The right distorts Martin Luther King Jr.

[XemaSab]

Snippet from the middle:

AF: You write that the right has distorted the speech for their own purposes. Can you talk a little bit about this?

GY: In 1966, twice as many people have an unfavorable view of King than a favorable one. When he dies, he’s politically polarizing and marginalized person. And the right tries its best to forget him but they can’t. They can’t denigrate him. As of 1983, Ronald Reagan was suggesting that he might be a Communist. Jesse Helms is disparaging his record. But King wins through. Only Mother Theresa is a more popular figure in the 20th century. And so the right has to remember him, though they viciously opposed everything he did.

But they remember him by distorting his record in general and his speech in particular, and they remember him through his speech. They take one line: “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.”

And they take that to represent an entire philosophy. As though the dream speech and King’s agenda was an appeal to color blindness. And the legacy of racism is ignored, as if to say, ‘Okay we’re done now, segregation is over that means racism is finished and to take race into account would be itself racist.’ So even though he was a proponent of affirmative action, they use it to suggest that he wasn’t. And they bring it up every time they want to say, ‘Let’s not take race into account, we’re all the same.’ Of course, it wasn’t an appeal to ignore racism, it was an appeal to address it. What he was saying was ‘I dream about a day when this is possible,’ but we’re not there yet. Not by a long shot.

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/24/gary_younge_i_have_a_dream_is_most_admired_least_well_known_speech_ive_come_across_partner/?source=newsletter