Quoted: On the Misintepretations of Dr. King’s Messages

I wonder about the appropriation of his legacy and work to fit sanitized reform agendas.

I am thinking about the horrifying shooting in Arizona and how Dr. King’s message of non-violence will me used to justify a certain level of complacency and turning a blind eye to state violence. I am thinking of days in jail and young bodies against water hoses, batons, fists, dogs and guns. All too often, when the work of Dr. King is mentioned it is in the context of non-violence and peace as if those words equaled no violence. As if the struggles before him, the struggles contemporary to him, and the struggles after him have not cost lives, blood, freedom.

Too often, non-violent struggle is equated with no violence, as if we can all just wish the injustice away and it will all be ok. Now, as I have stated before, I am not a pacifist, but what I think people most misinterpret about Dr. King, is that they take his messages and interpret his words and actions as encouraging passivity. Just like there are those who take the 14th amendment to play divide and conquer games between Latinos and Blacks (as if the two could not possibly exist in one person). We have seen King’s legacy as a church leader used to justify homophobia and transphobia.

What we need to see more of is an analysis and understanding that no matter what you label struggle, standing up against injustice leave open the mind, body and spirit to violence, from the state (i.e. Boder Patrol, I.C.E.) and from those who will use the “state” to justify their actions (i.e. Minutemen and Police in the University of Puerto Rico). Sometimes this violence is internalized and used against one another in indirect and direct ways.

~~Maegan La Mala, “Martin Luther King, Jr.: Peace Appropriation“

We have turned King into a milquetoast moderate whose agenda went little beyond the ability to sit next to white people on a bus. We’ve stripped away from the public remembrance of this man his calls for income redistribution, his insistence that the United States has become the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” and his proclamation that poverty, racism and militarism are the “triple evils” that America’s rulers have not the courage to confront.

When conservatives can effectively twist King’s singular line about judging people on the “content of their character” rather than the color of their skin into a reason to oppose affirmative action, even though he openly supported such efforts in his writings and interviews in 1961, 1963, 1965 and again in 1967, it ought not surprise us that folks are a bit confused about who King was, and about the principles for which he stood.

The way in which we have forgotten or been misled about King’s legacy is never more apparent than when asking children what they know about his message. Sadly, when I have done so, the most typical answer given is that King stood for not “hitting people,” or “not hitting back if they hit you first,” or that his message would be, were he alive today, “don’t join a gang.” While all these things are true I suppose, they rather miss the point.

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