Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in 1963 sounds innocent enough. Indeed, it sounds so uncontroversial that many conservatives and conservative groups are fond of quoting it as a gotcha against the farthest fringes of recent woke race theory.
“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,” King famously proclaimed.
Who could disagree with that? Who, besides the Ibram Kendi’s of this world, could hope for a nation in which the color of one’s skin matters more than one’s character?
Yet younger generations are bristling against holidays like MLK Day, and it’s not just those who are dabbling in brands of edgy internet racism.
King was an adulterer, a heretic, an alleged rapist, and far more “woke” than his famous one-liners would lead us to believe.
Those who, like me, want to do away with the ritualistic adulations of a man like King do not point this out because we believe that noble movements cannot be led by complicated or even immoral men. Picking apart the personal lives of our ancestors and discarding their life’s work on that basis is a rabbit hole that ends in our own history’s self-destruction. Yet there remains something sinister about MLK Day even given these considerations.
MLK Day represents the de facto wokism which infects both the right and the left, rewriting our history into a basic story of oppression and hate vs. freedom and liberalism. King’s solution to racist laws and customs across the country was not to return to the Constitution, regardless of what older conservatives anxious to adopt his popular legacy claim. Rather, King’s solution is the same one we’re likely to hear on MSNBC today – race quotas, affirmative action, and flirtations with communism.
It’s the assertion that we must ignore these facts which is causing so much growing sentiment against celebrating MLK Day. Younger conservatives see in the holiday yet another example of the consensus on race and liberalism which infects both parties. In other words, the conservative establishment is willing to overlook a whole host of the most leftist positions because their opponents may call them racist for opposing a universally-beloved character like King. Even your most Republican aunt probably posted an MLK quote on Monday, because she was taught by cable news and radio shows she consumes that the racial aims of the left were wholesome and in line with the doctrines of the founding fathers up until 18 or so years ago when Barack Obama announced his candidacy. For her, your opposition to MLK Day could only be because you are the epitome of the racist governors of the South which King decried.
Such idols must be destroyed. Yet opposing liberal idols like MLK will be challenging, as even many in conservative leadership have embraced his legacy positively, harping on his so-called color-blind “dream.” But it must be done if we are to fully eradicate the weak liberalism of the establishment right which gave rise to wokism in the first place.
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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.
Image credit: Picryl
