Don't let anyone lie to you on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Never allow conservatives to co-opt King's words to turn him into a snuggle bunny who just wants us all to wuv each other. King was a badass, radical son of a bitch, and his beliefs would still set the hair on fire of most all politicians of both parties. He believed in the redistribution of wealth. He spoke in stark terms about the end results of racism. He knew that along the path you were going to have to deal with liars, ratfuckers, and shitbirds, and you had to know how to deal with them or you were just gonna want to wring their necks, which is what they want you to do so they can crush you.
Here are some excerpts from a transcript of King talking to his Southern Christian Leadership Council staff at a retreat in 1966. Some of this would make it into his speeches and sermons, but this is King as a raw nerve, never backing down but always going forward with eyes wide open:
"Our society is still structured on the basis of racism. And racism says in the final analysis that a particular group is superior and another group is inferior and this is what we still confront...the ultimate logic of racism is genocide. In a sense, Hitler was one of the most honest men in history because he carried racism to its logical conclusion. The minute that he concluded that the Jewish people were inferior by nature, then he started killing Jews, and with his sick concepts and his pathological mind, and his deep racism, he ended [up] killing six million Jews. And the fact is that the ultimate logic of racism is genocide. If you say that I am not good enough to eat at a lunch counter, if you say that I am not good enough to go into a hotel or motel because of the color of my skin or my ethnic origins, then you are saying that that I do not deserve to exist. And this is what we see when we see that racism still hovering over our nation. And there is no doubt of the fact that it is still there, so we must see that during this period when we have had very dramatic victories we did not rid our society of racism..."
King explained why there was what he termed a "so-called white backlash" to their movement. It was because now they were asking for things that cost money, not just rights: "You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You [are] really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with the captains of industry. You can't talk about getting better schools in our nation without going back to see...that all schools are messed up.
"Suburban politicians talk about they are against open housing. And yet out of the same breath, they talk about they are not racists. And so what we are witnessing, my friends, is something that is very old in our country. And I am not going to be intimidated by the so-called 'white backlash' because American has been backlashing on the question of fundamental, basic, and human rights for the black man for more than 200 or 300 years."
King based his belief in wealth redistribution in his faith, taking a stand that no allegedly Christian politician would dare to take: "I am simply saying that God has left enough [to spare] in this world for all of his children to have the basic necessities of life, and God never intended for some of his children to live in inordinate, superfluous wealth while others live in abject, deadening poverty. And somehow I believe that God made it all. I believe that God made the coal. I believe that the gasoline that goes in my automobile is there because God made it, and I believe firmly that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. I don't think it belongs to Mr. Rockefeller. I don't think it belongs to Mr. Ford. I think the earth is the Lord's, and since we didn't make these things ourselves, we must share them with each other."
Yeah, when someone posts on Facebook about how much King wanted us to love each other, make sure they understand that he would fuck their shit up. Love existed on his terms, not the fake love of the racists in denial.
