January 15, 2022
Today is the 93rd birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when we will once again endure mainstream America’s mawkish veneration that flattens and distorts what he stood for. In the American popular imagination, Dr. King is remembered for one eloquent speech in 1963 importuning white America to judge Black people by the “content of [our] character,” and his death at the hands of a racist assassin.
Americans prefer to forget Dr. King’s scathing condemnation of white moderates “who are more concerned with ‘order’ than justice; who prefer a negative peace, which is the absence of tension to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice,” (Source: “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” April 16,1963).
Americans don’t want to engage with Dr. King’s critique of our country’s vast wealth inequality. His statement 56 years ago that “depressed living standards for Negroes are a structural part of the economy,” could have been written today. Dr. King’s observation that, “Certain industries are based upon the supply of low-wage, under skilled and immobile non-white labor,” explains today’s opposition to unionization efforts at Amazon and Starbuck’s, (Source: “MLK’s Forgotten Call for Economic Justice,” originally published 3/14/1966, The Nation).
We have completely erased Dr. King’s uncompromising condemnation of the Vietnam War and American militarism more broadly detailed in his incisive speech at The Riverside Church in 1967, when he presciently declared that “when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered,” (Source: “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”, delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King at The Riverside Church on April 4, 1967).
Today, 54 years after Dr. King’s death, we are not only still battling racism, materialism and militarism, but are threatened by a major political party’s dedication to, not only destroying everything that Dr. King fought for in his life, but to burning down our very democracy itself.
After all, a country where Black, Brown, Asian and Indigenous people have to surmount an increasing number of obstacles to cast a ballot is not a democracy. A country where states are passing laws allowing state legislatures to overturn the will of the electorate is not a democracy. A country where benighted bigots ban books by and about Black people cannot call itself a democracy.
In spite of all of this, Congress is still struggling to pass voting rights legislation. Putative Democrats Manchin and Sinema persist in elevating an arcane procedural rule over the actual Constitutional rights of living, breathing Americans. They have been unmoved by pleas from civil rights leaders or fiery speeches by Joe Biden. Manchin and Sinema would rather preen for Beltway pundits than act. In the battle between white supremacy and multiracial democracy, they appear to have picked a side. Whether they are “actual racists” is decidedly beside the point. Manchin and Sinema may surprise us, but all I know is we’d better have a Plan B.
#MLK Day
#Nocelebrationwithoutlegislation