What is the reason for today's Conservatives belated embrace of the life & legacy of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr? If anyone is even remotely knowledgeable of Conservatives (of whatever political party) long history of rejecting Dr. King's message of love of humanity & his unconditional embrace of diversity & equal rights and justice for all they will understand that their current embrace of Dr. King's life & legacy has absolutely nothing to do with admiration and everything to do with fear.
Like their ideological forebears of slavery and the segregated South, the biggest fear that Conservatives have; that they have always have since seeking to oppress we people of color, is that from the ranks of those they oppress and continue to oppress, will emerge another avenging angel of color along the lines of Nat Turner. This is what keeps Conservatives up at night and along with racism is a key reason for their advocacy of modern Lynch Law in the form of Stand Your Ground.
Like the old southern slave owners who used the benign and relatively well treated house Negroes & like the Southern segregationists who used the bought off ministers of the black church, they seek to promote members of the African American community who are non threatening; who do not believe in self defense and for whom turn the other cheek will forever be their Gospel.
What better symbol to stave the colored hand of vengeance in the face of Conservatives continued assault of the rights & dignified treatment of African Americans than Dr. King himself but not the real Dr. King mind you but rather their bleached, sanitized, and homogenized remaking of the man? "We will assail you violently without reason or cause & strip away your right to vote and be treated as equals" say Conservatives to we African Americans "yet you will never be justified in defending yourselves against our attacks because Dr. King, was all for nonviolence, for turning the other cheek, and Dr. King was a great man!"
Yet the gross miscalculation Conservatives are making is their assumption that we African Americans do not see right through their attempts to whore out the memory of Dr. King. With each passing year, as Dr. King's contemporaries die out and Dr. King himself retreats further into history, Dr. King's message becomes less and less relevant; not because he was wrong but because modern Conservatives seek more and more to use his life's example in the same way a bully puts on a pair of glasses in order to avoid being hit after he's beaten up somebody. There is but so long that a cowardly retreat behind those standards that the aggressive parties themselves refuse to live by will work.
The time is coming when new Nat Turners will emerge and these avenging angels will replace the Angel of Love that was Dr. King even while knowing that doing so may well indeed result in the extinction of the African American community as a whole. Dr. King himself said many times something to the effect that a person who is not willing to die for something has no real reason to live.
What the African American community needs today are more Nat Turners. It needs more Malcolm X's, H. Rap Browns, and Stokely Carmichaels. The rise of such figures are the only thing that will end the blood lust Conservatives & the Radical Right for these people have proven and keep proving time and time again that the word love is not part of their vocabulary; at least where their fellow citizens of color are concerned, and if we people of color have any hope of coming through this current storm intact then we must be more than willing to give what we get in whatever manner we're getting it.
We must get it through our collective skulls that we are under absolutely no obligation to be the doormats and road kill of bigots. There is nothing wrong with wanting to defend yourself, with urging your children to defend themselves. Too many of our men have been made martyrs and not nearly enough of our martyrs have lived long enough to become men. Our lives are important and our future is worth fighting for and if necessary worth dying for. The right of self defense is not the exclusive purview of any one race or culture. It is the fundamental right of all living things and as such it, life, is priceless and therefore more than worth defending at all costs.
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