Talking About MLK? Let’s change the conversation
12th September 2011 · 0 Comments
By Tonyaa Weathersbee
Guest Columnist
So now, it seems the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial is set for either this month or in October.
Whenever it happens, it ought to be an occasion unadulterated by fluffy reminiscences about King’s dream of racial equality, but one filled with tough talk about the reality that is crushing it.
That reality would be the staggering unemployment that is disproportionately plaguing Black people and the anti-government fervor that is impeding the power of the nation’s first Black president to fix it.
Such fervor kicked in when Obama was elected, and unfortunately — because of the massive influence of Fox News and right-wing talk radio, people began to be told that they had more to fear from the nation’s growing deficit than from massive joblessness.
Suddenly, the conversation shifted from whether they’d be able to feed their children, put a roof over their heads or help them survive in the short term to whether their offspring would be saddled with trillions of dollars in debt in the long term.
No matter that deficits are normal during tough economic times, lest the entire economy descend into a depression.
No matter that when former President George W. Bush drove the budget deficit by waging two unfunded wars and giving tax cuts to the richest Americans, there was no primal political screaming from the GOP’s born-again deficit virgins about the fate of the children then.
Yet even now, many of the nation’s youth are coming home from those wars with missing limbs, post-traumatic stress disorder, and no chances of finding a job anywhere.
The Republicans need to be called out on their hypocrisy because what lurks behind much of their anti-government gospel is a coded racism that goes back to King’s time, a time when the protests he led forced the government to do more to help Black people, women and struggling workers gain more rights and respect.
When the federal government began to force Southern governments to do the same thing, in their eyes, it suddenly became intrusive. And the GOP has, over the years, learned to exploit such resentment by speaking in code instead of epithets.
Said Lee Atwater, the deceased former chairman of the Republican National Committee who masterminded the racially-charged Willie Horton ad during the 1988 presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’, that hurts you. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.
“You’re getting so abstract that now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] Blacks get hurt worse than whites,” he said.
I’d say that vilifying government during a time when it is needed to juice up the economy is certainly something that hurts Blacks more than whites, especially since Black unemployment is at 16 percent, compared to nine percent overall.
Yet the anti-government Republicans and the Tea Partiers don’t care about hurting a lot of Black people — or a lot of white people, for that matter — with their craziness as much as they care about hurting one Black man: Obama.
That’s why it’s time to take back the conversation. And I’m hoping that Obama, in unveiling his new jobs program, will begin to do that.
But the dedication of the King memorial, which will, undoubtedly, be covered live by a number of networks, is also the perfect time to begin to flip that script.
Especially since the economic progress of this country is being held hostage by people with the same mentality of the segregationists that King fought in his day — people who didn’t mind closing schools and institutions to avoid integration, and who, if anyone paid attention to the debt ceiling debate, didn’t mind damaging the nation’s credit rating if it meant damaging the first Black president’s chances for re-election.
Using government to help spur job growth, of which we had zero last month, would go a long ways toward doing that. And that’s something that King, who was organizing a Poor People’s Campaign before he was killed on April 4, 1968, would certainly be fighting for.
But now, it’s a fight that we need to take up. Because if the economy worsens due to Tea Partiers and the lawmakers they support acting on exaggerations fueled by racial resentments, then we have nothing to lose by acting on the truth.
This article was originally published in the September 12, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper
