Incremental Steps Toward a More Perfect Union
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice — Martin Luther King.
One of the discussions that I look forward to in my American history classes each semester starts with the famous quote from Martin Luther King’s 1968 speech at the National Cathedral. King’ who was paraphrasing transcendentalist Theodore Parker’s words from a century earlier, was acknowledging that progress is slow, yet he believed that morality had positive momentum in the same way Newton’s First Law of motion posited that a body in motion stays in motion. The beauty of teaching with the King quote is that students could easily challenge the validity of the passage during any given semester in my teaching career, and it always led to fruitful and thought-provoking discussions. Was the arc of the moral universe bending upward for Trevon Martin, Eric Garner, or Brionna Taylor? Outside of issues of race, where is the morality in detaining children at the border? What about the January 6th insurrection? What about the lack of universal healthcare? Is there any morality in new laws that restrict voting? A daily barrage of bad news leads students to question the very existence of a moral universe.
The problem with quotes is demonstrative of the problem with history itself. Everything about history is open to interpretation and has way too many moving parts to encapsulate in any orderly fashion. It’s the dilemma of human nature — we like things that are neatly packaged and organized in a way that we understand, and we tend not to be fond of uncertainty or grey areas. We want categories of on or off, stop or go, black or white — but history is like society itself; it’s messy and uncomfortable. When students claim that there is little evidence to back up King’s quote, I can easily argue that there is indeed evidence, but it is continually unfolding, and our lifetimes are too short to comprehend how far the world has come.
The arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, but it is not a straight line; it’s more like a saw blade with peaks and valleys.
Because history is disorganized, messy, and open to interpretation, it can be difficult to validate a quote like King’s. The analogy that seems to work best for my students and me is to imagine the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice but visualizing the arc as a saw blade. The peaks and valleys along the upward slope represent the progress and setbacks on the journey towards justice. No one ever promised that progress is inevitable or that it follows a consistent path. Still, between hints of goodness that tried to emerge out of Reconstruction, or the Progressive movement, or the Great Society, I can make a pretty good case that the arc does bend in a positive direction.
With the conviction of Derek Chauvin yesterday, we may be on an upward swing. Perhaps it’s the notch rising out of the valley carved out by the Daunte Wright killing, which took place in the same city while the Chauvin trial was underway. It’s not that the Chauvin conviction is an insignificant marker, but we need to accept that it is only a step in the right direction. George Floyd’s death was a tragic loss that we can never justify, and the Chauvin case won’t automatically end the ongoing issues with bad actors among the police and throughout society itself. Still, the outpouring of outrage across the demographic spectrum and in the White House gives us hope that the forward motion of morality is still moving in the right direction.
If the jury in the Chauvin trial at all represents society's feelings at large, then it's clear that incremental progress is being made. Still, at the same time that the jury was being seated and Daunte Write was being gunned down, GOP representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was discussing forming the “American First Caucas” in congress that is intended to protect “Anglo-Saxon political traditions.” Society like history continues to be messy and uncomfortable, but people and movements like Greene’s are insignificant and spread across the dustbins of history. The Chauvin verdict means more. It represents the voice of the people who are working towards forming a more perfect union and gives us hope the arc of the moral universe is still moving forward and on an upward trajectory.
