Dr. Maulana Karenga

The 40th anniversary of the martyrdom of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. calls for us not only to pause to pay rightful hommage to him and the great gift of life he gave us, but it also calls for us to think in deep and soul-searching ways about the meaning of his self-sacrifice and how we have honored his legacy or let it wither along the way as we turned our attention to lesser things and helium-light thoughts about the way we should live, the nature and range of our responsibility to ourselves and each other and to those whose sacrifices are the source of any forward thrust we claim. And we must also ask ourselves have we allowed his message and meaning to be transformed into a media and made-for-museum ritual of remembrance, emptied of essential meaning and reduced to corporate commercials and self-deluding commentaries on racial reconciliation without the requirements of justice or struggle? Indeed, it is King himself who cautioned us against hoping for and declaring “a cheap victory in a climate of complacency” and out of fear or seeking favor, participating in the great betrayal of silence which ultimately leads to our social death. For he taught, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.”

In the year before his martyrdom, in September, King gave a speech at the American Psychological Association which speaks well to the ease with which society embraces illusions about itself and demands we embrace them also. He told them, as if he were speaking today, that though social scientists can aid us in the understanding of ourselves and society, “White society is in even more urgent need”. Indeed, he said “White America needs to understand that it is poisoned to its soul by racism”, and that “all too many White Americans are horrified not with the conditions of (Black) life but with the product of these conditions-the (Black person) himself”. In a word, they are not horrified by injustice done to us in New York or New Orleans, in the schools, courts, streets, slums or prisons, but are horrified at the righteous anger we express, and the audacity not just to hope but also to resist injustice and oppression in its various forms.

King states that there is “little depth to the changes” they pretend is progress. For although White America as a whole has stopped some of its more outrageous raw-meat racism, he said, “that’s not the same thing as ordaining brotherhood” or “inaugurating justice”. King criticizes White Americans for racializing crime and talking about it outside of the social conditions that cause and feed it. He calls these socially-based crimes “derivative crimes” and argued that “they are born of the greater crimes of the White society”. And he challenged White society to stop violating laws themselves, committing violations which further deprive the poor, relax or fail to enforce building codes and regulations, let “police make a mockery of law”, deny “equal employment and education and provision for civic services”.

King’s criticism of the Vietnam War is clearly a criticism of the war in Iraq. The war, he said, has “played havoc with our domestic destinies. The bombs that fall in Vietnam explode at home”. Indeed, “it has frustrated development at home” and it tells especially the poor and needy, that society “place(s) insatiable military demands above their most critical needs”. Moreover, it has wreaked havoc on the lives and land of Vietnam, left countless youth dead, mutilated and maimed and “greatly contributed to forces of reaction in America”.

Published in : Op-Ed, Dr. Maulana Karenga