This month marks the 95th birthday of
Martin Luther King, Jr the iconic American
civil rights and human
rights leader who forced America to live
up to its rhetorical ideals of freedom,
democracy and equality. For his efforts, he
was assassinated in 1968.
The fallen Nobel laureate and “drum major
for justice” - vilified, ostracised and
loathed in life, monitored and hunted by the
government - was honoured posthumously with a
federal holiday in the United
States. Yet, as that holiday has been diluted
and repositioned into a national day of
service, and Dr King’s character has been
neutered and rendered a passive, innocuous and
idealistic dreamer who gave rousing speeches,
Americans have lost sight of the man’s
revolutionary philosophy.
Five decades ago, Martin Luther King
warned of America’s triple
evils: racism, economic exploitation and
militarism. These evils continue to plague the
country to this day, necessitating the radical
restructuring of society the black leader so
urgently promoted.
“I am convinced that if we are to get on
to the right side of the world revolution, we
as a nation must undergo a radical revolution
of values,” King said in his “Beyond
Vietnam” speech. “We must rapidly begin …
the shift from a thing-oriented society to a
person-oriented society. When machines and
computers, profit motives and property rights,
are considered more important than people, the
giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism,
and militarism are incapable of being
conquered.”
Racism, the original American sin
born from the enslavement of Africans and the
genocide of indigenous peoples, has not
abated. In his 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech, King said as black people were
concerned, the US had failed to honour its
promises written in the Constitution and the
Declaration of Independence. “Instead of
honouring this sacred obligation, America has
given the Negro people a bad check, a check
which has come back marked ‘insufficient
funds’. But we refuse to believe that bank of
justice is bankrupt,” he said.
Today, the US has yet to address
reparations to African Americans to repair the
damage of enslavement and the continuing
legacy of institutional racism, including both de jure and de facto
racial and economic discrimination.
Open and avowed white
supremacists operate in the government,
engaging in whites-only policies based on a
false racist theory of white
genocide, with an immigration
policy of ethnic cleansing,
separation of migrant families and
imprisonment of 15,000
children - all designed to keep
whites in the majority. Meanwhile, white
supremacist hate groups are thriving in the
streets, with a sharp increase in hate
crimes and school bullying in
the era of Trump.
The US is a “flawed
democracy” according to the Economist’s 2018
Democracy index, ranking only 25th
globally in terms of political
participation and culture, governmental
functions, electoral process, civil liberties
and pluralism. In states such as Georgia and
North Carolina, white conservatives of the
Republican Party employ segregation-era voter
suppression tactics against people
of colour and the poor, including restrictive and
unjust voter ID laws, voter
purges, rigged elections and votes
stolen, and gerrymandered legislative
districts.
Despite professing to be the
self-proclaimed “land of opportunity”, the US
maintains a predatory capitalist system with
pathological levels of economic inequality. In
a land of abundance, only a handful enjoy its
wealth. With 40 million people in
poverty, the US is the most unequal advanced
nation, with the least social and
economic mobility in the developed world.
The US profits from misery through private
prisons, and a for-profit healthcare system that forces people to go
bankrupt and into poverty while paying for
medical bills.
The wealthiest one percent owns 40
percent of the nation’s wealth, while the
top 10 percent controls 77
percent of the wealth. While working
Americans are drowning in nearly $1.5
trillion student loan debt they are
unable to pay off. And as conservatives shake
their heads and proclaim nothing can be done,
the nation engages in policies of plunder of
poor and working people, such as a $1.5
trillion tax cut almost entirely for
the benefit of the top one percent.
Meanwhile, Trump forces a government
shutdown over his vanity border wall that
leaves 800,000
federal workers without pay, and he advises
furloughed workers to make
adjustments and, barter with their
landlords and hire an attorney.
A culture of corruption precludes the US from solving its
problems. Politicians are beholden to moneyed
interests rather than held accountable to the
public, a Harvard Business School report suggests. Laws promoting gun
proliferation, environmental degradation and “loyalty oaths” to other
nations reflect the largesse bestowed upon
these politicians by lobbyists who seek to
enact them.
Martin Luther King, aware of the connections between
injustice at home and abroad, spoke out
against US proclivity for war. “As I have
walked among the desperate, rejected, and
angry young men, I have told them that Molotov
cocktails and rifles would not solve their
problems,” King said. “I knew that I could
never again raise my voice against the
violence of the oppressed in the ghettos
without having first spoken clearly to the
greatest purveyor of violence in the world
today: my own government.”
Today, the US meddles in the affairs of other nations,
waging drone wars and killing
hundreds of thousands of innocent
civilians in the name of the “war on
terror”, assassinating people and engaging in
regime change. Decades of US intervention
in Central America caused skyrocketing
levels of corruption and violence that fuelled
a migrant crisis.
Meanwhile, King predicted “spiritual
doom” for an America that continues to
spend more on war than on social uplift.
Today, a nation which claims it must cut
social welfare spending and cannot afford free
universal healthcare or college
spends trillions of dollars on
defence - 37 percent of world military
spending and more than the next seven
highest spenders combined - and
yet cannot account for how the military
allocates that money.
Rather than heed his message, America
killed King, the messenger. Then, it watered
down his message to render it more palatable
and digestible to the “white
moderate” who is “more devoted to order than
to justice”, and prefers that we wait for a
“more convenient season” for freedom rather
than take direct action now. If America hopes
to redeem itself, it must change now.
Note: This article was originally posted
on Aljazeera.com in 2019.