Don’t let the far right distort MLK’s words
“I have a dream that my 4 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.”
Martin Luther King Jr. “I Have a Dream”
Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C., Aug. 28, 1963
This past week we celebrated the life of Martin Luther King Jr. Embedded in this annual celebration is a call to honor King’s legacy by continuing his unfinished work. We are continually called upon to bring about a more equitable society, to seek liberty and justice for all, to pursue the as-yet unrealized American Dream. In recent years, this call includes the need to call out those who whitewash King’s words.
Among the notable distortions is the far-right abuse of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
“You think about what MLK stood for,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said. “He said he didn’t want people judged on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character. You listen to some of these people nowadays, they don’t talk about that.”
DeSantis uses King’s words to reverse their original meaning.
It was in proposing the “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employers Act” in December 2021 that DeSantis made this assertion. Otherwise known as the “Stop WOKE Act,” signed into law in April 2022, this legislation allows parents to sue schools that teach so-called “critical race theory.” It follows upon a June 2021 ban on such teaching in Florida public schools.
Florida’s state Board of Education claims this ban protects schoolchildren from distortion of historical events, or ideological indoctrination as DeSantis terms it. The MAGA movement has been instituting these bans against “critical race theory” throughout the country.
Critical race theory, an academic concept, is taught mostly in law school, certainly not to K-12 students in public schools. Legal scholars developed this approach to racism in the 1970s and 1980s, following the civil rights movement. It views racism as a systemic societal issue, not simply individual prejudice.
The way so-called “critical race theory” is being used in these pervasive bans, however, makes it possible to ban any teaching about race that does not conform to the ideology behind the bans. Unless
Alma Rutgers the teaching reinforces certain “white” views in its reference to race, it will likely be defined and banned as “critical race theory.” This could be teaching about the experience of enslavement, the causes of the Civil War, Jim Crow segregation, Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, or about the inequities in housing, education, and health care.
These are bans on the expressions of non-establishment viewpoints. Suppressed are views of people of color that are inconsistent with an ideology that serves an established white power structure. Banned could be teaching about Martin Luther King.
Tennessee’s ban on the teaching of “critical race theory,” instituted in May 2021, elicited a complaint about including in the curriculum “Martin Luther King, Jr. and the March on Washington,” by Francis Ruffin. The far-right organization Moms for Liberty cited true depictions of the segregated South as a reason to ban this book.
DeSantis’ invocation of King claims the teaching of “critical race theory” makes race the most important thing, while it should be “content of character.” This use of
King’s words whitewashes King’s real message. It also illustrates the extent to which the bans are inherently racist and themselves exemplify critical race theory, as properly conceived. It was a theory to which King subscribed before it became an academic theory.
“Justice for black people will not flow into this society merely from court decisions nor from fountains of political oratory …” King wrote in an essay titled “A Testament of Hope,” published posthumously in 1969. “White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society.”
King’s “I Have a Dream” speech invoked a 1963 society in which “content of character” was far from prevailing over racism, one in which “the Negro still is not free.” That free society remains a dream in 2024.
And in the ongoing pursuit of this American Dream, we owe it to King to call out those who weaponize his legacy in the service of a MAGA agenda.
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