It's Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, or "That day when conservatives say that one line from King and pretend that's all he ever said." Or, really, considering how the entirety of the MAGA movement, pissy politicians and prickish pundits, are simply denying that civil rights laws are needed, maybe they'll just ignore King altogether.
It might be best for the motherfuckers to not fake it because, see, they get so much wrong about the "content of character" line from MLK. Just as a reminder, he most famously said it in his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963 and this is the full line: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
The way that line is interpreted so often by the right is that non-white people will somehow magically earn the right not to be judged by skin color by white people. Except there's a flip side to that, and it's something King would expand on in later work in the last few years of his too-short life. See, it's not just non-white people who are judged by their skin color, but also whites by non-whites. White people were (and are) the fucking problem when it comes to race relations, and King was also implying that they needed to step up if they didn't want color to be the most defining characteristic.
In a keynote speech at the American Psychological Association's annual convention in September 1967, King spoke about the role of social scientists in the fight for civil rights, and he was pretty goddamn clear about who needed some character-building:
"White America needs to understand that it is poisoned to its soul by racism and the understanding needs to be carefully documented and consequently more difficult to reject. The present crisis arises because although it is historically imperative that our society take the next step to equality, we find ourselves psychologically and socially imprisoned. All too many white Americans are horrified not with conditions of Negro life but with the product of these conditions-the Negro himself.
"White America is seeking to keep the walls of segregation substantially intact while the evolution of society and the Negro's desperation is causing them to crumble. The white majority, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change, is resisting and producing chaos while complaining that if there were no chaos orderly change would come."
Later in the speech, talking about rioting and discussing how the product of it was damage to property and not people despite the violence against the bodies of Black people, King quoted Victor Hugo: "If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness."
And he explained, "The policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness; they create discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos. Day-in and day-out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; and he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them but do not make them any more than a prisoner makes a prison. Let us say boldly that if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man."
King would fuck MAGA's shit up because he would look at what's happening in Minneapolis and point out that the real criminals aren't the workers and parents and children trying to live meaningful, peaceful lives. No, you can figure out who the villains are by the violence they use to terrify and punish people for just existing. And I believe he would demand widespread civil disobedience, leading it himself.
As I've said every MLK Day for over 20 years, King was a radical, and the effort to erase his radicalism is one of the successes of the conservative revision of American history. While our hateful leaders pretend that we moved beyond the need for laws protecting the rights of non-whites, as MAGA freaks irrationally scream about "diversity" like it means "holocaust," we have to remember that the job of a society is to lift people up, or it's not worth saving.
