What about equal rights is pluralistic?
Much of the civil rights movement was fighting for equality against an ethnocentric backbone that had access to the rational sphere where the African Americans did not. I would argue that this fight was more similar to The Enlightenment shift, than it was to a shift from rationalism to pluralism, and so therefore was a shift from ethnocentrism to rationalism.
To me the aspects of the civil rights movement that WERE pluralistic were reparations, and affirmative action. These types of arguments argue for shifting the playing field such that it is not only flat, but weighted in the favor of the historically oppressed in order to flatten it forward in time.
I think you are accurate in your description. What’s interesting with the civil rights conversation is how it really demonstrates multilayered realities at play. You are right that the essence of civil rights was to shift the country into the deeper realization of the modern/rational consciousness it was founded in. Civil rights leaders had pluralistic even integral development and by coming at it from that space were able to speak to the conditions of black lives from multiple stages and lines. They evoked Christian consciousness, reason, and justice in their pursuit of this expansion.
The other interesting thing with looking at the Integral ethos of civil rights is the way in which red/amber development differs for the oppressed from the oppressor. I haven’t really thought this through, but there is something that gets stuck at green for the oppressor group where our shame leads to ethnocentric dissociation. I think this may be why so many liberal greens are acting out the political views from that amber and below stage. I found that in myself and have been lately trying to integrate my “whiteness”. It’s an interesting conversation to me, thanks for bringing it up.
In our most recent episode of The Ken Show, which was about Integral Social Justice, Ken framed Martin Luther King Jr.'s teachings as demonstrative of healthy orange values — “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
I think that green really began to seep in around the margins of this statement, bringing with it an increased cultural sensitivity, explicit pro-multicultural values, and a pluralistic sensibility – all qualities that orange largely lacked. So I think that the civil rights movement was largely sparked by mature orange values, particularly around universal individual freedoms, but was largely carried by green views that began to question and relativize the most unhealthy aspects of orange — monolithic universalism, colonialism, materialism, etc.