Some random dude told me on facebook that I need to study up on my history, because I had said MLK didn’t advocate pretending to be colorblind. Bitch please.
This was after he’d told troubledsigh (a presumably white dude talking to a man of color) the usual misunderstandings of MLK being all about us just holding hands and racism suddenly disappearing. Nope, he said to fucking fight.
MLK Jr. didn’t ask for rights, he wasn’t pandering or sweet to the forces that oppressed him. He was a threat to whiteness through and through.
MLK Jr. wasn’t violent not because he wanted to gain some brownie points from whitedom but because he KNEW, FIRSTHAND, what…
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
Only MLK quote I’m entertaining for the day. If you can’t get down with this MLK, the forgotten, less cheery-hand-holding MLK, then don’t come at me about what my relationship to his legacy should be and why I should be a pacifist.
Especially when I feel like if anyone were to be violent in fighting oppression, it should be white people.
Me & firesandwords were just joking about exactly this about an hour ago! We were doing a lil role play where I was the grumpy black lady and he was the liberal white dude…you know, like I say, “Hey, black people exist!” and he says, “That’s divisive! Why are you being violent?” I promise it was all in good fun.
What’s extra funny about white people using that line about “But you have to follow MLK’s dreeeeeeam!” is that I never said I intended to. If MLK encouraged pacifism at all costs, even in self-defense—which is completely false and a ludicrous simplification of his philosophy—that doesn’t mean that I also have to…just because we are both black. I need space for critiquing that philosophy; I don’t need it imposed on me.
I came across this just now while trying to find something related. I’m trying to find something about the privilege of nonviolence in a violent society—or I guess, rather, thinking of oneself as nonviolent in such a context. And I’m thinking about all this in relation to Occupy Wall Street and how much I want to limit my involvement with Occupy New Haven. I want it to not be such an alienating space. I want it to be relevant to my students. I want there to be space for a diversity of tactics, because I have lived a life with enough instances of systemic violence that I really cannot fall back on nonviolence. There were too many times when that option misunderstood and failed me. And yet, I am being told again that we have to be nonviolent, and I’m wondering who “we” means.
Serious Delirium.: Let’s talk about Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Now, before I say anything, I want to say that I do think he was a great man, and very important to the civil rights movement (obviously).
BUT (there’s always a but), the fetishization of Dr. King by activists and liberal-minded politically active people is misinformed, disturbing, and unhelpful.
Martin Luther King Jr. is, in America, the prime example of “why non-violence works”. He is the figurehead of silent protest and peaceful resistance, and many people honestly think this is because the culture he was trying to change respected these tactics and found it in their hearts to change and become less racist, or at least more tolerant. This is completely a constructed image- one of the main reasons the civil rights movement succeeded (I use that term loosely, because obviously institutionalized racism still exists heavily) is due to the fear generated by the more extreme sections of the civil rights movement, and white people’s default to the less-intimidating pacifist movement.
History has been heavily white-washed to remove violent protest as effective (or even necessary). This is why it’s “Martin Luther King Jr. Day”, not “Malcom X” day or even “Civil Rights Day”. The dominant culture wants us to associate revolution and freedom with pacifism, even though it explicitly betrays those principles. The reason why is obvious. Any group that is in power develops the sole goal of staying in power at all costs. Making the oppressed believe that non-violence is the only ethical, moral, and effective means of protest and change is to negate them, and force them to play by rules that those in power are free to break. It is purposeful constraint of ideas and methods forced upon the oppressed by the very people oppressing them. To marginalize violent protest is to tell those who are being hurt that it doesn’t work, and to force your oppression not just upon them, but to let the oppressed group oppress themselves. Martin Luther King Jr Day is, sadly, not about celebrating a great man- it is about constructing the false image that those who are getting hurt and even dying by the hand of those in power have no violent recourse against those who are hurting them. It is a holiday about removing the option of self-defense from the oppressed.
Realest talk.
I think I’m down with this. At the very least, it has always bothered me that people can spend one afternoon a year talking about nonviolence and then going back, unquestioningly, to lives supported by violence.
I also am just not a fan at all of hero worship. Because heroes are just people—people who you happen to admire for some set of reasons, but they are still people who make mistakes, have bad habits, and are not going to have perfect politics all the time. In fact, I am right now wearing a hoodie with Stokely Carmichael stenciled on the front. And people have asked me don’t I know about the sexist shit he used to say; I didn’t know for a long time, and when I finally found out about it a few years ago I was crushed, because Stokely was kinda my hero when I was in middle school & high school (yes srsly). But, he was also human, and that’s not an excuse for problematic behavior, not at all, but it is an example of how you can admire someone for one way they’re really rad, and then they totally drop the ball in another instance. Fetishization requires turning someone into a two-dimensional cutout and not a real, full person.
And to take MLK so far out of context as is done with the holiday only increases the damage of hero worship. Like I want to know what music he liked, I want to know his opinion on old folk blues. I want to know what women of color authors he saw his work dialoguing with. I want to know his feelings, like deeply, of his friendship and work with Bayard Rustin who was gay. I want all of this stuff, or none of it. But I don’t want the shit that’s going on now—posters about nonviolence in racist public schools with cops in them, or white people telling me I should be patient and ask politely for what I need by quoting garbled versions of MLK’s words back at me, or people telling me to put my work on hold to instead organize voters for Obama so we can have a post-race society like MLK wanted (I mean, did he say that?).
I guess MLK Day has always seemed to me like the holiday version of tolerance or diversity—it’s like a full day of buzzwords that white liberals can use to tell themselves they’re treating me well, or at least well enough, just so long as I don’t get too pushy or talk too much.
(As an aside, in 1991 when I was in kindergarten we were singing a song about Martin Luther King, I guess before the holiday, and I interrupted it to tell everyone about how the president started a war (Gulf War) and wasn’t that messed up. I got a phone call home over it.)
