Martin Luther King Day: I'm for honoring him, but I spend too much of the the day rolling my eyes. As a Norwegian, I suspect that Americans with ethnic roots closer to the Equator must be even more put off by the ritual displays of piety. Try to throw out the votes of Black Americans at 7 o'clock, tweet about MLK at 8 o'clock. I'm thinking of you, Lindsey Graham and Ronna McDaniel and, I'm sure, scores I'm unaware of because I was playing board games with kids.
King wasn't so loved when he was alive. A Harris poll from early 1968 found that three-in-four Americans viewed him unfavorably. This article, a welcome antidote to all the artificial sweetener, doesn't come right out and say people thought he was "uppity," out of his lane, but that's what the author, James Cobb, a historian at the University of Georgia, is saying. The previous year, 1967, King had condemned the Vietnam War from the pulpit, and his tone was bitter: he said it was hypocritical to send young Americans thousands of miles "to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia." The above is a video of a speech, "The Other America," he delivered on March 10, 1968, less than a month before he was killed. He says racism is "deeply rooted" in America; he takes up the subject of "white backlash" and calls into question the good will of white Americans; he makes the subtle point that some white liberals recognize that Bull Connor is wicked and regard their criticism of him as a substitute for being committed to racial justice; he calls a riot "the language of the unheard" and says the conditions that lead to them must be condemned as strongly as the riots themselves; he's critical of the "bootstraps" argument (it only occurs to people who have boots); his economic program, which includes a call for "a guaranteed annual income," is that of the left wing of the Democratic party—it's a lot easier to understand why three-fourths disapproved in 1968 than it is to explain the universal approbation he enjoys today. I see now that Mike Pence and Ivanka Trump were among those tweeting about him during this year's festival.
In the 1970s, when Andrei Sakharov and others were calling attention to human rights violations in the Soviet Union, the official Kremlin response often called out the names of "dissidents" who were tolerated or even honored. There were government-approved "dissidents," in other words, who functioned to deflect the criticism of dissidents. I feel like something similar has befallen King. The country's racial past is ugly, a stain that won't wash out, but, no need to look too closely, we all love Martin Luther King. It has required some scrubbing to make him anodyne, however.
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