2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: If MLK Were Alive, He'd Make White Folks Just as Uncomfortable as Black Lives Matter [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)The fight against racism was always also a fight against the oligarchy. Nobody ever implied that Dr. King had abandoned the fight against racism...his economic battles were part of that fight...as it happens, had he succeeded, it would have helped other groups, but that doesn't take anything away from what the fight was about at its center.
There is no conflict between those fights, because nobody in the corporate world was fighting against racism in the Sixties-at least not in anything but the most trivial sense.
This history only got tied in to Bernie because he was falsely accused of not caring about institutional racism. His Sixties work was referenced simply to prove that wrong-NOT to equate Bernie with Dr. King(only a complete idiot would do that)OR to steal credit for white leftists where such credit wasn't due.
Bernie should have had an explicit anti-institutional racism plank in his program from the get-go. We all agree with that. He'd be leading now if he did. But he was always voting the right way(unlike HRC, who was working against the values of the freedom movement in building the DLC, a group that pushed the idea that Democrats should ignore the black community)and unlike O'Malley, Bernie didn't CAUSE black people to be murdered by the cops by basically telling them, in effect, "do whatever the hell you want". What gets me is that his lack of a reference in his stump speech was treated as being worse than years of indifferent-to-outright hostile-actions on the part of the other major candidates.