Fifty years after Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered, his legacy has been thoroughly plundered, appropriated and misused in order to obscure the very lies he fought to expose. His radical dream has been reduced to a gauzy vision of peace without justice; his ferocious demands for a guaranteed income, a Bill of Rights for the Disenfranchised and an end to police brutality have been consigned to a dark corner of our national attic, right next to a box marked THE TRUE CAUSE OF THE CIVIL WAR.
The willful denuding and sanctification of Dr. King can be roughly traced to the first celebration of his birthday as a national holiday, in 1986. As soon as weary conservatives accepted defeat and dropped their opposition to the holiday, the process of coopting King’s legacy began. That legacy was built on a devotion to the truth, and it should be resurrected.
As a political strategist, Martin Luther King was necessarily focused on the imperative of raising white consciousness. He was killed while supporting a strike by sanitation workers in Memphis, now famous for images of marchers carrying signs proclaiming I AM A MAN, a statement meant for the eyes of those not accustomed to seeing plain truth walk down the street in broad daylight.
The work of bringing truth to light was at the core of Dr. King’s mission. If white people are truly interested in honoring his legacy, we should devote ourselves to the restoration of that project. The anniversary of King’s killing by a white man, a murder that echoes still in a relentless parade of black death by white hands, should be taken as an opportunity for confronting truth and working to dismantle systemic racism, an occasion for reflection, commemoration and restorative justice.
It is after all in our best interest. The endless, elaborate, self-annihilating lengths we go to in order to cover up the secret workings of racism has meant not only an ongoing, centuries-long cataclysm for people of color, but a steady corrosion of our capacity to live meaningfully with ourselves.
We organize our civic lives around the imperatives of that secret, and exhaust our selves performing the heartbreaking work of pretending otherwise. Our support (tacit or otherwise) of institutionalized racism deforms our politics, stunts our moral growth and requires the maintaining of huge edifices of ignorance. Our public conversation is kept tightly circumscribed, so that the full extent and ramifications of systemic racism are rarely, if ever, discussed. Our civic and spiritual well-being are invariably sacrificed to tribal fidelity and its demand that we obscure the grand theft at the heart of the American bargain.
We’ve been here before, again and again. The dancing troll at the crossroads intones, “What shall it be? The long, hard slog of Reconstruction or a skip down the Lost Cause highway?” “Extend the New Deal to everyone or keep those Blue Dogs voting Democratic?” “Fight for economic justice or party like it’s Morning in America?” And each and every time we've taken the path marked "Dystopia This Way.”
If there is anything hopeful about this grim historical moment, it’s that it might force upon us a reorientation toward truth, and a reckoning with our history. Nothing makes us more uncomfortable, I know. But taking the comfortable way out is indefensible in times like these.
However much we think we know about how the structures of racism are built and sustained, it’s not enough. Already know about the history of redlining, or school segregation? Learn about their insidious modern variations.
Read, or read again, about the history of mass incarceration, then check in with your secret belief that intact families would go a long way toward solving the problems of the black community. Challenge your assumptions. Think about why people of color look at you funny when you describe someone as “self-made.”
You get the idea.
But learning isn’t enough. The next time you encounter people tut-tutting about the bad manners of protesters instead of the racism they’re protesting against, say something. When you catch pundits attributing support for a presidency built on racism to things other than racism, make a phone call, or ten, or twenty. Call out the people you know and those you don't. Make racism a deal breaker, a friendship-ender, a channel-changer. Don’t let them get away with it.
Listen to and believe your black friends and colleagues who tell you about their encounters with racism. Support post-prison programs. Fight voter-suppression. Advocate for legislation that targets racist police practices. Support candidates who make ending racism a priority. Vote for candidates of color.
Apply scrutiny to your own prejudices, but even more to your hiring practices, your parenting habits, your entertainment choices and your votes. Racism is not about what’s in our hearts, it’s about what’s in the minutes of our cities’ planning commission meetings. It's what's on the maps at our zoning boards, in the loan criteria at our banks, in the box of toys in our kids’ rooms, in our mass transit schedules, in our police force's regulations, on our magazine covers, in our drug laws, in our news sources and on your lips.
Work intentionally to expose and destroy the structures that enable Inequality and bigotry.
We are the problem. That might be a hard truth to live with, but it’s the truth. I sleep on a mountain of bones and so do you. The least we can ask of ourselves is a few restless nights. Every load we lift has been made lighter by generations of broken black hands. Every dollar we spend is soaked in the sweat of untold centuries’ worth of demeaned and invisibilized people. We travel through life on paths cleared by people of color yet named after white men, men who in turn conscripted still more people of color to the job of covering up their crimes. Men like us.
The work of making good on that debt, of creating new and better histories, begins with a look in the mirror. Let’s honor Dr. King by spending this April 4th opening our eyes to the truth, and taking a pick axe to the foundations of systemic racism.
If not us, who?