Today, Monday January 21,
2013, President Barack Obama will be inaugurated into his second term as the
Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces and leader of this great nation. To
many it would only seem fitting that, on this momentous occasion, the president
should take
his oath of office on the Bible that once belonged to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Given that this event also falls on the
same date as Martin Luther King Day, in
many ways it represents the maturation of a country that has come full circle
and gotten past a long and bitter history of exploitation and disenfranchisement
of it’s Black minority. Not only have we as a country chosen to have a Black
man lead our country, but we also have validated his leadership by awarding him
the maximum amount of time that we can possibly give to any occupant of the
Oval Office. This event speaks volumes of the progress that we have made as a
nation. And what better way to commemorate such a milestone than to do so on
the day designed to commemorate the struggles faced by people of color and with
the tool that the man at the front line of that struggle used for guidance.
…so why is it that doing so
would be an affront to everything that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. fought and
died for?
If we take a look back at the
legacy of Dr. King and what he stood for in its entirety, the answer is really
quite simple. The core of who Dr. King was is that of a man filled with a
radical, unequivocal, and unapologetic love for humanity. This unwavering
commitment to mankind and to truth is what made Dr. King a relentless critic of
unregulated capitalism, imperialism, the military industrial complex, and the
many institutions within American society that facilitate racism, poverty, and
war. This was a man whose depth of vision realized the interconnectedness
between the neo-colonialism that drove the Vietnam War and the poverty and
disparity of wealth that people of color were subjected to back home. As he
said in his 1967 speech The
Casualties of War in Vietnam, the bombs that were dropped in Vietnam
exploded back home. They exploded in the city slums, barrios, and reservations from
which the government siphoned off billions of dollars to fund its neo-colonial
cause while ignoring the thousands of black, brown, and red people suffocating
under poverty’s grip.
Dr. King new what the consequences
were of an America who refused to recognize the right to self-determination for
indigenous peoples. He new what would become of a United States that touted its
commitment to democracy while sustaining the regimes of authoritarian dictators
in Latin America. He also knew the great risk he was taking if he were to speak
against these practices that led us into the Vietnam War. On April 4, 1967, exactly a year before
he was assassinated Dr. King followed his conscious and broke his silence on the
war by giving a speech at the Riverside Church in New York City entitled Beyond
Vietnam. As a result, many
labeled Dr. King a traitor, leaders of the NAACP rebuked him, and his ally in
the White House Lyndon Johnson no longer supported him. He spoke out against
the war not because it was strategically smart for the Civil Rights movement,
but because it was morally right to a man who knew what our country would look
like in the future if only one aspect of it’s morality was appealed to. What he
saw is a country that is not much different from the one we live in today.
When we compare Dr. King’s
vision of America, to the America that the policies of President Obama reflect,
we see just what a stark contrast there is between the two men. President Obama
has been a trailblazer in the use of unmanned drones that terrorize and take
the lives of hundreds of innocent people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and
Somalia. Yet again, the bombs that those drones drop are felt in the inner city
where schools that lack the proper funding and resources are put on the
chopping block and are offered up to private corporations to manage. Similarly,
every air strike made by the fighter jets Israel purchased with the billions of
dollars of annual military aid that the US sends is felt by the growing number
of homeless families across our country who are out in the street while
hundreds of thousands of homes remain unoccupied. The President’s complacency
with the rampant penchant for war and the endemic poverty that plague these
United States finds itself at odds with the radical pacifist from Montgomery,
Alabama who warned us of those in power who spoke of peace while rolling the
drums of war.
This Dr. King I speak of is
not the watered down version that is found in our schoolbooks. Because to
highlight his view gives legitimacy to criticism of the way our country was
operated and still has been since the turn of the twentieth century. But even when
we speak of the one-dimensional Dr. King we are told about in school, the
heroic master of civil disobedience that shattered the institutional racism
brought on by Jim Crow. When we speak of this Diet Dr. King who never
criticized our ruthless capitalistic, imperialistic, and militaristic society,
we overlook the fact that the Jim Crow he relentlessly fought against is still
very much alive and well in our present society. All across the country in the
same inner city schools were you find people of color living in poverty
learning about Dr. King’s inspirational life, you find a school-to-prison
pipeline that criminalizes those students for minor misconduct. So we find our
selves with a system where a growing number of young people of color are
treated as criminals before they are given a chance to understand the nature of
their behavior.
At the same time we find
ourselves with a justice system that allows private corporations to exploit and
profit from the growing number incarcerated Americans, an overwhelming majority
of which come from those same schools that forwarded their misbehaved children
to uninterested police officers rather than concerned educators. As this Prison
Industrial Complex grows we see that people of color, especially those in the grips
of abject poverty, are living under a new mutated form of Jim Crow, immune to
the vaccination of the Bill of Right, and much harder to cure. The New Jim Crow
thrives of the War on Drugs, the Prison Industrial Complex, and the
School-to-Prison Pipeline, all of which the President has refused to address or
even acknowledge.
Dr. King’s vision stretched
much further than just giving basic civil rights to a minority population that
lived with out them. His vision is one that called for a revolution in this
country. When he gave his speech at Riverside Church, Dr. King made it clear
that he was a man of moral consistency and he knew that the injustice of
refusing people of color their rights was just as morally depraved as the
injustice of not allowing the people of Vietnam to break away from their French
colonizers. Dr. King let the world know that he was against the imperialist,
neo-colonial character of our nation and that he will not be silent about it
because it affects every facet of American society. To many people, it is not a
coincidence that Dr. King was assassinated exactly one-year to the day that he
broke his silence on Vietnam. Because if Dr. King had his way, we would be
living in a much different America than the one we find ourselves in. An America
shaped by the his interpretation of the very Bible that will be used later
today as President Obama takes his Oath of Office.
Given his record, the
President is a far cry from the man that Dr. King was. He has effectively maintained
the institutions that Dr. King denounced, and remained complacent in the
enactment of policies that perpetuate their influence. For the President to
take his Oath of Office on the Bible that acted the moral compass to such a man
who died fighting against the very powers that the President serves is a great
insult to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Not only will it be an
insult but it will also cheapen his legacy of a man who spoke out against the
war crimes in Vietnam, who spoke out against the horrors that the Jim Crow
system bestowed on people of color, who spoke out against the poverty that
ravaged the richest nation on the planet. All this is enough to make one
shudder at the thought of the President placing his blood stained hands on the
document that served as the source of inspiration, guidance, and strength for a
man who tirelessly wrestled against a violent, imperialistic society with
nothing but an unrelenting message of peace and love.
