothstein chronicles the explicit racial zoning laws that began in the 1920s, policies that formally engineered segregation and entrenched inequality. These laws didn’t just shape neighborhoods; they locked in place a caste system Wilkerson makes visible. Not incidentally, the 1920s also mark the beginning of the Great Migration, which Wilkerson explores in The Warmth of Other Suns. The timeline matters.
Wilkerson first brings the underlying structure into view:
“America is like an old house with an unseen skeleton, a caste system as central to its operation as the studs and joists we cannot see. It is the architecture of a human hierarchy that buttresses a 400-year-old social order. Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. Looking at caste is like holding America’s X-ray up to the light.”
This is difficult and painful. Many Americans readily recognize the millennia-old caste system of India, in part because it feels distant, rooted in another culture, another empire, another history. What is far harder to confront is the accelerated, chilling caste system of Nazi Germany, defeated yet familiar. Because the Third Reich stands in our history as the enemy, we rarely acknowledge how much of its racial logic was borrowed from American law and practice. In turning away from that resemblance, we avoid examining our own shape-shifting, largely unspoken system of structural racism for what it is.
Caste Stories
In the American story, this caste system begins in August 1619—one year before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock—when a Dutch ship anchored in what is now Virginia. Africans first appear in the record as property: “20 and odd Negroes which the Governor bought for victualles.” While permanent enslavement was not yet fully codified, it was well underway.
In the decades that followed, colonial laws separated European and African laborers into distinct and unequal categories, setting in motion a hierarchy that would become foundational to our social, political, and economic systems.
What makes America’s caste system unique is its presumption of inhumanity. By 1630, colonial censuses did not bother to count Africans at all—even as they accounted for European inhabitants, indentured or free. As Wilkerson notes, “Before there was a United States of America, there was a caste system born in colonial Virginia.” Those at the bottom were not considered human, a belief that justified unspeakable violence, documented without remorse.
A lot has happened since the 1600s. But the structure itself has proven remarkably adaptive.
Slavery was abolished in 1865—but only after the bloodiest war in American history, fought to defend the “right” to torment, rape, imprison, sell, trade, abuse, kidnap, and kill Black people.
Reconstruction gave way to the systematic construction of segregated institutions, white supremacist ideology, legal rationalizations, extralegal violence, and daily racial terror.
Jim Crow brought with it lynchings, legalized exclusion, and the denial of fundamental civil rights—practices that lasted well into, and sometimes beyond, the 1960s.
Today, that structure shows up in housing policy, mass incarceration, poverty rates, education gaps, hiring practices, police violence, voting restrictions, and more. And yet, despite this continuous throughline, slavery is often dismissed as a “sad chapter” in our past. Many white Americans cling to the idea that slavery contradicts our self-image as a just, enlightened democracy. But, Wilkerson urges us to lean in:
“Just as individuals cannot move forward without confronting the trauma of domestic violence or addiction in their families, a country cannot become whole until it confronts what was not a chapter, but the basis of its economic and social order.”
Beloveds
Seen through Wilkerson’s lens, the Beloved Community isn’t a call to harmony without conflict. It is a response to structure—to what has been built, enforced, and denied for centuries. If caste is the framework American life relies on, often unseen or unspoken yet structurally decisive, then the Beloved Community begins with seeing it. That recognition isn’t ancillary to the effort, it’s the threshold.
More soon.
So. Much. Love
Cara
