On this day commemorating the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. which still have much to consider, and much to fight for.
But if you were to listen to the MAGA Faithful, they swear that Dr. King, if he were not murdered in 1968, would be on their side.
Hasan began his Sunday night segment by saying that it took more than 20 years before Congress would pass a law making the slain civil rights leader's birthday a national holiday.
"Prominent Republicans at the time, like the late Sen. John McCain and the current GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IL), voted against it," the host recalled.
One thing Republicans tend to do is take a key message from his "I Have a Dream" speech out of context and quote it, Hasan argued.
"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," the quote says. Republicans use the quote to justify a "color-blind" society that neglects the experiences faced by people of color, according to Hasan.
"I don't think we can ignore race," said Martin Luther King III. "What my father is asking is to create the climate where every American can realize his or her dreams. Now what does that mean when you have 50 million people living in poverty?"
"And when white Americans tell the negro to lift himself up by his own bootstraps, they don't look over and see the legacy of slavery and segregation," said MLK. "I believe we do all we can and seek to lift ourselves up by our bootstraps but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself up by his own bootstraps. Many negroes by the thousands of millions have been left bootless as a result of all of these years of oppression and it was a result of a society that deliberately made color a stigma and something worthless and degrading."
Hasan claimed that many of the things King believed would be things that led leaders in both parties to flee, such as his support for democratic socialism. For example, as a 23-year-old, King said that he was more of a socialist than a capitalist because "capitalism has outlived its usefulness."
King echoed the same sentiment about a month before he died.
Hasan further argued that these will be the things forgotten by politicians on MLK Day as part of what Cornel West called it 'the sanitization of Dr. King.'
In the Capitalist “Color-Blind” world, color — supposedly — doesn’t matter. This view imagines that we are all in the same circumstances, we all have access to the same resources, we all have an equal and fair chance to achieve our hopes and dreams.
Unfortunately, that dream is simply not the reality.
As Dr. King himself pointed out presuming that we are all starting from a “level playing field” is simply not the case. Some of us have been held back, for generations. Some of us are running downhill with the wind at our back, while others must run into a head wind, they must struggle through, over and around a steeple chase with obstacles and hurdles at every turn.
Is it possible to enter life in poverty and yet still achieve educational and financial greatness? In theory, yes. This is of course, The American Dream.
But in reality, according to the Brookings Institute that dream is far easier to achieve in Canada than in America itself.
1. The chances of making it, Horatio Alger-style, from a childhood in poverty to an adulthood in affluence (i.e. moving from bottom to top income quintile) are lower in the U.S. than in other nations. The American Dream is in better shape in Canada:
2. There is a very strong relationship between the incomes of parents and the incomes their children will have as adults. Inequality, in other words, is strongly inherited:
3. Rates of relative intergenerational mobility in the U.S. appear to have been flat for decades:
4. It is a different story, however, for absolute mobility – which indicates how well a person does compared to their parents in absolute terms, rather than relative ones. On this measure of mobility, the last few decades have seen a sharp decline. Most Americans born in 1940 ended up better off, in real terms, than their parents at the same age. Only half of those of those born in 1980 have surpassed their parent’s family income:
The fact is that the ability to shift upward from one generation to the next has been falling away from us all for decades. The standards and living conditions of your parents are becoming a greater and greater indicator of the conditions you will live in, and that your children will live in.
And frankly, we have Capitalism and so-called “meritocracy” to thank for that.
Secondly, as we exalt the efforts of the greatest Social Justice Justice warrior of all time, we also have to admit that the segregation he fought against in his time, has only grown far worse.
Picture this: two babies born on the same day, maybe even within the same hour, at the Harlem Hospital Center in New York City. One baby, born to a Black mother, goes home to her family down the street in East Harlem. The second is taken home just a few blocks south to the Upper East Side by her white mother.
Fast forward to these babies’ adulthoods, and they’ve stayed close to the people and places they’ve grown to love—but their ability to access things like fresh food, quality pharmacies, well-resourced schools, clean water, and even something as simple as the trees that shade their blocks are drastically different. The way their communities are policed and incarcerated is substantially different, too. As a result, the two people are expected to die roughly 19 years apart, despite living just a few blocks from one another.
A new study and interactive map from researchers at the University of California Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute, or OBI, demonstrate a comprehensive attempt to better understand residential racial segregation, the common phenomenon at root of these disparate inequalities, across the US The study finds that, while residential segregation declined modestly from 1970 to 1990, it began increasing in 1990 and has been getting starker ever since. As a result, more than 150 large metropolitan regions in the US—a whopping 81 percent of the total—are more segregated now than they were 30 years ago, according to the study.
“Segregation is the invisible undercarriage of every expression of systemic racism in this country.”
“Segregation is the invisible undercarriage of every expression of systemic racism in this country,” Stephen Menendian, lead author and Director of Research at OBI, told Grist. “While segregation might not explain everything with inequality, it’s the sine qua non of racial inequality, which has a role in all injustices.”
Access to clean water, clean unpolluted air, fresh food, healthcare, good schools and good jobs are all directly linked to where you live. And for generations, particularly in large cities that has been linked to which side of the Red Line you fall.
In 1933, faced with a housing shortage, the federal government began a program explicitly designed to increase — and segregate — America's housing stock. Author Richard Rothstein says the housing programs begun under the New Deal were tantamount to a "state-sponsored system of segregation."
