MLK on white moderates

[BainsBane]

34. They haven't done damage

They got Bernie and O'Malley to release plans for racial equality. They've forced Hillary Clinton to sit down and discuss their demands. They've elevated their concerns to a level where everyone is talking about it and anyone seeking the Democratic nomination is having to figure out how to respond to their demands. African Americans have put Democrats into office for decades. They are the single most loyal Democratic voting block, and they are using that voting power to advance their own concerns for human life rather than simply providing votes.

MLK was a civil rights activist. Abuse of power is perpetrated not just at the level of government but through people who work to undermine civil rights by insisting their own privilege comes first. It is performed on a daily level, on city streets, in small towns, and in cyberspace.

The only ones who have damaged themselves are Sanders supporters. They have made his candidacy toxic so that it has become synonymous with a shocking level of tone deafness and aggressive hostility toward a movement of racial equality.

To pretend that civil rights is not about equality and is instead "divisive" is a RW argument, exactly what Fox News and the GOP has argued for sometime because the Democratic party represents the interests of people of color, women, and LGBT. In such a view, the only thing not divisive is ignoring the interests of the subaltern for the white majority--in order words, enforcing inequality and white privilege.

BLM is not "divisive" because they dare to raise attention to the epidemic of killing of black people rather than the more important issue of the white bourgeoisie's anger at Wall Street. "if I don't want to join a movement for equality." Bullshit. I stand for equality. What I will not join is efforts to elevate the privilege of the self-entitled over the lives of other human beings, and I find the very notion that it is even possible to advocate equality while denying the value of a movement for those lives the ultimate in hypocrisy. That you invoke the word equality is the ultimate of irony. You are advocating the very opposite, stomping out concerns about human rights for your own material comfort. If I don't recognize how much more important your pocket book is, your political heroes, your right to not be confronted with uppity black folks who dare to talk about deaths of black people, than I can't possibly be for equality. They are divisive because they fail to recognize how superior the white "liberal" is to themselves, how inconsequential a movement for their lives is in comparison to the egos and feelings of the self-entitled. The bastardization of MLK to promote the economic interests of the minority--because you all are not the majority, either politically or demographically--over the basic civil rights of African Americans, over their lives, is an epic level of cynicism. You can be sure I will not be joining any movement that engages in the disgusting racism I have seen in the wake of Seattle, even worse than that which followed Netroots. I would sooner poke my eyes out than help such people assert their supremacy, all while appropriating MLK in the most cynical of ways.

I pledge here and now to fight the efforts of the white bourgeoisie to put black folks in their place so that the white upper-middle and middle class can regain what they see as their rightful place atop the capitalist world order, a system of grievous inequality they were more than happy with as long as they benefited over the many. I will fight for TRUE equality, which means the end of white privilege and entitlement, the end to six figure incomes for the upper 20 percent at the expense of the 80%, the end to global capitalist exploitation that enables those 6 figures incomes. That is a kind of equality none of you folks want. What you want is to regain any lost privilege, which is the opposite of equality.