Why I'm Uneasy with Martin Luther King Day

I remember when Martin Luther King Day was first declared a 
Federal holiday, how Arizona’s Governor Meecham repealed the 
previous governor’s establishment of the holiday there, and how 
Jesse Helms led opposition to it in Congress, on the grounds 
that King was unpatriotic, a Communist sympathizer, and not 
“important” enough to be honored with a holiday.

We all knew what they really meant, just as I knew what the 
childhood friend who dismissed it as “a black holiday” was 
calling black people in the privacy of his own mind. It was the 
1980s, and it was pretty clear that what people who had trouble 
with celebrating Martin Luther King Day really had trouble with 
was racial justice.

Which is why it may seem odd that now, in the year 2016, I’m 
having some trouble with Martin Luther King Day myself.

One of the more painful things I’ve observed, since I began 
speaking out against racism, is the degree to which white people 
have taken a sanitized, safe, domesticated version of Martin 
Luther King into our hearts.  I wish I had never seen this, but 
I’ve actually seen it more times than I care to count: a black 
person speaks out against present-day racism and violence, and a 
white person attempts to shame him into silence by invoking 
Martin Luther King and what the white person is pleased to call 
“non-violence.”

What about riots?  The white person asks.

You’re so angry! The white person accuses.

I can’t support Black Lives Matter, the white person complains.  
It doesn’t have the moral leadership of Martin Luther King.
Or–my (least) favorite: What would Martin Luther King think of 
what You People are doing?  (To which the rational answer–which 
I have seen made–can only be, “We’ll never know; You People 
killed him.”)

And the definition of non-violence gets extended, almost 
infinitely, to mean no disrupting political rallies, no blocking 
traffic, no making unpleasant scenes at the mall.  “Non-
violence” has become code for white people refusing to listen to 
live black voices, in the name of a distorted version of a man 
whose actual words we rarely bother to hear, beyond a sound-bite 
or two from the “I have a Dream” speech.

Are we “honoring” Dr. King?  Or are pretending that his death 
marked the end of racism in America?  What are we really 
celebrating here–his non-violence, or our hope to continue our 
lives without being inconvenienced by protests, shamed by 
justifiable anger, or disturbing life inside our comfortable 
white bubbles?

Nonviolence–real non-violence–can be assertive and disruptive as 
hell, something I notice a large number of us white folks don’t 
want to acknowledge.

Likewise, it seems as though it’s inconvenient for those of us 
living in comfortable privilege to see that marginalization is 
violence… poverty is violence… indifference to oppression is 
violence. In fact, there’s a whole range of ways it is possible 
to be violent in our passivity.  I hate to see us dumbing down 
what nonviolence really means, bowdlerizing the legacy of Dr. 
King, in the service of our immediate emotional comfort.