The government's efforts were "primarily designed to provide housing to white, middle-class, lower-middle-class families," he says. African-Americans and other people of color were left out of the new suburban communities — and pushed instead into urban housing projects.
Rothstein's new book, The Color of Law, examines the local, state and federal housing policies that mandated segregation. He notes that the Federal Housing Administration, which was established in 1934, furthered the segregation efforts by refusing to insure mortgages in and near African-American neighborhoods — a policy known as "redlining." At the same time, the FHA was subsidizing builders who were mass-producing entire subdivisions for whites — with the requirement that none of the homes be sold to African-Americans.
Rothstein says these decades-old housing policies have had a lasting effect on American society. "The segregation of our metropolitan areas today leads ... to stagnant inequality, because families are much less able to be upwardly mobile when they're living in segregated neighborhoods where opportunity is absent," he says. "If we want greater equality in this society, if we want a lowering of the hostility between police and young African-American men, we need to take steps to desegregate."
Government very specifically and deliberately created this situation. Government should indeed be used to help alleviate these conditions. It needs to be a national project.
This issue is in and of itself, not racial. The difficulty of upward mobility is just as much a challenge to poor rural whites as it is to poor urban blacks. it just so happens that the rate of living in poverty by race is vastly different.
Similarly, you can see that the varying rates of Infant Mortality by Race, follows the same arrangement.
The rate of pregnancy-related mortality is very similar.
Literally, the conditions in which you live has a direct impact on your ability to live, and the ability of your children to live. Let alone thrive.
This all gets worse when you factor in continuing race and gender discrimination in housing, education, healthcare and jobs.
We can not get to “equality” unless we openly recognize that circumstances are quite literally “UNEQUAL.” Some special attention and special effort needs to be put forward to correct the failures of the past, and the present, to save the future.
Or else we will continue to repeat those failures — as frankly, we have since the time of Dr. King.
Logic dictates that we should look at these charts and place our strongest efforts to alleviate poverty and promote prosperity first among Native Americans, and secondly among Black people, thirdly Latinos. That would only be practical. That would only be fair.
But that type of approach is exactly what our MAGA friends would argue against. They would and have battled directly against all the Dr. King attempted to achieve. They would call it “Reverse-Racism.” They would call it “Woke” or “Wokism.” They would rail against it, just as they are likely to try and dismantle the Infrastructure Investments which are being made by the Biden Administration. Just as they rant against accurate (Black) American History being taught in schools claiming that it is indoctrinational “CRT.” Just as they scream aboug LGBGQ “groomers” exposing our children to different (not bigoted) ideas about gender identity. Just as they have blocked the implementation of Dr. King’s second signature achievment — the Voting Rights Act — for nearly a decade.
It’s not that there aren’t poor white people. Clearly, there are. A nation strategy to remove the barriers which hold them in poverty, from providing access to a world class education, clean water, clean air, afforadable healthcare, to abundant job oppurtunities with living wages would help everyone, black and white alike.
They just don’t want it. They either believe that they’ll be left behind — as black and brown people have been — and/or black and brown people will be uplifted above them.
They think we’re going to treat them the way they treated us.
This is why they have become so unreasonably jealous of any black person rising up. This is why they lose their minds over the idea of a Black Little Mermaid and so-called “Black Washing” in Hollywood.
Marvel does 19 movies where the lead character is White and Male — just one with a Black Male — but then when they do one with a White Female all hell breaks lose. All because she had the all-fired temerity to accurately point out that the majority of roles in most films go to White Straight Males.
“I’m happy to be on the forefront of the normalization of this type of content and to prove once again that representation matters. Diverse storytelling matters, the female experience matters, and these are markers,” Larson said. “So it’s something I’ve always known and I think a lot of people always knew, but this is just normalizing.”
She said having little girls come up to her and say “thank you” has made her “surprisingly emotional.” “I don’t think we think about that all the time as kids. I think we accept what we have, but to see this new generation of boys and girls, or kids who don’t identify as either, being able to see this on screen and to not know anything different is really exciting,” Larson said.
Malkin brought up that he never thought he’d see LGBTQ superhero, at least not when he was growing up. “That breaks my heart to hear that, because there’s no reason,” Larson said. “I don’t understand how you could think that a certain type of person isn’t allowed to be a superhero. So to me it’s like, we gotta move faster. But I’m always wanting to move faster with this stuff.”
If we’re going to give young people hope that they can — possibly — break through the various glass ceilings of class, race, gender and identity that looms over their heads they have to believe that it is at least possible to break through.
That was indeed to core of the argument brought forth by Dr. King was it not?
As we’ve seen in these various backlashes, from characterizing Black Lives Matter as merely violent riotous thugs, to demonizing the 1619 Project as “indoctirination” and “making white kids cry” to attacking LGBTQ teachers as “sexualizing children” and groomers time and time again we see the jealously, rage and greivance of White Straight Males against those who they feel threaten their social position.
But that’s not the way it has to be. In truth, poor whites, poor blacks and all marginalized people have common cause to improve the lot in their lives.
We can all do this together — we can take the reality of the American nightmare and restore the Dream — or else continue to fall hopelessly apart.
The war in Ukraine is part of this same issue because it is a war against corporate corruption and government authoritarianism. It's a war against racial inequity and for gender equality. It’s a war over freedom.
This will be our last battlefield, because there are no more wars worth fighting other than fighting for the future.