If conservatives were to read and listen to King carefully, they would not only find little basis in Kings writings to justify their assaults in his name, but they would be brought up short by his vision of racial compensation and racial reparation, a vision far more radical than most current views of affirmative action. King wrote in Why We Can't Wait that few people consider the fact that, in addition to being enslaved for two centuries, that black folk were also robbed of wages for toil. It is worth quoting King at length:
No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law. Such measures would certainly be less expensive than any computation based on two centuries of unpaid wages and accumulated interest. I am proposing, therefore, that, just as we granted a GI Bill of Rights to war veterans, America launch a broad-based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, our veterans of the long siege of denial.
King ingeniously anticipated objections to programs of racial compensation on the grounds they discriminated against poor whites who were equally disadvantaged. He knew that conservatives would manipulate racial solidarity through an insincere display of new-found concern for poor whites that pitted their interests against those of blacks. King claimed that millions of [the] white poor would benefit from the bill. Although he believed that the moral justification for special measures for Negroes is rooted in the robberies inherent in the institution of slavery, many poor whites, he argued, were the derivative victims of slavery. He conceded that poor whites are chained by the weight of discrimination even if its badge of degradation does not mark them.
King understood how many poor whites failed to understand the class dimensions of their exploitation by elite whites who appealed to vicious identity politics to obscure their actions. King held that discrimination was in ways more evil for [poor whites], because it has confused so many by prejudice that they have supported their own oppressors. Hence, it was only just that a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, intent on raising the Negro from backwardness, would also rescue a large stratum of the forgotten white poor. For King, compensatory measures that were truly just that is, took race into account while also considering class had the best chance of bringing healing to our nation's minorities and to the white poor. It was never one or the other; both were a moral priority for King.
