{"id":32608,"date":"2023-01-15T00:45:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-15T00:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=32608"},"modified":"2023-01-21T05:44:46","modified_gmt":"2023-01-21T05:44:46","slug":"how-the-distortion-of-martin-luther-king-jr-s-words-enables-more-not-less-racial-division-within-american-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/how-the-distortion-of-martin-luther-king-jr-s-words-enables-more-not-less-racial-division-within-american-society\/","title":{"rendered":"How the distortion of Martin Luther King Jr.\u2018s words enables more, not less, racial division within American\u00a0society"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hajar Yazdiha<\/a>, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

U.S. Rep. Chip Roy<\/a> of Texas is just the latest conservative lawmaker to misuse the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to judge a person on character and not race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the protracted battle<\/a> to elect Rep. Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House, Roy, a Republican, nominated a Black man, Byron Donalds<\/a>, a two-term representative from Florida who had little chance of winning the seat. Considered a rising star<\/a> in the GOP, Donalds has opposed the very things that King fought for and ultimately was assassinated for \u2013 nonviolent demonstrations<\/a> and voting rights protections<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Calling Donalds a \u201cdear friend,\u201d Roy noted the selection by Democrats of another Black man, Hakeem Jeffries<\/a> of New York, and invoked King\u2019s words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFor the first time in history, there have been two Black Americans placed into nomination for speaker of the House,\u201d Roy said<\/a>. \u201cHowever, we do not seek to judge people by the color of their skin, but rather, the content of their character.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Republican U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida is applauded after being nominated for House speaker on Jan. 4, 2023. Jabin Botsford\/The Washington Post via Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As a scholar<\/a> who researches social movements, racial politics and democracy, I have seen the consequences of the misuse of King\u2019s words play out everywhere from the halls of Congress to corporate diversity training sessions to local school board meetings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Roy\u2019s case, the invocation of King\u2019s legacy was an attempt to hide Donalds\u2019 outspoken right-wing political views<\/a>, including his vote with 146 others to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Roy\u2019s speech also omits Donalds\u2019 support<\/a> for voting reform laws in Florida that many Black civil rights leaders understood as efforts to disenfranchise minority voters<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As scholars, civil rights activists and King\u2019s own children<\/a> have long pointed out, uses of King\u2019s words, especially by right-wing conservatives, are too often attempts to weaponize his memory against the multicultural democracy of which King could only dream.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A sanitized MLK<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As every Martin Luther King Jr. Day nears on the third Monday in January, politicians across the political spectrum \u2013 including those who opposed establishing the national holiday<\/a> in 1983 \u2013 issue their heartfelt dedications to King or quote him in their own speeches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet January is also a month that commemorates a darker, more recent memory of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by right-wing extremists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two issues \u2013 misuses of King\u2019s memory and the Jan. 6 attacks \u2013 may seem like unrelated phenomena.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet in my book<\/a>, \u201cThe Struggle for the People\u2019s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement,\u201d I show how there is a direct line from distortions of King\u2019s words and legacy to right-wing attacks on multicultural democracy and contemporary politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
U.S. President Ronald Reagan signing Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday proclamation with, from right, King\u2019s widow Coretta Scott King, son Dexter and sister Christine Farris on Jan. 12, 1983. Diana Walker\/Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The misuses of King are not accidental.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a sanitized version of King was part of a conservative political strategy for swaying white moderates to support President Ronald Reagan\u2019s reelection by making King\u2019s birthday a national holiday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even after Reagan<\/a> finally signed the King holiday into law in 1983, he would write letters of assurance to angry political allies<\/a> that only a selective version<\/a> of King would be commemorated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That version was free of not only the racial politics that shaped the civil rights movement but also of the vision of systemic change that King envisioned. In addition, Reagan\u2019s version left out the views that King held against the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, the GOP\u2019s sanitized version only comprises King\u2019s vision of a colorblind society \u2013 at the expense of the deep, systemic change that King believed was needed to achieve a society in which character was more important than race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Weaponizing America\u2019s racist past<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This interpretation of King\u2019s memory would become a powerful political tool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Increasingly through the 1980s, right-wing social movements \u2013 from the gun rights and family values coalitions to nativists and white supremacists \u2013 deployed King\u2019s memory to claim they were the new minorities fighting for their own rights<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These groups claimed that white Christians<\/a> were the real victims of multicultural democracy and in fact were \u201cthe new Blacks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This false version of social reality eventually evolved into the \u201cgreat replacement theory,\u201d the far-right conspiracy theory, espoused by public figures like Tucker Carlson on Fox News<\/a>, that white people are being demographically and culturally replaced with nonwhite peoples and that white existence is under threat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In these distortions, gun rights activists called themselves the new Rosa Parks<\/a>, anti-abortion activists declared themselves freedom riders<\/a> and anti-gay groups claimed themselves protectors of King\u2019s Christian vision<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These distortions of the past were not just rhetorical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over time, these political strategies had powerful effects and generated what appears in my view as an alternative social reality that, for many white Americans, began to feel like the only reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Misinformation threatens democracy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Through the making of these alternative histories, right-wing strategists such as Steve Bannon could stir up white right-wing voters to \u201creclaim\u201d and \u201ctake back\u201d America<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
In this 1965 photo, President Lyndon B. Johnson discusses the Voting Rights Act with Martin Luther King Jr. Hulton Archive\/Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Such was the politics that led to Donald Trump\u2019s 2016 election and shaped a presidential administration that rolled back civil rights<\/a>, emboldened white supremacists and banned anti-racism training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through the misrepresentation of the racial past, this alternate social reality hardened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, these revisionist narratives have fractured the collective understanding of who we are, how we got here and where we go next. In my view, moving forward means honestly confronting the often ugly past and the deep roots of white supremacy that shaped it then and now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is only by facing, rather than ignoring, the complexity of America\u2019s history that the \u201cbeloved community<\/a>\u201d that King once envisioned can be realized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article was updated to correct the year of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and to correctly identify people in the photo caption of the holiday signing.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hajar Yazdiha<\/a>, Assistant Professor of Sociology, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hajar Yazdiha, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences U.S. Rep. Chip Roy of Texas is just the latest conservative lawmaker to misuse the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to judge a person on character and not race. In the protracted battle to elect Rep. Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":32609,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[11106,5094,473,479,13331,1523,4278,13330,1538,987,3455],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32608"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32608"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32663,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32608\/revisions\/32663"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}