Re-blog orig. posted January 16, 2012 (with updated information)
Once a year, Martin Luther King,
Jr.'s born day prompt the masses to do one (or all) of a few things: Fist pump
about having an extended weekend before rolling over to sleep-in, hit up all of
the MLK shopping deals at the mall, cull a cursory menu of food items that include fried chicken, collard
greens, and other edibles associated with Southern Black-Americans, or reduce
Martin Luther King to his "I Have A Dream Speech", gleaning the parts
that best suits some myopic agenda that often involves trying to peddle
post-racial propaganda or silencing people of color whenever they're trying to
dissect racial politics.
While Martin Luther King, Jr.'s
dream and fight for equal rights seemed cut-and-dry to most, the man was far
more complex and his message(s) way more multilateral than what we've
been taught in school and via the mainstream media, as this
post on Crunk Feminist Collective points out. Since immersing myself
in the social media sphere, I've seen various people quoting common MLK blurbs
on my timelines, usually as a way to reinforce shallow argument sans any real
genuine insight.
Today, I'd like to challenge
folks to dig a little deeper than King's famous "I Have a Dream"
speech and learn things about his life and work we don't often hear or read
about in mainstream media and school textbooks. Right before
King was assassinated, he became a lot more impassioned in his advocacy for
equal rights... and much of that was reflected in later speeches.
The continued fight against
racism and for equality isn't as easy as some people would like to
believe it is particularly when you consider the still tenuous state of today's
economic landscape and racial politics, specifically how this past election year
played out and how, in 2012, we were back to contending with issues like voter suppression and intimidation in predominantly minority neighborhoods. As King illustrated in
later speeches; his work and source material require more depth of
understanding, a rejection of the "colorblind"
mythos (because anybody truly interested in changing the world, can't do so
choosing to not recognize
someone else’s humanity, and a genuine belief in wanting everyone to succeed in
this country; that includes unpacking privilege, understanding how racism works
(this means eschewing the colloquial dictionary terms people usually defer to
in discourses about race), and the deconstruction of White imperialism.
While Martin Luther King,
Jr.'s dream encouraged people to co-exist peacefully; he also
noted the racial/health/economic disparities during that time, as the
following quote from 1967 (the year before he was he was gunned down)
indicates-- "When we view the negative experiences of life, the
Negro has a double share. There are twice as many unemployed. The rate of infant
mortality among Negroes is double that of whites…" -- a reality that many Black
and brown people grapple with today.
So when quoting Martin Luther
King, Jr., please do so with a better sense of understanding.
Additional (and noteworthy) Links: