MLK Talks About Institutional Racism

[qwlauren35]

Every year for MLK Day, I host a "King Thing" to listen to a relevant sermon or speech and discuss it. Most years, we also listen to the "I Have a Dream" speech, but the speech I chose this year was an hour long, and as it was, our two hour feast turned into a four hour roundtable discussion. I'd like to present you with a quote from this speech. It was given in 1967, a year before King died, at the 11th anniversary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It is entitled "Where Do We Go From Here?".

Here's the quote:

Even semantics have conspired to make that which is black seem ugly and degrading. In Roget's Thesaurus there are some 120 synonyms for blackness and at least sixty of them are offensive, such words as blot, soot, grim, devil, and foul. And there are some 134 synonyms for whiteness and all are favorable, expressed in such words as purity, cleanliness, chastity, and innocence. A white lie is better than a black lie. The most degenerate member of a family is the "black sheep." Ossie Davis has suggested that maybe the English language should be reconstructed so that teachers will not be forced to teach the Negro child sixty ways to despise himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of inferiority, and the white child 134 ways to adore himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of superiority.

Thoughts?

[Solomon]

1. Malcom X said it

before MLK.

[qwlauren35]

2. I'm not surprised.

There's a tinge of the radical to it. However, MLK got radical when he wanted to.