The Perversion of Dr King

Every so often there comes a time when you really wish there were someone who could pull a “I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. You Senator are no Jack Kennedy.” And I get the feeling that in the coming four years, those moments are going to come ever more frequently. So now on the holiday that we’re supposed to be remembering Dr Martin Luther King Jr, we are having one of those moments where some people are trying to corrupt the message of Dr King, to whitewash history; therefore, it might be nice to have someone we could look to: someone who served with Dr King, who knew Dr King, who was a friend of Dr King. If only there were someone just like Representative John Robert Lewis of Georgia’s 5th District. Oh, if only the Civil Rights movement weren’t so long ago that we might have a few voices like that of Representative Lewis’s that we could listen to in such times. Alas, we will have to simply believe whatever half thought out musings Rob Schneider might like to share on the subject of what Dr King stood for.

On the one hand, it is a sign of progress that Dr King’s legacy has gotten to the point where even the people who clearly would not have been and still not are on his side at least feel the need to recognize him as being on the right side of history. I mean, let’s not forget that it wasn’t until 2004 that John McCain recanted his decision to vote against MLK Day being a national holiday in 1983. But the trouble with the universalization of Dr King’s message is that it gets watered down and cut up into one or two soundbites that everyone recognizes, even though they lack any appropriate context. If I asked the average American to quote Dr King, I would get a paraphrase of, “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.” If I asked for more, maybe a handful of people would be able to pluck out a few words from “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” or else to quote the old spiritual “Free at Last.” And as great as those messages are, they are but a fraction of two speeches that comprise the tiniest bit of his life’s work.

First of all, to truly appreciate Dr King, it is critical that we recognize him as a human being and all that entails. When we set him up as some god of a bygone era, we minimize the struggle of those who worked with him, we set an impossible model for anyone to live up to including Dr King himself, and most importantly we set up a barrier for discussions about race and class and rights. Any time someone, in the cause of activism for the oppressed and the underprivileged, does anything wrong or controversial, the first thing out of the mouth of pundits will be a condemnation of their entire cause and an appeal to the better tactics and morals of Dr King. This means that any person who calls for justice is doomed to failure in the public eye, because the moment they prove their humanity and slip just a little bit, they give ammunition to their detractors and defenders of the status quo.

Dr King was a great man, but he was not a perfect man. If you cannot accept his lack of perfection, then you do not truly understand his greatness and decentness. For Jesus Christ to do a noble thing is ultimately boring, because as the son of God how can he do anything other than good? For a human being, an imperfect human being, capable of infidelity and plagiarism to inspire nonviolent resistance in the face of a brutal regime, to have that kind of fortitude in spite of human misgivings is what made him exceptional. He is inspirational because of, not in spite of, his imperfections. When we take away that humanity by putting him up on a pedestal, we take away the accessible model for civil rights activists and create a bludgeon for the enemies of justice to beat down any human being who dares dream of a better world.

Did Dr King call for violent resistance against the racism of the United States? No. Did Dr King own firearms to defend his family? Yes. Did Dr King fight racism in the South? Yes. Did he limit his scope to racism in the American South? No. Was Dr King a conservative? Well, according to J Edgar Hoover, the man was a communist. Dr King was everything that the modern GOP reviles, which is why his words have to be sanitized and his message simplified to the point where no one remembers his activism on behalf of unions, against the Vietnam War, in favor of Universal Healthcare, and his dedicated struggle alongside gay rights activists like Bayard Rustin.

But perhaps worst of all, is the perversion of his message of active nonviolent resistance. Near as I can tell, the only part of the words “active nonviolent resistance” that is acceptable to the vast majority on issues of race is “No.” And this is exactly the problem Dr King faced in his own time.
“I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

No matter how mild the resistance, no matter how nonviolent, the fact that there is any resistance at all causes a great many people to simply say “No.” Representative Lewis did not call for his supporters to punch or in any way hurt Mr Trump. Mr Trump has on numerous times called on his supporters to attack demonstrators at rallies. Representative Lewis is exercising his right to simply not participate in an inauguration ceremony, and that is somehow the real offense. A group forms with the audacity to claim that Black Lives do indeed Matter, in spite of discriminatory legal and police practices, and they are seen as the real racists. It is astonishing just how unbalanced the playing field is, yet even the most marginal attempts to balance it is met with condescension and condemnation.

It could not be any clearer what game is being played when the “Alt-Right,” the white supremacists, find their way into power and somehow find the gall to criticize an actual hero of the Civil Rights struggle for bringing race into this. And no matter how much dignity he shows in response to such crass hatred, we are expected to pretend like all sides are on equal footing. So I can only hope at this point that the mere fact that Archbishop Desmond Tutu is still alive will allow people to hear this message as one from a real human and not some myth of a bygone era. “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”