The Whitewashing of Dr. King
Over the past few years, I’ve been thinking about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. a great deal. Not just his legacy, though that’s part of it, but how that legacy has been received, how it’s been manipulated to fit a rapidly reconfiguring status quo.
We all have an idea of the kind of man Dr. King was, reinforced by the slow parade of teachers — from elementary to high school — discussing the salient points of his most widely known public address in which he talks about his dream for the nation and its black citizens. These formative years ultimately develop the lens through which we reflect critically on history. The old cliche is true, in that those with the power to write our history also have the power to shape how it will be packaged for future generations. Words are so powerful, even more so than memory, because once memory fades, words are all that remain to make sense of our communal past.
I’d submit that the view we have of Martin Luther King, Jr. is largely framed through glasses that have been whitewashed by those wielding the words through which history is passed down. We aren’t encouraged to see him as a revolutionary, as the radical catalyst of social change, as an end in and of himself. Instead, this formidable man is neutered and made safe by the way we’ve learned to view him today. He has become a means to society’s wider, and less noble ends. Even his words are dulled to suit purposes that are antithetical to the spirit of the movement he championed.
We never speak of Dr. King’s radicalism, which underpinned everything he did. We only speak of his civil disobedience, and only in a way in which that benign turn the other cheek mentality is indicative of his inherent humble nature. To accept violence without responding with violence is a heightened form of self control, a heightened form of obedience to the law, we’re told, from the time we first learn to read until the time we begin to formulate our own arguments, and society values an obedient negro above all else. A negro who knows his place. In this way, Dr. King’s words — sharp enough to cut through the complacency of his era when he uttered them — lose their meaning, and with it, their power.
A funny thing happens then. The microscope of history tightens its focus, eliminating the more troublesome aspects of Dr. King’s persona…
