2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: If MLK were alive today... [View all]BainsBane
(53,016 posts)I imagine people would be treating him as they do Black Lives Matter. It's easy to revere a figure from a half century ago, someone who doesn't challenge white privilege today. What actual commitment to Civil Rights means is standing up for racial equality--black lives--rather than reducing a movement to the equivalent of a campaign ad, as though King's legacy means nothing more than promoting a single man's political career. I will take my lessons on King's legacy from African Americans and historians, not from those whose singular fixation is a promoting one member of the political elite.
I don't know what Bernie has said about King or what that conversation on DU has been. I have, however, seen people here repeatedly proclaim that people of color are uninformed or suffering from Stockholm Syndrome because they refuse to prioritize the career of one politician above black lives, and above a Civil Rights movement to save those lives, and because they don't vote as a self-entitled segment of the white elite demands. In the face of such hostility to the rights and voices of African Americans, this attempt at appropriating King's legacy for political propaganda is particularly pernicious. Those who see the majority of African Americans as unfit to make their own democratic choices unsurprisingly feel entitled to take from black folks, including their very history, even as they denounce a contemporary Civil Rights movements as insufficiently deferential to white "progressives" and Bernie in particular.
We have a Civil Rights movement going on right now today--people continuing to carry on the struggle than MLK started. We all know how various Americans have responded to that movement, who has declared it a Soros conspiracy, who insisted that BLM had no right to interrupt some as important as Bernie Sanders. That tells us much of what we need to know about what people's views on race and civil rights are. The whitewashing of King's legacy and opportunistic appropriation of history is a continuation of those same efforts. Civil Rights becomes about Bernie. He is what matters most--not the horrific, violent racism that afflicts America today or the historic and contemporary struggle for racial equality, but Bernie.