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

After all, King’s commitment to non-violence had a purpose larger than non-violence itself. Non-violence was, for King and the movement, a means to a larger end of social, political and economic justice. Non-violence was a tactic meant to topple racism and economic exploitation, and lead the world away from cataclysmic warfare. That so many young people seem not to get that part, because teachers are apparently loathe to give it to them, renders King’s non-violent message no more particularly important than the banal parental reminder that we should “use our words” to resolve conflicts, rather than our fists. Thanks, but if that message were all it took to get a national holiday named for you, my mother would have had her own years ago.

So we compartmentalize the non-violence message, much as we compartmentalize books about King and the movement in that section of the bookstore established for African-American history; much as we have compartmentalized those streets named for the man, locating them only in the blackest and often poorest parts of town.

Were this tendency to render King divisible on multiple levels—abstracting non-violence from justice, colorblindness from racial equity, and public service from radical social transformation—merely an academic matter, it would hardly merit our concern. But its impact is greater than that. Our only hope as a society is to see the connections between the issues King was addressing and our current predicament, to see that what affects part of the whole affects the greater body, to understand that racism and racial inequity must be of concern to us all, because they pose risks to us all.

~~Tim Wise, “We Twisted King’s Dream, So We Live With His Nightmare“

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