January 21, 2019
Today, we celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in what would have been his 90th year, had he not been assassinated at the young age of 39. Around the country there will be commemorative programs where children dutifully recite excerpts from his speeches and politicians spout empty rhetorical references to Dr. King’s “dream” of a society where Black people would be judged on the “content of their character,” rather than demonized for the color of their skin.
The version of Dr. king celebrated by America is a bowdlerized, denatured one that upholds the status quo, rather than challenges it. It casts Dr. King as a supplicant petitioning America to recognize the humanity of Black Americans, rather than a radical pacifist demanding the long overdue payment of the debt America owed to its Black citizens.
A cursory look at the news today shows that even by those sanitized standards, America is falling woefully short of fulfilling Dr. King’s dream. Just this weekend, we witnessed a mob of entitled white high school students from Kentucky menace Nathan Phillips, a Native American elder and Vietnam War veteran, who was attempting to defuse tensions between the students and a group of Black Israelites. The students responded by surrounding Mr. Phillips and making mocking “tomahawk chop” gestures (Source: “A Fuller Picture of a Viral Confrontation,” by Michael E. Miller, The Washington Post, 1/20/19).
Once the damning video went viral, the adults predictably bent over backwards to shield the kids from responsibility for their actions. One parent blamed the “Black Muslims,” handily conflating racism and Islamopohobia to misidentify the fringe group actually involved.
New Yorkers who smugly derided the arrogant cruelty displayed by the boys of Covington Catholic got their own comeuppance on Saturday when video surfaced of two girls at Brooklyn’s Poly Prep making “monkey” noises while in blackface, (Source: “See It: Blackface video roils elite Brooklyn private school,” by Ben Chapman, New York Daily News, 1/19/19). Once again, the predictable response of the parents was to claim innocence and ignorance, and the school was more concerned with punishing the person who exposed the video than those who engaged in an appalling display of bigotry.
It is exhausting. Time after time, more energy is spent trying to debunk charges of racism and punish those who expose it, than is ever spent holding people accountable who terrorize others out of racial animus. It is tempting to blame this all on Trump, but the truth is that he merely emboldened and mainstreamed what was already there. We are so busy playing whack-a-mole with the racists du jour, that there is little energy left to engage with the larger questions of how to dismantle the structural racism and income inequality that condemn increasing numbers of Americans to lives of poverty and despair. Those willing to engage with the true scope of Dr. King’s legacy, know that in addition to racism, he condemned the evils of militarism and capitalism. A year before his death, he risked ostracism by coming out forcefully against the Vietnam War. In the year before his assassination, Dr. King was busily mobilizing a Poor People’s Campaign that would unite poor Americans of all races, including white Americans who would “not allow their prejudice to cause them to blindly support their oppressor.”
If we want to truly honor Dr. King, we should follow the lead of the radical prophet he actually was, rather than the anodyne racial diplomat of our imagination. Today is a day to contemplate our future, in light of our past, and grapple with the question Dr. King posed fifty years ago: “Where do we go from here? Chaos or community? The answer is up to all of us.
#MLK90