Reconstructing <equality>: Culturetypal and counter‐cultural Rhetorics in the martyred black vision

A guiding purpose of most social and political minority movements in a pluralistic society is to achieve legitimacy in the terms of the dominant ideology. In Anglo‐American liberal democracies such legitimation is located in the ideograph <equality>, an ideological commitment which promotes “sameness” and “identity.” An interesting feature of <equality> is that it functions implicitly as a rhetoric of control, requiring those who would achieve legitimacy to sublimate their “difference” from the dominant ideology. As such, it poses serious contradictions for a society that is truly interested in promoting a humanistic and pluralistic egalitarianism. In this essay the authors examine the way in which the culturetypal rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the counter‐cultural rhetoric of Malcolm X functioned together to negotiate this characteristic of <equality> as black Americans in the 1960s strove to achieve legitimacy for their struggle for civil rights, and in so doing constructed a revised and emancipatory conception of cultural <equality>.